Death of Flash
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- CyBrainX1
^
"Adobe releases final Flash update with stronger language asking users to uninstall the app before its EOL."What is EOL and why to people insist on using acronyms to make themselves sound important when they're only failing to communicate?
- Was it too much work to type nine characters "end of life"?CyBrainX
- EoL = End of Lifed. Pretty standard jargon in tech circles these days and ZDNet's quite an established tech outlet. But yes, journalists should never assumeNairn
- Whoops. How did I not even see your own response above? haha.Nairn
- gotta use them TLAs to establish credibility, see?hans_glib
- “Why do people use acronyms to make themselves sound important?”, he asked on Q.B.N.nb
- Flash isnt really dead right? It lives on as Animator? Is it just the flash player that is dead?dkoblesky
- Yeah, the player and the .swf many of us Flash devs didn't use the Flash IDEkingsteven
- IDE. There's another one I don't know what it stands for. I assume it the development platform but that's only from context of hearing it so many times.CyBrainX
- I don't want to delete the player, what if i want to check out my old work from years ago in a moment of nostalgia?shapesalad
- This is why I'm deeply jealous of the artists and craftsmen behind the stone/ceramic/wood works you see in museums.shapesalad
- Their efforts, skills, creativity and gift of time lives on, whereas our generation have spent hours slaving away to manipulate a magnetic field on a HD.shapesalad
- Only for the work to be unseen and obsolete with an update, EOL, or malfunction. Just wasting my life clicking a mouse button....shapesalad
- at least you weren't wasting your life typing "End-of-Life" and "Integrated Development Environment"kingsteven
- @shape In your amazing future there's a Flash Louvre with a Winged Victory of Samothrace that flaps its wings if you hover nearby.garbage
- As @dkoblesky said, it lives on as Adobe Animate.fadein11
- My company has a looooot of legacy flash widgets floating around the site that are bricked. It’s a major issue the company was not prepared for at all.jtb26
- If only they'd had some notice!Nairn
- lol nairn, indeed. I haven't had a client request or had to update anything Flash related for years.fadein11
- https://ruffle.rs/Nairn
- Man, I remember trying to ween managers off of talking about/requesting Flash-based things in 2014! And it's still (barely) ticking.evilpeacock
- Adobe should put "FLASH NO WORKY VEWY SOON YOU BAD MAN UNINSTALL NOW TSK TSK"cherub
- SteveJobs0
Had a long conversation yesterday with a friend about flash. Was getting kinda nostalgic for the creative era it led to especially when compared to what the web has become today.
The movement against flash is, in my opinion, probably one of the best case studies of the mob effect ever.
- I like how your name is Steve Jobs as well! I agree, it was very floored but it was also very creative. It could have been bigger than it was (as software tool)mugwart
- Absolutely, Everyone reacted to it's alleged slowness on mobile as if it was never going to improve. Jobs said no and everyone fell in line.CyBrainX
- And we still don't have a replacement.sted
- please, don't act like the iPhone was the only phone out at the time ... Flash was running on all non-Apple phones at the timemonospaced
- Adobe simply stopped working on it, despite it running on Android devices. Didn't help that Jobs was against it, but that's not the only reason it diedmonospaced
- sorry SteveJobs, nothing I wrote here has anything to do with what you are saying ... I wasn't part of the movement, but I certainly agree it was beneficial :)monospaced
- Steve Jobs was right
https://www.apple.co…ernexbcn - ^that's why the battery life on iphones is so good @.@sarahfailin
- imagine using flashernexbcn
- Those where the days..all day long browsing the net for dope Flash portfolio sites.sureshot
- Superb biz move on Jobs' part. We still don't have something that works as well. Thanks fanboys/internet mob. How much does that app store make? Yeah.formed
- Flash put food on my table & clothes on my back, gonna miss the buggy wee bastard RIP :(mrAtor
- @formed ... Apple was the underdog back then ... Flash was available on Android, and it was a piece of flopping shit ... that's why it diedmonospaced
- 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
- 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
- jazmine0
so wait, do i need to learn AS3 or not?
