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What Killed Adobe Flash? (daringfireball.net)
An employee, who claims to have worked on the development of Flash, writes: Apparently, the world settled on the "One True Cause" for why Flash "died". Take for example this blogpost by John Gruber about FedEx... it ends with this consideration on Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash": "If it had been an angry rant, it would have been easily dismissed without needing to be factually refuted -- "That's just Jobs being a prick again." The fact that it wasn't angry, and because it was all true, made it impossible to refute."
Impossible to refute. There's no doubt that this was the beginning of the end for Flash, right? Except that this is utterly wrong. I worked on Flash, and I worked on the thing that actually killed Flash. It is my strong belief, based on what I observed, that Steve Jobs' letter had little impact in the final decision -- it was really Adobe who decided to "kill" Flash. Yes, Flash was a bad rap for Adobe, and Steve's letter didn't help. But ultimately, what was probably decisive was the fact that developing Flash cost Adobe a ton of money. John Gruber, responding to the blogpost: To be clear, I don't think Jobs's letter killed Flash. But I don't think Adobe did either. Eventually Adobe accepted Flash's demise. What killed Flash was Apple's decision not to support it on iOS, combined with iOS's immense popularity and the lucrative demographics of iOS users. If Jobs had never published "Thoughts on Flash", Flash would still be dead. The letter explained the decision, but the decision that mattered was never to support it on iOS in the first place. It's possible that Flash would have died even if Apple had decided to allow it on iOS. Android tried that, and the results were abysmal. Web page scrolling stuttered, and video playback through Flash Player halved battery life compared to non-Flash playback.
Impossible to refute. There's no doubt that this was the beginning of the end for Flash, right? Except that this is utterly wrong. I worked on Flash, and I worked on the thing that actually killed Flash. It is my strong belief, based on what I observed, that Steve Jobs' letter had little impact in the final decision -- it was really Adobe who decided to "kill" Flash. Yes, Flash was a bad rap for Adobe, and Steve's letter didn't help. But ultimately, what was probably decisive was the fact that developing Flash cost Adobe a ton of money. John Gruber, responding to the blogpost: To be clear, I don't think Jobs's letter killed Flash. But I don't think Adobe did either. Eventually Adobe accepted Flash's demise. What killed Flash was Apple's decision not to support it on iOS, combined with iOS's immense popularity and the lucrative demographics of iOS users. If Jobs had never published "Thoughts on Flash", Flash would still be dead. The letter explained the decision, but the decision that mattered was never to support it on iOS in the first place. It's possible that Flash would have died even if Apple had decided to allow it on iOS. Android tried that, and the results were abysmal. Web page scrolling stuttered, and video playback through Flash Player halved battery life compared to non-Flash playback.
But Flash was supposed to be the one who would kill the iPad!
But mainly, the enormous security risk, bad reputation, and lack of native support in browsers.
It was a resource hog and had shitty security.
I never really minded flash in the earlier days, it enabled a lot of fun content. As time passed, it was the source of more and more security problems, and was used for more and more just plain annoyances like advertising. Had Adobe reworked it into a good, secure framework with some touch interface and power optimizations for mobile (I kept Flash around on Android for some time. It sucked the battery down hard while doing much of anything) it may have stayed relevant.
HTML5 didn't help either, since it did a lot of what it was for anyway.
Why is this short blog post news?
Adobe flash killed itself by being pure crap.
It killed itself because it is a steaming pile of horseshit.
Flash sucked, and I'm glad I don't have to deal with it anymore.
After Microsoft in general and Windows in particular, fixing Adobe in general and Flash in particular was my bread and butter for the last 20 years.
Didn't it?
I tend to rant.
There is flash as a simple media player. Then there is flash a java replacement. If flash had confined itself to a meda standard it might have survived. Flashes extension to full programming media experience bug fest made it a lot of work to migrate to new environments and lot of work to keep updated for old environments. Flash became too heavy and too much of a liability.
If it was up to normal people and not Google, Microsoft and Mozilla, we'd still be using Flash and we wouldn't be adding DRM to the HTML standard.
Gruber is always either defending or praising Apple, rarely is he unbiased. This post is just another example of the fanbois always believing that Apple is always absolutely, positively correct all of the time.
Flash was already dead by the time apple decided to not support it. It was already killed by adblock, security vulnerabilities, power consumption, un-indexability, and the failure of Air to gain traction.
Shitty clickbait developers killed flash... Flash was a great tool for certain projects, Actionscript was getting pretty good before the bottom fell out. For short deadline graphic intensive projects it was a lifesaver. If they are built right Flash applications are (were) absolutely fine.
It's not perfect, but honestly, the ability to move to an even greater OS- and browser-agnostic platform has great appeal for developers.
Flash has some great tools, though, and a decent codebase. I've used ActionScript/Flash to create mobile games, and now I have to find the time to port over my framework and products at some point.
1. It was only mainstream useful for video.
2. The rest of it was so full of bugs it was having a zero day exploit every week.
Jobs didn't kill it, Adobe incompetence killed it. He just refused to bundle it with iOS. But it could still be installed with Firefox and Chrome after Job's decision, so it was not like Jobs was the end game.
Jobs simply told the truth about it. Nothing more. It was the truth that killed it, not Jobs saying the truth.
e.g. Kushner had a secret meeting with VneshEconomBank in Trump tower, Putin's payroll bank for spies, mercenaries and politicians who receive bribes. Does saying that make Trump the traitor, or does the ACT of receiving help and money to seize power to remove Russian sanctions make him a traitor?
http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-vnesheconombank-spy-trial/27013041.html
Acts vs truth.
It is absolute madness if you do not recognize the steadfast refusal of Apple to adopt Flash, along with the ensuing rise in the number of people who used phones and tablets to browse, as the #1 cause of The Fall of the House of Flash.
