Death of Flash
Out of context: Reply #171
- Started
- Last post
- 205 Responses
- raf3
Here we paste again, just because people have short memory and only remember what they want to. Written almost 2 years ago by yours truly, slightly updated:
--
Let’s get the history right before nobody remembers anymore how it actually went.
Not running on mobile did not kill Flash, neither did Steve Jobs. When iPhone came about, Flash had already been in agony, kept alive by its usefulness as a video player. People don’t remember this now, but by 2006 discussions whether or not Flash was “still ok” were commonplace here. Flash-only websites were already a big no-no, it was only ok to use “flash elements” on a page.
In 2007, when iPhone arrived, I worked as a front-end developer and hadn’t opened Flash in months. And I loved Flash.
Why was it dying, if it was (possibly still is) the better technology?
It never fully integrated with the browser and never stopped being a foreign body in it. Never properly spoke with JS, kept breaking history, didn’t deep-link, had weird right-click menu and always opened a new window instead of a new tab. It was processor-heavy. It still spins the fans in my laptop and shrinks its battery time today to the point that I sometimes use a Flash-disabling plugin when on battery just to save power.
One terminal flaw that was obvious by then was that it was never going to work well with Google indexing. This alone is enough to mean a death sentence to any web technology today.
Add CSS Nazis who loomed over the internet at the time (Respect The Standards!), and a general distrust towards letting a single company control so much of the web to the equation (it wasn’t baseless, by then Adobe had proven more ‘evil’ than Google and Apple together), and you get the picture.
Another, and when I think of it, possibly main reason of Flash’s demise was that Adobe was so busy appealing to programmers and making Air the next Java, that they completely neglected the crowd who made Flash as big as it was: designers.
Neglected? They just showed them the finger, because the future and the real money supposedly was in the Air — Adobe's platform that was going to bring universal apps running both on Windows and OSX. Most good Flash designers I know had a hard time transitioning to AS 2.0 and never picked up on AS 3.0 when Adobe forced it on them. Many of them never bothered to.
TL;DR: Jobs didn’t kill Flash, he only smelled its stench noticing before anyone else that Adobe already drove it into the ground.
- Exactly. The short and sweet of all of it is, it's a plugin not a standard.prophetone
- well saidhotroddy
- The only point I agree with is Google. It being a standalone plugin is what made it work. HTML5 is still a long way from that reliability.formed
- No one I knew was "smelling the stench", they were pushing for better sites and it was 3.0. We are still years behind.formed
- so truemonospaced