- just 2version3
- ok. then i'm good.jazmine
- ditto man; as3 is ballzzz/tough...ideaist
- You need to know AS3 for making aps for iphone.74LEO
- as3 isn't that different n worth learning i think. :)instrmntl
- I knew AS2 like 3 years ago, but figured I'd go to AS3 since I will have to relearn it anyway. Is it really harder?graphiknature
- Don't listen to any developers who also know Java and are already OOP savy. AS3 takes months to learn.CyBrain
- Even if you're expert in AS2.It's mostly a rewrite of the language. You can't even code a button the same way.CyBrain
- ernexbcn2
It's dead Jim
- https://webkit.org/b…
https://blog.chromiu…
httpernexbcn - https://www.blog.goo…ernexbcn
- https://blog.mozilla…ernexbcn
- I wonder if we'll still be able to see all our old work..SlashPeckham
- RIP of the Daysarahfailin
- https://webkit.org/b…
- i_monk0
Firefox now blocks Flash by default
http://gizmodo.com/firefox-now-b…
I can't say I'm surprised. I've been prompted to upgrade Flash three times in the last week.
- http://www.engadget.…pablo28
- Think if you update Flash Player, then it still works. I just updated FF and my site doesn't get blocked at all.fyoucher1
- FF is mostly dead to me. Pushing Yahoo and now blocking Flash is enough for me.formed
- Pushing Yahoo?i_monk
- Mozilla partners with Yahoo: http://techcrunch.co…formed
- Firefox went to shit. I use Chromedbloc
- ideaist0
Can't we as designers / developers hold some type of protest and demand flash on portable devices? It seems unfair that Apple is letting us know what technology we can use rather than the other way around...
Any protest ideas???
- chrisRG0
is it just me or is this a deja vu thread ?
- instrmntl0
Adobe Flash just took another step towards death, thanks to Google
Google officially killed Flash advertising in its browser. As of September 1, any advertising that uses the technology requires the user to click it to play — it’ll otherwise remain frozen.
- Note: The writer seems a bit biased and probably doesn't know much about flash. That being said, its still a huge blow to Flash.instrmntl
- Bullshit. You know Jobs killed flash all by himself.monospaced
- Yup. He did. One of his smartest business moves. How much has that app store made Apple?formed
- ^ and there's the biggest truth of all about Apple regarding Flash.CyBrainX
- I was being sarcastic. Also nobody stopped anyone from making badass flash games for other smartphones but that never happened.monospaced
- e-pill3
my site i built in flash and forever IT STAYS™
- pinkfloyd0
Bring back Director and lingo
- deathboy0
Wasn't it about increasing profits with h264 licensing on videos instead of flash. But than google came out with webm or something and apple responded by making h264 license free. If i remember right the whole anti flash push was simply bottom line profitablility under the guise that it was a sub par technology that couldn't run on first gen devices that didn't even have the power to mutlitask..
- That's why Apple killed it - money then went to the App storeformed
- ha oh yea forgot about app store. cant have free flash games out there when they want a cutdeathboy
- The infant app store not supporting flash shouldn't have been the cause of its deathmonospaced
- those flash games sucked ass on mobile devices because they required a mouse or keyboardmonospaced
- the app store is full of free apps and apple doesn't get a cut. Stop saying stupid things.ESKEMA
- oh, and they ran like utter shit, or else they would have prevailedmonospaced
- Free apps builds stores inventory. Apple advertises number of apps. In app purchases of free apps is 30%. Thats profit.deathboy
- all seems quite profitable. as far as early flash xp. Hardware/OS wasnt up to snuff. Mac never tried to develop to let in competition. App stores became popular since web xp on phones suckdeathboy
- competition and web experience on phones sucked anyways so native apps were easier. liek a native plugin.deathboy
- that's why it's not bloated with viruses, malware and hair loss.ESKEMA
- Apple is all about money. The app store was about money. Period. Flash was killed directly to benefit them, all else is hypothetical.formed
- is hypothetical.formed
- Flash was shit and wasn't supported, but it was supported on ALL OTHER PHONESmonospaced
- so how did ONE underdog newbie to the area cause it to die? Please...monospaced
- marketshare and advertisingdeathboy
- Apple's marketshare when iOS came out was nil. Their advertising didn't mention Flash.monospaced
- ESKEMA0
Apple has updated its iPhone Developer Program License Agreement to ban use of cross compilers, according to DaringFireball.
Prior to today section 3.3.1 of the agreement said:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs.
In the new version section 3.3.1 now reads:
3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).
Gruber indicates that this makes cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe’s upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, prohibited.
It could also prohibit other tools such as MonoTouch, Titanium, PhoneGap, and Unity3D.
It could hardly be more clear if they singled out Flash CS5 by name. (Wonder what Adobe does now? CS5 is this close to release and the iPhone compiler is the flagship feature in this version of Flash. They’re pretty much royally fucked.)
- Raniator0
If someone would like to rewrite beatport.com into HTML then I'll buy an iPad.