Flash had other problems sure but it persisted and grew for years with those same problems. It was only wen someone came along that took user experience and security seriously in a way that was popular, that Flash finally met its long-overdue demise.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It was Mrs. Peacock, in the Library, with the revolver.
What happened to Flash:
1. Animating junk on web pages was never very useful, so people more-or-less stopped doing it. Flash saved itself by becoming a way to deliver web video.
2. Decoding video with a general purpose CPU is very much inferior to decoding it with dedicated logic. Video standards were designed to enable dedicated logic decoders. CPU-based decoding used far, far too much energy so Flash couldn't compete or even come close.
Flash became mostly useless. Then it became only a way to get your system hacked and added to a botnet. Then it became nothing.
Using it to simply serve up raster video instead vector graphics was the reason.
I don't think Jobs's letter killed Flash. But I don't think Adobe did either.
no, the internet rallied around Flash like a mafia hitsquad around a mole and slowly beat it to death. NodeJS, html5, and webm video all colluded to deliver the killing stroke to Flash. Adobe, in turn, largely did what they do best and ignored the programs compatibility issues in Linux, stability issues in mac and windows, and rampant security issues across the board. It should serve as a stern reminder of what could happen to Photoshop and AfterEffects if Adobe doesnt start paying more attention and start fixing real bugs.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Let's be real, the 'death of Flash' is only being talked about because the major web browsers are cutting support for it. An opinion posted by Jobs in 2010 related to a decision not to support Flash in iOS is supposedly the reason browser makers are cutting support for Flash in 2017? I'm not buying it. HTML5 video has everything to do with the death of Flash, as most usage of Flash was simply for audiovisual playback. Webgames and webapps used to use Flash, but how many people use those nowadays compared to mobile apps? Even on Android, which supports Flash? Youtube moving over to HTML5 video by default was the death knell of Flash. The constant drumbeat of 'more critical Flash vulnerabilities found and exploited in the wild, uninstall it already' didn't help, either. I wonder how Flash would've done if it were a) secure, and b) not a resource hog.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
But the top two from my list are 1.) constant updates (there are always zero-days, it seems, with Flash), and 2.) while Flash is great for content owners / providers, it sucks balls for content buyers / consumers (imagine trying to navigate a website entirely made out of Flash....yes, people have done this; try playing a Flash video when the streaming site is overloaded (can only buffer so much) or the embedded controls suck...it's a horror.
When I did support the two things you could be guaranteed would need a patch EVERY MONTH were the Java Runtime and Flash. I know there's a halo around Steve Jobs in the media but frankly he was just restating the obvious and I guess he had the courage, foresight or hutzpah to say "no" first.
Can you give "it" a medal?
If Flash were secure, I would still have it installed. I wouldn't develop for it, but others would and still have the installed base for it.
Flash doesn't need a post mortem, it just needs an obituary. Its death wasn't suspicious, and it didn't commit suicide. It was a cute, talented kid with promise, but as often happens, it became a shiftless, troublesome adult, partly as a result of the parenting mistakes of its narcissistic adoptive parent. Its lifestyle, shortcomings, and bad luck led it to an early death; it's time to close the casket, fill in the hole, place the gravestone, and move on.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Proprietary systems will always fall to superior and widely adopted open standards. Except when they don't.
Kinda telling when the person asking about the death of flash doesn't realize they're the reason (I'm taking their claim about working on on the development of Flash at face value) and has to ask other people why. If they couldn't see the serious problems they created in the design or implementation (such problems are already enumerated in other posts), or didn't work to address them, then of course adoption will die off.
It wasn't needed any longer and it was bad from the start.
Fuck medium.com!
Apple killed Flash, or at least threw the first stone by disallowing it on their mobile devices. They did it because they saw the writing on the wall. Flash was a security nightmare, and really only existed as a stopgap because bandwidth used to be a far more of a premium and there were no web standards for streaming video, audio, and animation. This is mostly fixed with HTML5.
Believe me when I say this is uncharacteristic of me, but, "Thanks Steve Jobs!"
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
The reason Flash died is that there was finally a legitimate alternative in form of HTML5 video.
No one wanted to use Flash. But there was no other way to serve video as effectively as it did. Once HTML5 video arrived and was supported by the major browsers, Flash's days were numbered.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
...if this topic is the best the editors can come up with...
Adobe just didn't care about Flash to continue develop it or support it. It was their competitor product that they want to snuff out.
HTML5 would be the second reason
Next up, the desktop kills the desktop
Relegation of the desktop to luddites won't happen until it becomes practical to app apps using an app on a tablet. I haven't seen any hint that Apple plans to port Xcode to the iPad Pro. As for Android, I'm aware of an app called AIDE, but is it any good?
Definitely Silverlight.
What would have been a better production and delivery means than Flash for animated series like Homestar Runner, particularly before home Internet plans supporting HD video streaming became affordable?
There's on one reason it died but who cares? Honestly, we should just be happy it did die!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
What will kill^Wreplace HTML 5, since it's so busy breaking things for those not on the cutting edge that it really has no longevity to speak of?
For verily, HTML 5 is pretty much quite like flash in its targeting at instagrat "user experience" mayfly chasing, minus some (*cough* DRM *cough*) of the more eggregious corporate proprietariness idiocy, inability to open source because NDAs, and all that, but plus more ineptness-by-committee and other entrenched silliness and "some browsers more equal than others" webmonkey bastarditude. Oh, and much more wastage of computing resources. IOW, flash was bad but HTML 5 is not better, just differently worse.
Do we really believe that someone who thinks "costed" is the past tense of "cost" was working at Adobe on Flash?
When I did support the two things you could be guaranteed would need a patch EVERY MONTH were the Java Runtime and Flash.
That and Windows itself, with the "Patch Tuesday" habit of Windows Update. And the web browsers, once they went to a rapid release mentality since Chrome 1 and Firefox 4.
