Death of Flash
Out of context: Reply #193
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- SteveJobs5
To be fair flash is quite a miraculous technology. It's basically java but with a far more accessible development environment aimed at non-developers. That's how we were able to see the kind of demos that were coming out in the 90's. THE NINETIES! Think about that for a minute. Ajax was still another 4-5 years away.
The runtime itself was impressive too. This is the component we call a plugin that was installed in your browser and loaded your compiled 'swf' files into memory and displayed them on the page. For anyone who's never done low-level programming, you can't begin to appreciate what a challenge and conquest it was (and still is) to develop a cross-browser application that loaded, decompressed, interpreted, and ran these swf files at runtime and everything just worked. Btw, a game emulator like snex9x or dolphin64 is basically the same thing (I would know, I've wrote one back in 2005). It's no wonder flash was a resource hog - especially when wielded by the likes of designers (hey no offense) who weren't trained to think about things like performance. So loading a video player, an interactive presentation, and 5 ads on the page (the equivalent of 7 emulators running simultaneously) meant your browser was about to pull at every system resource you've got to carry out its tasks.
So, can something that fits in your pocket with a ~600MHz processor and no fans or hardware acceleration be able to do all that without melting? Probably not. Could Adobe have made it happen? I'm sure they were trying but the hardware specs were not going to change fast enough so even an ultra-mobile-optimized flash runtime (whatever the heck that would even look like) could do even a fraction of what the desktop browser counterpart could do.
So am I blaming Jobs for the death of flash? Not really. Most have made this an either-or discussion/argument but to me it's not. I see 4 parties at fault:
Steve Jobs (takes a bow). Though Jobs himself did Adobe no favors, by 2009 he had the Midas touch and nobody questioned his authoritative knowledge, much less his intentions, so when he spoke out against the technology everybody listened.
Adobe. Of course Adobe missed several opportunities to address things and help their reputation. Like focusing less on Flex, Air, and AS3 and teaching flash designers about resources and how to achieve better performance. They were more concerned about metrics, market penetration, and their bottom line than being responsible to the powerful tech they'd given everyone to use how they saw fit.
Flash developers. So without any intervention, training, understanding, or maybe even caring about these performance issues yes, these 'flash developers' were also contributing to the decay of flash technology.
Us. In the end, however, it was us, the masses, that killed flash, unwittingly as it might have been. It was being used many times over on single pages for display ads when an animated gif would have sufficed and slowing dual core processors to a crawl (far lesser power has sent man to the moon and back). There was really no way around it apart from one thing: disabling or uninstalling the plugin - and that right there - was the beginning of the death of flash.
- Jobs put the death wound in Flash. Nobody stepped in to heal the wound and it quickly died. Superb move on his part. $28b made each year in that app store.formed
- It would have required preemptive action from Adobe. By the time Jobs became the vocal opposition it was already too late for them to stop the bleeding.SteveJobs