- HTML 5 I meant...Raniator
- I can't work out why they decided to build it with Flash in the first placeNightshade
- because it makes sense to build in Flash, more so than any other web language.jhey
- Actually I've met the guy who started Beatport and he described it more as a case of starting with Flash and being trapped (i.e., not wanting to rock the boat w/ existing customer base)ukit
- trapped (i.e., porting over entire infrastructure, not wanting to rock the boat w/ existing customer base)ukit
- After all, the site is a money making machine, but it's clunky and datedukit
- ESKEMA0
^^no flash here. I'm not saying that flash is dead, but it won't be the only option. Flash is what it is now because there was never an alternative.
- i agree with that. it is not healthy for one software to dominate. so apple and flash are kind of similar, in a way.twokids
- this doesn't work in IE, and that is why we have flashMilan
- Adobe 'had' Live Motion before it was Adobe Flash. Microsoft has Silverlight.fyoucher1
- witch are all proprietary too. I was meaning no proprietary alternative.ESKEMA
- must_dash0
Sorry for the long post, but...
I've built Flash web sites for the last 10 years or so, more than often completely made from Flash. Some flash stuff I've seen chugs along on my Mac Pro, so it is never going to work well on something with a lot less power...e.g The iPad...
But I must point out that only 10% of people use a mac, and possibly 10% of those use an iPad... so that works out at 1%, meanwhile Flash penetration is at about 98.8% so more people don't have the Flash plug-in anyway... I've not included the iPhone in that as it doesn't suit the device...
Why doesn't Flash suit the iPhone? Well the beauty behind Flash was the feedback you had with your mouse, rollovers that changed text, or opened sections of a site, or revealed navigation... How would that translate onto iPhone/iPad? it wouldn't... dragging your finger around scrolls the pages, not a mouse pointer... So a lot of the stuff I like about Flash wouldn't be used on there anyway.
The good old days of Flash have gone also... the sites I still think are great, is not how Flash is used now. E.g the original Frost* site by de-construct, or the Spin site by Hi-res... these days all the Flash stuff seems to be bloated video playing sites... It is like going back to using videodiscs at school or a Don Bluth game where you just participate at key points of the site.
In my opinion Flash and interaction design was always at its best when people were leaning forward and interacting in real time with Flash sites, now they tend to be lean back, and let the visuals wash over them. The problem is that however big the studio is, their video work looks amateur compared to broadcast and cinema. So you get the worst of both worlds... and end up with just piss poor telly.
HTML5 or jQuery or mooTools are rapidly getting to the point where they allow for interaction design without digging through version and browser hell of javascript compatibility... and they allow a lot of the features I've always used in Flash.
So sorry Adobe but unless you bring Flash back to the designers and stop throwing video, 3D capabilties etc at it, rather than fixing what doesn't work with it... then I'm out.
- man, i totally agree 100%.showpony
- yeah only Mac users have iPhones... OH HANG ON!BIGGESTDOGINTHEWORLD
- I never said that.must_dash
- you did "10% of people use a mac, and possibly 10% of those use an iPad... so that works out at 1%"
BIGGESTDOGINTHEWORLD - that would assume that ipod users don't have a home computermust_dash
- I think there are a lot of generalizations in your opinions. There are good and bad interactive Flash sites and good and bad flash video-heavy sites.CyBrain
- and bad video-heavy sites.CyBrain
- fyoucher10
I don't think we'll ever see it go away, just evolve.
We'll see it used more and more for mobile devices...and again...banner ads. I know iPhone and ITampon don't support it -- yet -- but they'll be a normal workaround/compromise sometime (there is a way to run Flash on an iPhone already). There's just too much content in Flash already for companies to redo everything in another format. Plus, everyone and their mom's mom already has this plugin.
JQuery can't do 'real' animation either (more than just slides and fades, like character animation and shit like that) and video takes too long to create and creates large file sizes which is prohibitive in mobile devices.
You can create an animation in Flash much faster than you can in After Effects too. Production is much faster. Making video's for ads or anything that's animated is just going to be too costly and too time consuming. You know how agencies always need shit yesterday.
Flash will get back to its roots soon, what is was originally meant for.
- I'm not understanding the Flash vs. AE comparison. Please provide linx/info.dMullins
- Speaking of animation production time...fyoucher1
- yes... flash's animation roots are good... the re-invention of the browser through AS3 code-o-rama isn'tvaxorcist
- also scaling up vector based animations has its uses...SlashPeckham