Why is everyone saying it's dead? I am forced by many vendors to use it daily. Not just fly-by-night one-off software companies, but big global enterprises who require it to use the web interfaces for their enterprise class software.
It's not dead. It's not even close to dead. It might be walking to the hospital, but there are a lot of big software companies trying to give it directions home for a little lie down.
And whos John Gruber? Why is he being cited?
What killed flash was Apple not wanting flash games running inside a browser on ipod touches and iphones. If flash ran well on them then people would have less reason to get apps from their store. Additionally anyone who made a good pda/smartphone would be able to harness these flash games. For google it was in their interest not to suport flash games either because of their app store they were pushing.
The second thing that killed flash was it was trivial for a end user to save a single player flash game from a website and keep running it offline forever. This is bad from a corporate point of view. It was also incredibly easy to decrypt flash files and rip out the assets.
Third it had shitty security and Adobe sucked at keeping it secure. Flash should never had had access to the microphone, the ability to write files to the drive, or access the camera.
It was a combination of the facts that Adobe didn't have good lawyers and that there weren't neophobic executive types at Apple that could force us to keep using it. I mean that's why Java and Flash stuck around on the browser for so long. Before Steve Jobs was like "hell fuck no" to client side Java and Flash, the browser makers had zero guts to take on the legal and perceived market share ramifications of saying no.
Remember when Microsoft tried to ditch Java they got sued: http://tech-insider.org/java/r...
Yeah so I think Steve Jobs did have a huge role in eating rid of Flash. It was a bold move that started the chain reaction. Basically he showed that you can be successful without it. If anyone at Chrome, I.E., or Firefox would have suggested getting rid of Flash they would have been told by executives that Flash was a leading and popular technology that a lot of people depended on for ads and games and even corporate intranet applications. It sucks, but we do have to give Steve Jobs and the unknown Apple engineer who probably pitched it to him credit where it's due, Flash would still be around if Apple hadn't told Adobe to fuck off.
Flash needed killing pretty much from day 1, because: "Ohh look I can build and entire website and all I need is Flash!"
Then on day 2 the advertisers: "Ohh, I can have my adverts look like games, or make noise and play video to get more attention!"
Macromedia had two popular web plugin platforms in the early 2000s - Flash and ShockWave (for publishing Macromedia Director content online). Shockwave got a good 3D engine with built-in Havok physics (ShockWave3D, developed by Intel if I'm not mistaken), Flash didn't get a 3D engine, although many Flash devs asked for it. When Director was neglected, first by Macromedia and then very, very seriously by Adobe (which let Director die completely), ShockWave3D, which started as a very promising Web3D technology, failed. Flash never got a decent 3D engine - although you could embed Flash content inside Director/ShockWave and use ShockWave3D alongside a Flash UI for example. So Flash never had a good chance at going 3D - which might have saved it when people began tiring of 2D Flash. So that's basically it - ShockWave got 3D capability, Flash didn't.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
1) Flash video clips, both recorded video and video animated with Flash shared on Newgrounds and the like.
[...]
The first group largely shifted to YouTube
YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, and the like are fine for "recorded video" but inefficient for "video animated with Flash". Rendering a vector animation to pixels and then compressing the pixels bloats file size by a factor of 10 in my tests.
Adobe's replacement for Flash as a vector animation authoring tool is Animate CC, which can create vector animations for HTML5. The difference is that one can buy a used copy of an old version of Flash, but Animate is available only as a rental. So which other timeline-based* graphical applications, either free or purchased, can people use to create vector animations for HTML5?
* Typing coordinates into a text editor is not "timeline-based".
Flash was a "miracle" tool, at first, before broadband became mainstream: in supported fast, small, animated vector graphics applets! They were so beautiful! And then Adobe bought it and disaster struck. Adobe wanted it not for vector graphics but to use it as a container for video, monopolize video streaming, and compete against Microsoft, Apple, and Real Networks. In the end, nobody won. HTML5 was adopted as the video standard. The Flash plug-in became a monstrous installer, full of security issues, that was updated every other day. The concerns about reliability, security and performance were valid. Nobody wanted Flash anymore, especially not in mobile browsers.
I suspect if you looked closer, a lot of the power sucking attributed to flash is actually due to bloated advertising stacks. The advertising bloat hasn't gone away, they just converted it to javascript.
Steve Jobs was responsible for it's death, and his true motive was clear: he wanted to force as many people to buy through his App Store as he could. He knew it would be a long time before HTML5 could compete in the then known as "Rich Internet Application" (e.g., anything other than text and videos). So where did iOS users need to go to get that "Rich Internet" experience without Flash? Apps. And that necessitated them buying them through the App Store. Which Steve Jobs got a nice 30% cut of for each purchase. End of story. P.S. It didn't help that Adobe is lazy/incompetent. And Flash DID run on iOS - Kevin Lynch personally demo'd it at Adobe MAX sometime around 2008/9? I was there. He announced they were working with Apple to get Flash Player on iOS. We all knew ol' Steve would never allow that to happen. We all would have been better off if someone had bought Flash Player rights, or come up with something open-source to replace it, and get all the browser vendors onboard with it as a standard. Instead, we have a limited replacement (HTML5/JS) that is still catching up.
One thing that layout and UI designers miss about Flash is WYSIWYG. Web (non) standards display differently under different browser and OS brands, versions such that you either have to test under a gijjillion client variations, or live with rendering mistakes. I HATE THAT and it makes me scream bloody murder. I want WYSIWYG dammit! Even slashdot often gets it wrong, as menus overlap when they shouldn't, etc.
And WYSIWYG doesn't mean that you have to settle on one screen size, it just means that if you test under size X it renders the same way under a client set for size X. Essentially the server does any resizing so that one doesn't have to rely on an inconsistent client. The client just sends it's preferred screen size and the server renders it and sends "dumb" coordinate-based vectors back: no client-side auto flow or "float" shit. Floats can float up my ass; floaters are what you find in the john.
