Adobe Flash Player
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- CyBrainX0
It's so sad who Adobe gave up on Flash. They could have fought for it a little bit.
- They don't give a fun.nb
- Can't compete with a Goliath like Apple. I am amazed they bothered to keep it this long. Sad.formed
- Leave apple out of it. At the time the iPhone was the underdog and was limited. Adobe had a chance to win.monospaced
- It was after the first iPad when the war escalated.CyBrainX
- lol mono http://cdn.meme.li/i…Hombre_Lobo
- yeh its a shame. sadly apple is a much bigger tech influence than adobe.Hombre_Lobo
- makes no sense why people let a tech company tell them what web formats are good or bad. what next, no gifs?Hombre_Lobo
- Apple didn't though. They were just one phone among many. And EVERYONE thought they would fail.monospaced
- Anyone and everyone else could have supported flash and kept it alive. Fact remains that flash still exists and can still be mobile.monospaced
- Flash was already dead, Jobs only noticed it before others. I loved Flash as a dev and in 2007 I saw it was on its way out.raf
- It was not dead before Jobs started the war. Google was behind Flash big time.CyBrainX
- I still get frustrated just thinking about it. Flash had a lot of potential that alternatives haven't come close to matching.CyBrainX
- matching.CyBrainX
- It was dead, Adobe had killed it by ditching designers and trying to make it a software platform for Java programmers.raf
- Most good Flash designers I knew never learned AS3. They put a lot of effort into learning AS2, were sick of Adobe pulling the rug.raf
- All apple did was say their underdog phone didn't support flash. That is not a war my friend. Not even closemonospaced
- And if Google was backing them, what the fuck went wrong?monospaced
- What went wrong was Adobe gave up. They could have improved/adapted it like all their other software on a yearly basis.CyBrainX
- nb0
If you don't need Flash for work, just get it off your computer. The internet is fine without it.
- vaxorcist0
Note that some malware / popup-ware tries to fake people out by pretending it us a flash player update... its pretty obvious to most techies but not everyone
- CyBrainX0
Flash is still huge with ad banners. That will keep it going for a while.
- monospaced0
I still don't quite get why Adobe didn't and hasn't yet pushed through a mobile standard for flash. I still feel like that window is open and they'd be welcomed through.
- They tried. The Apple backlash was epically militant. Angry Steve hastened his death over it.CyBrainX
- organicgrid0
It seems like ever week you need to update your Flash Player and or Acrobat.
- hotroddy0
Looking back now, I see an obvious limitation that flash had when transitioning to mobile.
Nearly all flash sites were 'above the fold' and the flash movie couldn't talk to browser scrollbar very well and movie dimensions had to be pre defined.
Then came responsive websites trend which made scrolling websites a huge trend.
I never saw any solutions for this with my time using Flash and actionscript.
I personally still love designing above the fold websites but you have to abandon the design for mobile.
- Design and format is up to the people using Flash, not Adobe.CyBrainX
- hotroddy0
Meffid, was it when using safari? I'm now seeing it but only on safari. Turns out it's Safari is intentionally fucking w flash. ON chrome it works fine.
More here:
http://osxdaily.com/2014/05/17/f…
- hotroddy0
Meffid, was it when using safari? I'm now seeing it but only on safari. Turns out it's Safari is intentionally fucking w flash. ON chrome it works fine.
More here:
http://osxdaily.com/2014/05/17/f…
- raf0
I wrote it a year ago somewhere:
---
Let’s get the history straight before nobody remembers anymore how it really happened.
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 and a compact ad delivery format that was able to capture more data back than users ever knew.
People don’t remember this now, but by 2006 discussions whether or not Flash was “still ok” were commonplace. 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 had loved Flash.
Why was it dying, if it was (possibly still is) the better technology?
It never fully integrated with the browser, never stopped being a foreign body in it. Never properly spoke with JS, kept breaking history, didn’t deep-link, had a non-standard right-click menu, made text non-selectable too easy and always opened a new window instead of a new tab. And it was processor heavy like nothing else on my computer. It still spins the fans in my laptop and shrinks its battery time today.
Add CSS Nazis to this who loomed over the internet back then and a general distrust towards letting a single company control so much of the web (which wasn’t baseless, Adobe by then had proved to be more ‘evil’ than Google and Apple together) — and you get the picture.
Another, and when I think of it, probably the 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 real money and the future was in the Air. Most good Flash designers I know never picked up on AS 3.0, and many developers never bothered to.
TL;DR: Jobs didn’t kill Flash, he only smelled its stench and noticed before anyone else that Adobe already drove it into the ground.
- ukit20
Exactly raf. Before the iPad came out and Jobs issued his manifesto the trend among designers and developers was already to not use Flash and replicate as much as possible using JS. It's only once Jobs made his statement that Apple would not support Flash that people nostalgically came to Flash's defense and pretended Apple was the one that killed it.
- formed0
That's just not true. At least not for my business or the others that we work with. Certainly nothing any clients wanted was, and still cannot easily, be done with js.
I find it the opposite, as soon as someone mentions how they miss the design and reliability of Flash people jump and start saying how it wasn't Jobs that killed it.
Jobs killed it, brilliant business move, nothing more to it.
But hey, what do I know.
- No he didn't. He simply said the iPhone wouldn't support it. That didn't cause it to die. Adobe did.monospaced
- evilpeacock0
It's a mess now; most ad networks I have to work with require Actionscript 2 which means running the CS6 version of Flash indefinitely since AS2 support was removed with Adobe's Creative Cloud versions.
Eventually I'll probably have to move Flash CS6 to a virtual machine to keep it running smoothly as new hardware and operating systems come out (just like doing IE testing).
- ukit20
I guess it depends on your vantage point, if you are working on Flash sites for a living it might have carried on being a popular niche for longer.
All I'm saying is that looking at the scene as a whole, I could see a clear trend away from Flash in terms of the kinds of sites designers and agencies were making which accelerated during the mid 2000s. It had less to do with Apple and more with the emergence of jQuery and other JS-based solutions for what Flash was trying to do. No it didn't give you the ability to replicate everything Flash could do, but in many cases it was good enough there was increasing adoption of a "standards mindset" within the design community.
Also raf is absolutely right that Adobe shot themselves in the foot by trying to position Flash as a tool for rich internet applications, which was a dead end movement and alienated designers.
- formed0
JQuery, etc., and this so called HTML5 stuff had promise, but it's been years and we are still not at the design possibilities of Flash was 12+ years ago.
This "standards mindset" has led to a barrage of generic websites, which has further been perpetuated with WordPress.For high end, design driven sites (a la "custom", NOT standard/generic), Flash was king and has yet to be surpassed. There are some great examples out there, dont get me wrong, but the cost to develop those are insane and stability/flexibility is far from what a single player had.
Adobe probably contributed to it, but Jobs killed it and guaranteed Apple a very profitable market in their app store. There's no other reason why he'd make such a stance. It was business smart and helped Apple to dominate the "app" world and market place.
- Fact remains that ALL other phones supported flash besides the iPhone. You can't say one phone killed itmonospaced
- fate0
I think that's really wrong. If anything, Flash development accelerated during the 2000's
Seems like EVERY photographer had a flash site.
Flash agencies like Fantasy Interactive, group94, First Born, Big Spaceship, RGA (yes, these were primarily Flash design/dev agencies before they rebranded as "digital agencies of the future) hit their stride during the mid 2000's