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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 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.
Adobe flash killed itself by being pure crap.
Don't worry, Windows 10 is giving you plenty of work.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Definitely Silverlight.
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.
Flash and Homestar Runner validated each others' existence. Once H*R had run its course, Flash no longer had a reason to exist.
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".
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.
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 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.
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.
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."
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
The other thing not mentioned is that Apple would have easily allowed Flash on iOS had Adobe managed to come up with a mobile version that addressed Apple's performance concerns. In his memo, Jobs even mentions this. They waited and waited for Adobe and finally gave up. Many rabid Android fans at the time were more than gloating when they got Flash to run on their Androids . . . until they actually used it and found it a buggy, battery draining mess just as Jobs had said it was.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.