It's probably the dumbest invention I've seen in my many decades of IT. Great job security perhaps, but sucky productivity as we fight with the plague of fat-client versionitus. Makes DLL-Hell look good in comparison. Now we got Client-Hell.
Damned humans! Its like a mom or wife that randomly rearranges your room while at work or in the basement. Whoever invented auto-flow deserves to have wake up one day to find that one of their girlfriend's tits are on her crotch and another on her back, but her snatch is now where her nose used to be. Hell, the client-floaters probably WANT it that way, sicko Picasso pervs!
I hope something like Flash with WYSIWYG comes back, as an open standard. The schizophrenic client problem is the main reason PDF's still live. Managers, customers, and/or designers decide where the put stuff and it STAYS there; imagine that. It stays where they actually want it and you satisfy their request as they sketched it. No drifting, screwy overlaps, or surprises when browser version N + 1 comes out. It's like magic! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of shit that stays where you actually PUT it. Imagine all the people living in WYSIWYG harmony, like God, I mean the Matrix admin, wanted it. Shifty shifters go to the basement to be Picasso BBQ.
Table-ized A.I.
Flash STARTED as a browser-neutral Javascript environment, which featured vector graphics. Later, as consumer bandwidth became sufficient to stream video, people started using Flash to embed video.
Flash was a programming runtime in the days of dial-up and isdn, before video on the web was a thing.
In a righteous world what killed it was the disdain for proprietary closed plugins and protocols, and that we finally realized we need open protocol, open source protocols to do what Flash, Unity, etc did, or else people would keep on using them for lack of an alternative. In many ways, Netscape was to blame for Flash, since Netscape created a browser that lacked rich multimedia features but provided NSAPI which just encouraged third party people to make ugly closed source proprietary plugins that you could not watch a youtube video or look at many multimedia content without. We finally realized that making people download propreitary plugins to watch a video, play a game, look at 3D multimedia content and so on was incredibly stupid. Its better to have an open protocol and do it with open source code in the browser.
> It wasn't a resource hog - its just that the majority of people programming for Flash sucked as developers.
In some Flash versions, at least, the simplest "Hello world" animations hogged CPU by default. A smart developer could arrange for it to idle between frames so it wouldn't toast the CPU.
Chicken, Egg, which came first? Who gives a crap? Same w/Flash.
Just another day in Paradise
Flash isn't dead yet. While most mobile webpages no longer use it, on the desktop you still see it pretty frequently. As for its impending death, that has been a long while coming:
* using Flash to design a whole website became mostly unnecessary due to HTML/CSS becoming more powerful
* using Flash for vector animation became replaced by regular video and Youtube
* using Flash as video player became unnecessary due to HTML gaining a <video> tag
I am not quite sure what happened with Flash and gaming, Newgrounds.com is still around, but you rarely hear about it anymore. Doing games in HTML with <canvas> and WebGL is now possible as well, but I don't really see those very often. I assume Unity and mobile gaming took mostly over what was once done in Flash.
However what really killed Flash was Adobe no longer supporting it. When software is full of security and performance issues, it's no surprise that people will move away from it. Flash got popular in the first place because it did things that your browser wouldn't be able to do on it's own. But while browsers got more powerful, Flash just sat there and didn't really improve much at all.
iOS didn't kill Flash. Nor did Steve Jobs. Nor did Adobe. MACROMEDIA KILLED FLASH!... because they allowed it to become what it was never intended to be.
Way back in the mid 1990s, Macromedia acquired FutureSplash -- an ANIMATION product used by Disney, FOX (for the Simpsons), and others -- and renamed it Flash. I used Flash 2 for ANIMATION and it was a great tool.
Along comes Flash 3 and the introduction of MovieClips and transparency. Transparency was pretty straightforward, but MovieClips were not. MovieClips contained an animation (and timeline) that could then be placed in the main animation timeline. So, if you had an animation of a character dancing in a MovieClip, you could add that MovieClip to the main animation timeline and make the dancing character move up, down, sideways, whatever.
The introduction of MovieClips also brought some basic programming beyond the even more basic timeline actions that previously existed (solely for the purpose of starting, stopping, etc. an animation). You could now add your (stopped) dancing character MovieClip to the main timeline, and then add a button to the main timeline and add a "Tell Target" action to tell the MovieClip to start playing. This "Tell Target" programming was VERY basic, but it was sooooooooo confusing to most Flash animators because the FAR majority of them were truly animators, not programmers. In fact, MovieClip programming was so confusing to the animators' mindset that the "macromedia.flash" user group was constantly inundated with questions about "Tell Target." The concept of targeting "_level0" or the "_parent" or such made absolutely no sense to most animators. As a regular contributor to macromedia.flash, I eventually made a small website of "Tell Target" FAQs that was quite popular at the time.
What happened after that is what eventually killed Flash. Some people are great animators. Some people are great programmers. A very rare few are great at both. The ones that were great at both and using Flash started making some of the best Flash websites around. They were getting accolades left and right and being featured everywhere Flash was talked about. Gabocorp, 2Advanced, Der Bauer, etc. were thrust into the spotlight with their ability to combine great animation with great Flash programming to make jaw-dropping Flash websites.
With these kinds of websites garnering a lot of attention, the ever-increasing demand for more/better Flash programming started. Flash 4 add variables, input fields, the first real ActionScript, and other programming-based enhancements. Read through the list of versions after Flash 3 and most include more and more and more programming enhancements. Flash 5 introduced ActionScript 1.0 and Flash 7 had ActionScript 2.0 and on and on and on... until Flash died.
Security issues? Not a problem if Flash isn't a programming platform. Resource hog? Not (as much of) a problem if Flash ins't a programming platform. Unable to run on a mobile device? It's VECTOR GRAPHICS!!! Not a problem if Flash isn't a programming platform.
