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.

Comments

Several things

[Anonymous Coward]

But mainly, the enormous security risk, bad reputation, and lack of native support in browsers.

Re:Several things

[JoeMerchant]

I'd go for DRM, simple and straight up, as the primary sinker of the Flash ship.

Those ridiculously frequent "security updates" were almost entirely managing DRM holes, and it would seem they were managing the holes in whack-a-mole style without even attempting to design a more secure DRM solution. As a user, the update frequency killed my enthusiasm for Flash - if I could install it once and forget it, fine - I'll use it when a website says it needs it, but if I'm constantly having to install updates just to browse the web, no thanks.

As a content provider, having to constantly evaluate the stream of Flash updates, determine which one broke our app for our users and which update version we need to tell them to use (and compatibility would fade in and out across the updates, you couldn't just go "old", you'd have one feature that died in versions 275 through 313, and another that only worked in 306 through 392, then you come up with a third compatibility problem that breaks functionality from 317 onward, so you've got to tell your users to use 314 through 316, if they want to access all the features they are paying for.

Flash was not a good partner in the value delivery stream.

Security and annoyances for me

[Scoth]

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 the post mortem?

[jenningsthecat]

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.