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
- fues0
- fues1
- 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
- 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
- fate0
SteveJobs, loved the retrospective, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and that history.
As an old Flash designer/developer/animator, I do think that performance was really on a lot of developer's minds. I think juggling resources and being mindful of speed was something you always had to struggle with, especially in the late 90's / early 00's, because a lot of consumer computers were about as powerful as the first iPhone during that time.
Not disagreeing entirely with you, but performance was definitely a concern.
- True, the likes of yourself and many others kept these things in mind, but for the few who did, there were many more who didn't unfortunately.SteveJobs
- Friends of Ed book owners, flashkit members, etc. for sure sought efficiency. But I bet they weren't stamping out Lower my bills dancing banner ads either ;)SteveJobs
- ernexbcn2
Adobe couldn't release a decent version of their shitty plugin for mobile. If they were so sure it was achievable then they should have kept working on the Android version, but they even gave up on that one.
Flash was a resource hog even on computers, plus most the content made already on Flash wouldn't even adapt to a mobile screen.
- +1monospaced
- They still could! The last 10 years android remained completely open. Market share better too. But adobe did jack shit. Jobs died a long time ago.monospaced
- 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
- 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…
- CyBrainX0
I have to create a screensaver this month. IT says Instant Storm is the way to go. It's Flash based.
- enter the closest iron shop, buy something form the israeli open-bolt blowback family, fill it with love, introduce the tool to IT, say: I think I will use thissted
- I've use screentime in the past. also flash based.
http://download.cnet…dbloc
- PaulAllen0
Adobe Flash announces Creative Cloud Storm a creative mobile device that will play Flash files ten times faster than on Android and iPhones. With a already installed user base of 3.4 Million cloud users, and over 99% of Flash players installed in computer systems, the Flash player will not support the new Google logo and will continue to show the old Google logo, in addition to YouTube advertisement in videos which will also be blocked, requiring users to click the logo in order to see the advertisement. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen says, "You guys want to play with us? We will play the same game!"
www.adobe.com/2015/9/5/creative...
- 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