The interesting part is that in the wake of Flash's death, Animate survives... as an ANIMATION platform. Want to meet Flash developers who aren't looking for work right now? They're the ones who never stopped using it for Animation. Personally, I used Flash for a LOT of programming, but I also used it for a LOT of animation. With the shift of branding from Flash to Animate, I'm happy to see the return to the core purpose of Flash 1.0: ANIMATION!
If you look at the enhancements for Animate 2015 and 2017, you'll see a lot of items related to animation and graphics and not a lot related to programming. This is the way it should be... and probably the way it always should have been. Flash as a programming platform always should have been a separate product, like Flex, so it could live/die on its own merits, or lack thereof.
1) Flash was, like a lot of other Internet technologies, terrible.
2) Flash was disliked for unrelated reasons by people who happened to be in a position to kill it. They then pointed to the fact that Flash is terrible, which is true, but wasn't the real reason--look at all the other equally terrible stuff that's still around.
Adobe management only cares about their core peoducts, and it was only a matter if time before javascript caught up.
we finally realized we need open protocol, open source protocols to do what Flash, Unity, etc did
By "Unity" I hope you don't mean the desktop environment with an open source shopping lens that defaulted to sending every single search on your computer to Amazon's server.
Its better to have an open protocol and do it with open source code in the browser.
By this measure, the free counterparts to Flash Player are Gecko and Blink, the engines of Firefox and Chromium respectively. But what's the free counterpart to Adobe Animate CC (formerly called Flash)? Is Synfig any good?
What killed flash was Adobe trying to make it into a video player at the expense of it's animation capabilities. Thus everyone abandoned Flash for animation, and also abandoned it for game development. Thus everyone started hating on flash because it was the primary source of crappy video ads.
Flash might not have needed to die had Adobe never acquired it in the first place. What Flash was before Adobe was an Animation tool. That was the direction it was going. But Adobe hamfistedly forced AS3 onto it, thus it became difficult to develop games with it (and better self-contained game engines like Unity have thus replaced it.)
The entire thing Flash had going for it was it's tiny file size, Video ruined that. SVG could not replace it. SVG support in browsers is still between "bad and slow" and "terrible and slow". Thus Flash prevented SVG adoption, and SVG wasn't what animation departments wanted as it was larger than flash's simple lz-compressed binaries.
What ultimately has killed flash however was the move to HD and beyond. Flash was not designed with anticipation of screens over 640x480 in size. So while scaling up to 720p works, 1080p loses so much sub-pixel resolution that animation tweens are jerky. To say nothing of 4K or 60fps+ motion.
So Flash was going to die once 4K became commonplace. Flash does not scale to 8K at all, it has no subpixel precision at 4K or 8K. There's also issues like flash files being stuck at 16-bit pointers, so many bits of flash were not designed beyond the Windows 3.x lifecycle, and we only still have them due to Adobe's unwillingness to rip the bandaid off and create a "flash64" so to speak. Adobe too so much time in developing a 64bit flash product, that it delayed the rollout of 64-bit browsers, and as a consequence people were much less willing to develop for flash.
Which leads us to today. Back in 2008 I wanted to do a lot of stuff with flash, but so many missteps by Adobe and Google/Mozilla in handling how to render and secure flash has made Flash the second most dirty word next to Java. You will see Flash and Java disappear from the web browsers (in fact it pretty much has already) and many IoT things that used flash or Java (eg VNC KVM/IPMI servers) will become unusable. You can thank Adobe and Oracle for their shitty non-priority of security for this.
The best thing that should have happened to Java and Flash is those products being spun off, their 16/32-bit versions depreciated, and 64-bit only ABI's being ISO standardized, so that they become just another programming language. Unfortunately that is not the case, and we will see Flash go the way of COBOL where the need for people to know it will never go away, but everyone else moved on. Java needs to die as well, but it remains a well-despised language due to Hadoop.
Were the developers on other platforms as low quality as the one who maintained it on Linux? If so, perhaps that was a contributory factor amongst many.
There are still a huge number of sites that just won't work without it. Yes you can fool most of them by tweaking your browser but that isn't the point.
Adobe needs to put an execution date on it ASAP.
That will be the only way if can truly be consigned to the trash can/wastebasket of history.
It needs to die a horrible death.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Flash lost most of its use case when Youtube started switching away from it. But still very much controls gaming. Glitter Gem Kitties 5 is still a Flash exclusive. And billions of children and women play it everyday.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The Apple fans will say Jobs and Apple did. But while Apple complained about Flash and threw temper tantrums over it, they never offered anything to replace it (at least not alone). HTML5 (along with Javascript and CSS) is what replaced Flash and kiled it.
The only reason Flash ever became a thing was because web designers were begging the W3C to add multimedia capability to the HTML spec. The W3C saw the web as a medium of information exchange (the way Berners-Lee originally envisioned it was a way for researchers to exchange journal articles they'd authored). They saw the requests for multimedia capability as the petty desires of advertisers and marketers. You see, photos and text you can scan and grok as quickly as you want in whatever screen format you want. Audio and video are limited to the speed and format that the creator sets. So the W3C saw adding multimedia capability to HTML as counter to the web's original design goal.
Then web designers discovered this little thing called Flash. It was an artist's tool for transmitting animation over slow Internet connections (here's a YouTube version if your browser doesn't support Flash anymore). Instead of retransmitting redundant information like video does, it transmits backgrounds, scalable vector graphics, and sprites just once, and lets you animate them with on the client side. That's all it was designed to do - help artists create animation. It was never designed to be a multimedia web platform.
