Death of Flash
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- vaxorcist0
yes, been dead for a while, but the nails in coffin for me were:
1. no "back button" unless you code it, or (later) use a library, so we ended up re-inventing the browser not so well.... with lots of wasted time, as flash isn't about the page metaphor, but users kept demanding a back button
2. action-scrapped... 2.0 code useless in 3.0, etc... and the "hand off" from another developer meant that a few weeks were spent figuring out how they did things before you started anything new....
3. slow/fast... not as responsive as I'd like, depending on speed of network more than I'd like....
4. XML parsing was cool, but so many exceptions and oddities that we had to write a ton of filtering scripts to fix stuff coming from a CMS to the XML file that flash apps were supposed to read in and would choke on all sorts of random things that other XML parsers would not choke on...
- trooperbill-4
2advanced and thedesignersrepublic now unusable... any think of any more? i wanna create a blog piece naming and shaming lol
thanks
- It'd be a lot easier to showcase how HTML5 is still years away from what was promised (if ever)formed
- formed0
Adobe was caught sleeping, no doubt. Jobs took the chance to not only kill a competitor, but to solidify Apple's profits via apps. Brilliant business move, imho, but he did kill an industry and send well paid programmers to the streets.
I still care because much of what I do benefits from Flash (still used on large touchscreens, which now is a headache to keep things coordinated, before you could use literally the same file).
I am fine with the way it is today - boring and predictable. All about money, money, money. Flash would have evolved in the same way, eventually - cleaner, more minimal, mobile friendly, etc. Just look at how long its taken this HTML5 to really work and it is still ages from the flexibility Flash had.
- Sounds like your problem is really with Adobe for not letting it evolve?monospaced
- Nope, it's with Jobs killing it, Adobe wasn't given a chanceformed
- Agreed. And bash Flash all you want, what was the better alternative? No answer then and not ever 5 years later.CyBrainX
- Since Jobs didn't work at Adobe, I find it hard how he could personally "kill" Flash. I mean, it's still around.monospaced
- 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
- pinkfloyd0
Bring back Director and lingo
- e-pill3
my site i built in flash and forever IT STAYS™
- SteveJobs1
I do think Jobs killed flash, but only as the final nail in the coffin as illustrated above. And not directly, mind you, and certainly not all by himself.
Adobe didn't do their due diligence with the technology either. They jumped from a simple UI and a reasonably understandable (for most) AS 2.0 to the world of OO and they gave novice developers (and let's face it, this is the core of who was developing flash apps) too much rope to hang themselves with. These so-called developers knew nothing of garbage collection or memory management or using patterns for designing applications to run efficiently and thus you had flash applications that had the simple job of displaying a banner ad that would single-handedly take down a browser.
As a result, the non-tech world and even the somewhat tech savvy that 'knew a little php - or whatever' but have never done any real program whole-heartedly bought into the notion, while firmly grasping their Steve Jobs prayer beads, that flash itself was to blame and that it was an outdated, inferior technology. With the propogation of this notion that flash sucked as a technology the bandwagoners (and i'm pointing at most of you) brought this browser technology to a screeching halt.
In the early two thousands I might have cared as I appreciated and supported what the technology was and what it could do. Today I'm far removed from the tedium of typical web development and could mostly care less... ...except, I really did enjoy the rare creativity that the few, who knew, could squeeze out of it and bring us something purely enjoyable. But hey.. web standards and all that... flash is nonsense and the Web is serious business! Out with the old and in with the new!
- err1
We have to remember the best thing about flash was compression. All the HTML5 projects I've worked on were all bloated to hell.
Google webdesigner is great an all. But it still produces projects that weigh 500% bigger than what I can do in flash in half the time.
Let's not forget HTML5 is annoying when it comes to browser support.
I think adobe should have taken out half the functionality of flash and made the plugin run as fast and clean as possible to become the new gif or something.
- I agree with your last statement. Adobe had a responsibility to make Flash more mobile friendly.monospaced
- But the designer can do that by being a designer and just not adding too much.CyBrainX
- jhey0
- blaw0
From the Washington Post:
"Adobe: Flash Apps Will Run On The iPad, Even Full Screen At Some Point"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp…
- twokids0
the ipad could lead to the end of apple as we know them. they may become a niche player over this issue. They have walked this tightrope of being proprietary and yet appearing to support the open source mentality for many years. the ipad could be their undoing over the lack of support for flash and java. two interesting reads below.
- rounce0
This thread has a signal/noise ratio of almost nought.
I gave up before the end of the first page and, I'm only sticking around for the image posts.
- whatsup0
say
You say
You say
You say
You sayYou say one for the trouble
Two for the time
Come on girls let rock that [whistle]Fab Five Freddie told me everybody's high
DJ's spinnin' are savin' my mind
Flash is fast
Flash is fast
Flash is fast
Flash is cool
Francois sez fas, Flashe' no doYou say one for the trouble
Two for the time
Come on girls let rock thatGrandmaster, cut faster
Grandmaster, cut faster
Grandmaster, cut, cut, cut faster
Grandmaster, Grandmaster, cut fasterHey, hey, hey
Everybody say one
One, Flash one time
Everybody say two
Two, Flash two times
Say three
Three, Flash three times
Say four
Four, Flash four timesMelle Mel
Taurus is my zodiac signMr Ness
Scorpio, my name is right here
Aquarius
And King Creole
Pieces
Cowboy
Virgo
And Gra- gra- gra- gra- Grandmaster Flash cuts so on
His zodiac sign is CapricornWhy don't you tell me a story?
Please tell me a story too
You know, I think I'll tell you the story of my life
You tell me!
I wanna hear too
I was born in North Dakota a long time ago, see
And now I'm lucky enough to be here with you
Yeah, but what happened in between?
Yeah, what else happened?
Well, it went pretty much like this.Oh yeah!
Woo
[Whistle]
Woo
Ha, ha, ha
ch-ka-bow
Oah, oah
Aha, ha, ha, ha
Hoo!The official adventures of, Flash
Ohhh, ha, ha, ha
Hey, hey, everybody say ho (ho)
Say ho, ho (ho, ho)
Say disco (disco)
Say party (party)
All the ladies,
All the in the house say ow (ow)
Say ow (ow)Everybody come on
Say somebody, anybody, everybody scream! (Ooooo)Hey bro I got somethin' that'll blow ya mind!
Ha, ha, ha, ha
[Party noises]
Get ya hands off that girl!
Creole, Creole!Flash is
Flash is
Flash is
Flash is
Flash is
Flash is
Owww!
- stewdio0
@spraycan. You seem to have a lot of energy / enthusiasm and that's great. You're passionate about your coding. But please understand that some of us have been around the block more than you have when it comes to programming. When we say that JavaScript is beautiful maybe you should ask what the secret is rather than simply railing so heavily against it.
And believe me, Java is no prize. It actually pains me that Processing was written in Java (rather than say, NodeBox which was written in Python) but I do understand why Ben and Casey chose Java and I do support Processing. (...even taught a course in Processing at NYU's Interactive Telecommunication Program before moving out of New York.) Given your little jaunt about "languages" vs. "scripts" you really ought not to hold up Java, which runs on a Virtual Machine, as your idol of code machismo. Either use original C or assembly; do your own garbage collection.
