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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.
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.
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!
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.
It was the de-facto video delivery standard. BBC, security cameras, YouTube (for a while), everything played on Flash and most things only played on Flash for a while.
Thank God it's dying.
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.