But since the W3C refused to give web designers the hammer they asked for, the designers grabbed the closest thing they could find which resembled a hammer and started to hammer away with it. Flash began to be used for multimedia - animated websites, ads, and movies. That's why it was so full of security holes. The guys who wrote Flash never imagined it would become The Global Standard for creating multimedia websites. They thought they were just making a simple way for artists to create animation that could be transmitted over 56 kbps dialup lines, and didn't give any thought to security.
By the mid-2000s (long after the tech bubble), the problems with Flash were becoming clear. The W3C still refused to budge from their anti-multimedia stance, so the web browser developers themselves got together and began coordinating a way to add multimedia capability to HTML to help replace Flash. They came up with what eventually became HTML5 when the W3C finally relented. All this was going on years before Jobs wrote his "Thoughts on Flash" letter, but because those in the print media were widely ignorant of any of this, they mistakenly saw Jobs as the impetus behind the switchover. To repeat what I constantly seem to have to tell Apple fans, just because the first place you ever saw something was on an Apple product, does not mean Apple invented it. (Here's pinch to zoom in 1988!)
Outside of the whirlwind of controversy over web security, Flash continues to live on in its original intended design purpose, and rather successfully at that.
Flash really isn't dead. While technically the Adobe product isn't used much, the Flash features have made it into web browsers. This means browsers now have the same positives - but more importantly - all the negatives of flash. The security problems? That is just due to how complex the features are. Now that browsers are that complex, they have the same security problems and frequent updates. Plus now browsers have the ability to control your webcam, microphone, USB ports, enforce DRM. Think that this isn't a problem just because it is your browser instead of a plugin doing it? Think again!
What killed Flash was Apple's decision not to support it on iOS, combined with iOS's immense popularity and the lucrative demographics of iOS users.
Um, iOS is barely at 10-20% market penetration. The hypothetical immense popularity contest went to Android a long time ago.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Being very very bad killed Flash. It's one of the very few programs that died because of this.
There are so many vulnerabilities in Flash that it has seemed possible that Adobe is selling vulnerabilities, as the 2nd story linked below says. The only other theory is that Adobe Systems programmers have been getting no testing or other management.
Articles keep criticizing Flash, Flash, Flash. They should criticize "Adobe Systems Management".
It seems possible that Microsoft and other companies learned from Adobe Systems how much users were weak to abuse.
Stories:
Adobe Flash Player: List of security vulnerabilities. "Total number of vulnerabilities: 1,006".
Huge Adobe Flash security vulnerability revealed after hacking group's documents leaked. (July 8, 2015) "The huge weakness was revealed as part of documents leaked after a cyberattack on Hacking Team, a government-sponsored spying group, that seems to have been using it to break into computers."
Adobe Flash vulnerabilities -- a never-ending string of security risks (June 29, 2015)
Kill Flash now. Or patch these 36 vulnerabilities. "One bug being exploited right now in the wild." (June 16, 2016)
Adobe deploys security update to fix 52 vulnerabilities in Flash. (July 13, 2016) "Some of the critical flaws could lead to remote code execution on your PC."
Most Exploited Vulnerabilities: by Whom, When, and How. (Dec. 29, 2016) "The Adobe Flash Player comprised six of the top 10 vulnerabilities triggered by the exploit kits in a period from November 16, 2015, to November 15, 2016."
The final nail, was when Adobe's own executive exclaimed that he saw HTML5 as the future. When these words were said, Adobe pretty much pointed a shotgun at it's developers and pulled the trigger.
Why did Adobe's CEO say this? Because he was stupid. Even thought true, it was not what a CEO was supposed to do. But Adobe saw HTML5 as their holy grail. They would be able to have their cake and eat it too. They could write tools and take Flash developer and update it to create HTML5 content, and save millions on development of the Flash player.
Business-wise, it was a sweet opportunity from Adobe's viewpoint. However, Adobe hadn't reached that point, and the dumbf*** CEO basically publicly stated this before Adobe had migrated both it's tools and developer base. Imagine if Microsoft decided they were going to cease supporting all .NET/VB/C# and move to Node.js. But haven't released anything to do so yet.
***
The sad thing is that Adobe's Flex team was moving in a really great direction. Meanwhile, HTML5 was released, and in many areas it went "stupid". Sure canvas and all is great. But seriously, adding more input type was the very last thing HTML needed.
Adobe's Flex team realized this with their transition from Flex 3 to Flex 4. Rather than trying to develop new components for every situation (Checkbox, radio, drop down, text input, listbox, etc, etc). They realized a simple fact. Check all the apply and a multi-select listbox are the same data. A radio button and a dropdown is the same data. The presentation is just different. So they went the opposite direction of HTML5, and reduced the input types.
Now you have Boolean, string, list. You could define if the list allowed multiple selection. And you could style the list with a visual layer to be a vertical list, radio buttons, or even a custom skin (thumb images in a grid layout). It was brilliant. They took the revered MVC model and applied it to their input components - something HTML5 should of done.
Meanwhile, their ActionScript 3.x was actually a nice language in many ways. Very similar to Java, but with a few really nice abilities. Properties for example. Forget creating getter and setter methods. Define a property. "MyFoo.color". But hey, what if you have to add a restriction. No problem, there was a getter setter operation for all property elements. So if you later wanted to restrict the colors to 256 color palette, you could add the getter/setter for the property. No need to say MyFoo.setColor or MyFoo.getColor. It was simply MyFoo.color = blue, or display MyFoo.color.
I really wish HTML5 had gone a more intelligent route instead of the stupidity it went. HTML5, should of reduced the number of inputs to Bool, String, List. Then rather than adding new inputs such as phone, url, etc. Added the ability to associate "formatters". A formatter would be similar to a schema definition, that would also denote a preferred keyboard type. Then add keyboards to the HTML5 spec.
So rather than telephone, you'd have a string input with a telephone formatter. The formatter would detail input type "numberic", "9 chars", etc. as well as a preferred keyboard. "keyboard=keypad". Similar a ZIP code, SSN, etc would all merely be strings, restricted to numeric, and default to a keypad keyboard. Sadly, Adobe's Flex team was headed in this beautiful direction. HTML5 went fruit loopy...
Honestly, I said for a while, that Adobe should of released their own webkit browser that did not have security. But simply showed a defined API/Object Model construct that enabled ActionScript to be utilized on the browser DOM. Open source it. Allow all other browsers to incorporate it natively or via plugin. And present ActionScript3 as a "typed" language alternative to JavaScript for browsers.
Had they done this, they would of accomplished much of their goals. While at the same time not shooting themselves and all their developers in the head.
Excuse me nice gentlemen. I don't mean to interrupt but, I've been searching news articles trying to find my cat. Have you seen my cat?
I also warned people, that they criticized and hated Flash because of how it was used intrusively by marketers. Pop-over ads, etc. I warned and said that with Flash dead, they would simply turn to HTML5. Except now it would be native, and you'd no longer be able to block their ads. And I was right.
There wasn't one single cause of Flash being killed. So everyone arguing for or against Steve Jobs being the cause is irrelevant. Jobs did bring focus to the ever growing problem that was Flash.
Flash originally was a solution to a problem that Web users/content creators had: With multiple platforms and browsers like OS X, Windows, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc, how do web designers create consistent look and functionality for animations and video. While some browser specific optimizations were required for pages, animations and video had to work pretty much the same.
How Adobe did it was to code at very low levels the APIs needed to run everything. When CPUs and operating systems all had to do the work this wasn't much of a problem. Where it became more of a problem was when the work was being offloaded to GPUs and the OS became better at using the GPU. Flash unfortunately ignored these optimizations till very late. By that time, the reputation of it being a resource hog was well earned. For example, on OS X, there was a demo that showed how inefficient Flash was by taking the same video and putting it in two containers: MKV and Flash. The MKV container ran at low CPU usage while the Flash container ran at 100%. From what I remember this only happened on Flash for OS X so the problem was entirely Adobe's.
The second problem was security. Over time OS became more aware of the need for enhanced security. Flash unfortunately again was very late to fixing these in a serious way. Because of how Flash was written at a low level, it also was more of security hole as Flash requires escalated privileges to run/install.
The last problem was mobile UI. Flash was designed to be used with a mouse and pointer. When smart phones still relied on this UI, Flash would be fine. When they started moving towards touch-centric UIs, the promise of Flash was diminished. As consumers started to use more smart phones than computers, the original idea of using one platform to reach all users was negated.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
What did it in should be obvious... one security exploit after another, non-stop, for over 8 years. HTML5 might have been the final nail in the coffin but Flash really did itself in.
When Flash was originally conceived by Macromedia very little thought went into security, because at the time security wasn't a big issue (the Internet was still fairly small, compared to today, and hackers had not yet really ramped up on a large scale). The entire codebase was inherently insecure and trusting of the flash handed to it.
In all that time, ever since that first flash product went out the door, right on up to today, nobody did more than basic hand-waving around the security problems. I'm sure they will claim that they tried... but no... they really didn't.
In the end, people finally got tired of the endless stream of security exploits.
-Matt
or ECMAscript
Everything else is dead instead. Flash remains the only supported plugin for the modern browsers. It's the browser plugins that are about to be dead instead.
Adobe's decision to stop support on mobile devices was the deadly blow.
Simply put, it wasn't FOSS. If it were, it could have been fixed, enhanced, ported, etc. Might have actually become something useful. The question isn't "what killed flash?", the question is "who killed flash?" and the answer to that is Adobe. It didn't have to die, they just never gave it a chance to live.
The constant updates drove me insane! That's definitely what killed Adobe Flash, I mean it's just like Java that way!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I don't believe that Apple would have easily allowed Flash on iOS if it had performed well. Flash on iOS would have provided a simple path for people to write applications for iOS without paying the 30% apple tax.
[H*R's and Weebl's] solution was to put the toons on youtube for HTML5 compliance. It works, but it kills their easter eggs.
The size penalty of rendering the vectors to pixels also kills viewers' monthly download quotas.
Steve Jobs was mad because Flash killed Quicktime. Tit for tat retaliation.
Well one thing is correct, Steve Jobs never killed Flash and in fact all he did was make things more complicated for Apple users. Or let's say they simply installed Chrome with a built in Flash player and Mac users dumped Safari. What did eventually cause Flash to slowly dies was the constant barrage of security issues that plague it almost weekly at times. Then it simply became a resource and performance hog which Adobe could never seem to rectify. In fact Google and YouTube pushing all content away from Flash and to HTML5 was probably the start of the end for Flash. Then of course streaming services began to drop Flash which sealed the fate of Flash. I have manged to basically turn off or disable Flash in all my browsers. Anything still requiring it which isn't much I simply ignore.
Flash Player 2 was only 618 KB
http://www.oldapps.com/flash_p...
Chuck Norris.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It sucks in so many ways:
(a) it is buggy
(b) it is a plentiful source of security risks
(c) It is of bad design
(d) It eats up your CPU
(e) It is not integrated in HTML and compatible with HTML. In contrast JS + SVG
In short it is from Adobe. The guys who developed PDF and are unable to implement a PDF-compatible PDF viewer and editor.
They should have changed their business model while they had opportunity to do so at the time when browser proliferation started and Flash content was dominant on the web. They should have licensed the Flash standard to web browser developers so they could implement their own Flash engines, instead of sticking to "ActiveX" kind of in-house plug-in development.
That way they could have kept control over the technology while concentrating only on creative things (audio-visual presentation) they knew how to do best.
nope...wrong
Flash died because it was an inferior standard for the internet.
It was bloated, unsecure, proprietary, slow, and required too many updates.
In fact, analyzing Flash's design is a good way to learn what *not* to do at every development point.
Steve Jobs may have been a 'prick' but not when he was banning flash from his devices. It was simply good sense.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Adobe Management Killed it - AdobeAIR was the thing they wanted everyone to switch towards. Sadly, AIR was DOA for a number of reasons. Just like Silverslight was DOA. HTML5 has some hope, but security isn't one of the strong points for HTML5 yet.
Adobe bought Flash with their Macromedia buyout. They learned from MSFT that it is easier to buy your competition than to actually compete with them. So they bought Flash and started making terrible-for-flash business decisions - mainly around not performing a security audit, then not fixing whatever the audit uncovered. Management knew that fixing Flash would break much of the current Flash applications. They didn't have the balls to do it. It really is that simple. No balls.
Adobe isn't know for their security programming. Look at Acrobat too. It has been plagued by terrible security which continues to this day. Why bring this up? It goes towards explaining Adobe management decisions. They always choose the cheap way, not the secure way and they don't have any balls. Always.
The good news is that most of their best software doesn't need much networking or collaboration, so their range of fuckups on Premiere or that graphics thing they make don't matter.
The short answer for today is NEVER use Adobe products unless you make your living using them. Everyone else should use software from **any** other provider.
Yep - Adobe management killed flash.
This sounds like a huge oversimplification of the problems, if not outright scapegoating.
OBVIOUSLY it had nothing to do with Steve Jobs' post (which is 7 yrs old now), and I also don't think it not being on iOS had anything to do with it too.
Just look from the market perspective. If Flash was any good and worked well on anything other than iOS, it would still have market domination and would still thrive on the web, regardless of it working on iOS or not.
I dunno why people keep hammering on Apple and iOS, but let's not forget that worldwide iOS doesn't have even 15% of the market while Android holds up 80% or more. If you have a standard or app that does not work on iOS does that automagically mean you are bound to fail? Of course not. That's a very naive when not brainwashed way of seeing things. It'd work on Android, Windows PCs, Macs, Linux... basically any web connected device that wasn't an iPad or iPhone.
Flash killed Flash, and no, it was not because Adobe gracefully accepted it's demise, it's because Flash has inherent problems that could not be solved even after over a decade of Macromedia and Adobe trying to fix. From the annoying update scheme to constant security issues, extremely inefficient runtime, how it bogged down CPUs and hogged memory, plus a bunch of other stuff, came competitive alternatives to solve most of it's problems.
It took quite a while too.
Flash was also proprietary, development of it was handled by a single company, and there was no independent analysis and control of it.
Don't get me wrong, Flash was great back in it's early days, no doubt it's the foundation of many great things that can be done on the Internet nowadays, and it has a place in Internet history. But the adoption and needs of modern Internet outpaced it, and we need something more robust, lightweight, open, well thought out and better adapted to today's needs.
Back then when Jobs made his post, I commented on how a whole lot of websites still used Flash, how I knew that wasn't a perfect scenario, but how Jobs' statement would essencially change nothing in several years. I stand by my comment. We're now getting close to a decade after the fact, and we're finally seeing most of big services going for HTML5 and other technologies. But there are still websites out there using Flash, and fundamentally, HTML5 can't do everything Flash did - you need other plugins for that.
And here's the thing: an entire subculture died with Flash. As HTML5 cannot completely replace it, and other technologies are either not as intuitive, or depends on plugin install, and never had the wide adoption and experimental nature of Flash, we don't see stuff like those weird flash animations and games nowadays much anymore.
What killed Flash was not only having to update it every time you used it, just like Adobe Reader on PCs, but never knowing whether today's update was going to sneak in some useless browser toolbar you didn't want.
Any layer of products that needed computer limitations will not last.
Todays CPU and GPU can do a lot more than past hardware so the creative maths of saving CPU power is not needed as much.
A webcam and mic can work with social media, apps, other devices as part of software, the OS or browser.
Most modern OS now support more of the CPU and GPU and developers can access some CPU and GPU support in their own software or code.
Browsers can display pretty art now and work with a video file or show a video like stream.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Former professional Flash programmer here; now an iOS one; if you can't beat 'em, join them, right? Eight good years of major ad campaign mini-sites, interactive installations, art projects. Near the end of the line for Flash/Air, most of my projects were comprised of three contiguous 1080p screens with touch overlays, using 60fps interactive 3D interfaces, multitouch, maybe camera-enabled, farming data in realtime from multiple sources, to do very, very cool creative things. When mobile came out, everyone thought everything had to work to fit one platform. It doesn't have to. Flash had a place in higher-end hardware, it was practically designed as a resource vampire and it did good things if you fed it well. Away3D had brought it direct access to OpenGL. There were some great AR libraries. Sure you have your Cinders and your OpenFrameworks, but AS3 had a very nice, javascript-like, hard-typed, fully object-oriented syntax with multiple MVC frameworks available, and unparalleled control of creative minutiae. We should definitely embrace mobile-friendly technologies, open standards for the web, etc. Absolutely. But we shouldn't throw out what is still a pretty cool approach to doing immersive, high-resolution, multitouch non-web interactive experiences. Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
I'm one of those curmudgeons that blocked flash for years. Flash was an excuse for eye candy masking bad html code.
The demise of flash was really all the malware that used it.
NRRPT/RCT
If there's one thing,I'd say html5 and the better animations with css and JavaScript. Better code without the need for plugins.
Really? Why do we care what this guy thinks? He's already on record saying that we're all stupid. Multiple times. Yes, he's talking about you and me. Everyone but himself.
Flash was just a crap pile imho......It worked or didn't without rhyme or reason. it seemed to infect other operations on my PC.
I'm glad it's gone. I ripped it out of my PC lock stock and barrel long ago.
Adobe programmers killed Flash by creating a bloated program requiring intense resources with low performance. Then they forced users to pay them a license fee on every computer whether that user wanted their garbage software or not. They are bad like Microsoft and just like Windows, it died.