[HN Gopher] Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after Dec...
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Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020
Author : michaelhoffman
Score : 564 points
Date : 2020-06-15 15:18 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.adobe.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.adobe.com)
| j-james wrote:
| Newgrounds has done a lot of work on preserving old Flash
| content. Some standouts are their own Flash player and an SWF to
| MP4 converter, but what I find most interesting is Ruffle.
|
| Ruffle is a Flash emulator written in Rust that can be used as a
| browser extension, a desktop client, or a website polyfill. It's
| still a work in progress, but eventually websites with heavy use
| of Flash content (like many late-2000s webcomics, or even
| Newgrounds itself) could use the polyfill to replace Flash
| content with WASM blobs.
|
| The roadmap was updated recently, and provides a good overview of
| Ruffle's current capabilities. There's also a demo instance that
| can run arbitary SWFs, with a few examples available.
|
| https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player
|
| https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel
|
| https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle
|
| Roadmap: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap
|
| Demo: http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-
| west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/w...
| birktj wrote:
| Ruffle is great! I just used it the other day to convert a
| flash website with a service manual for my outboard engine into
| a nice pdf. Each page was a swf file, so I only had to wget
| them all, convert them with ruffle, and at last convert the
| images into a complete pdf.
| triangleman wrote:
| This guy is trying to emulate x86 in the browser and run the
| actual Flash player within that:
|
| https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...
| indigo945 wrote:
| From the post: > The Flash plugin itself
| includes a JIT compiler that > converts AS3 code to
| x86 code on the fly, which is then JIT > compiled by
| CheerpX into WebAssembly.
|
| And of course, the WebAssembly is then JIT compiled right
| back to x86, so it's actually three levels of JIT
| compilation. It's a wonder this runs with any acceptable
| performance at all.
|
| I'm looking forward to seeing this as a dependency of any
| future Electron app too; Moore's law must be brought to use.
| apignotti wrote:
| Here is 'this guy' :-). Feel free to drop any question on
| Twitter. https://twitter.com/alexpignotti
| btown wrote:
| Here's a talk by the team as well:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo
|
| And their website:
| https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpx.html
|
| This is honestly one of the coolest things I've seen, and
| given the amount of Flex/Spark software for enterprise out
| there, it could drastically change the legacy software
| landscape.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I don't really understand why this isn't the migration path for
| any legacy tech... Just containerize and emulate it. If there
| is a security problem, it's only inside your container. No big
| deal.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| It's not always possible to get that to work, depending on
| the tech. In the case of Flash one of the most annoying and
| difficult parts is that it requires access to the rest of the
| world on the internet to function properly a lot of the time.
| It's because of that lack of security that it was so useful
| and made a lot of good things possible back then (and also a
| lot of bad things too).
| j45 wrote:
| Is that a function of flash, or how the creator using Flash
| implements with it?
|
| It's easy to make a mess in many things, and it's true
| Flash has it's share due to it's sheer ability to create
| beginners in the realm of digital experiences.
| ryanlol wrote:
| I have a hard time understanding why network access would
| be so annoying and difficult. It should be easy for an
| emulator to implement user-adjustable restrictions on that.
| ori_b wrote:
| And what adjustment should you do when it makes a request
| to, for example, ` https://mms.cnn.com/aaldXQhJ0VycCFqfnQ
| hcGp1fkojSDwxbG5ueiJ5I... `?
| Someone wrote:
| User-adjustable restrictions work for only a small
| fraction of the population. That fraction gets smaller
| the more fine-grained you make them.
| mwfunk wrote:
| I'm sure there's a more scientific explanation involving
| cognitive bias and rationality and so on, but all I know
| is that few phrases send more chills down more spines of
| experienced developers than "it should be easy, why don't
| you just..." It's up there with "ship it now, we'll fix
| it later" and "if we can't agree which way to go, let's
| just make it an option in the prefs" on the Mount
| Rushmore of famous last words in software development.
| I've been burned by it so many times, I literally have to
| catch myself when I hear those words coming out of my
| mouth (or anyone's mouth, but I can only be responsible
| for myself), which they still do sometimes, because I'm
| just as subject to human nature and cognitive bias as
| anyone.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Hey now, the preferences panels of yore were glorious
| outposts of customization and power-user-centric
| software. Computing was way more fun back then. Don't
| lump anti-option sentiment in with those other, far more
| worrisome things.
| _jal wrote:
| That approach to preferences tends to cause combinatorial
| explosions in your QA department. You can do it if you're
| careful, but being careful is the opposite of the "then
| just make it a preference" approach.
| sergeykish wrote:
| But this is right question. It should be easy to replace
| part of the binary, it should be easy to run several
| programs at the same time, it should be easy to type on
| keyboard so computer executes commands.
|
| These are insanely hard problems yet they are solved
| because someone asked and someone tried.
| joshstrange wrote:
| My /favorite/ is "ship it now, we'll fix it later" or "do
| it this way now and we will come back and do the better
| way later" and then never going back.
|
| I've watched a few products "grow" using this method then
| project managers be surprised when down the line it's all
| held together with duct tape and chewing gum and a
| "simple" change is a week of work. There have been a
| number of times in my past where I have purposefully not
| suggested or the team decided not to bring up an "option"
| because we knew it would be abused.
| TheDong wrote:
| "why don't you just" is called out in Evan's "The hard
| parts of open source" [0] talk.
|
| He goes into some of the reasons it's a bad phrase and
| some of the problems behind it. I'd recommend the talk.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_4EX4dPppA
| duskwuff wrote:
| Flash used some unusual methods of authorizing network
| access (like crossdomain.xml [1]) which are significantly
| different from standardized HTTP cross-domain policies,
| and which can authorize some forms of network activity
| which are never otherwise permitted to web content (like
| connecting to arbitrary ports and transmitting arbitrary
| data, or sending HTTP requests with forged headers).
|
| [1]: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/articles/crossdomain_po
| licy_fil...
| londons_explore wrote:
| Worst case, you can use a helper server... The flash
| content tries to do an HTTP request, the container
| intercepts that, sends it to a proxy somewhere on the
| web, which does the request and pipes the response back.
|
| Sure, someone has to run that proxy, but I'm sure flash
| games sites wouldn't have trouble doing so.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Flash sockets don't transport HTTP requests. You might be
| able to tunnel them through WebSockets, but that'd turn
| the "helper server" into what would amount to an open
| network proxy -- it'd be trivial to abuse.
|
| It's kind of a moot point, though; I doubt that the
| networking servers that these games depended on are still
| online. That's a whole separate preservation problem.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Because re-implementing Flash is an _enormous_ amount of
| work. Back when Flash was popular there were numerous
| attempts to reimplement it for use on Linux. None of them
| really got beyond the proof of concept stage.
|
| Based on that I'm pretty skeptical that Ruffle will succeed,
| although I guess it does have the huge advantage that Flash
| is no longer a moving target and they really only have to get
| it to work with existing Flash movies - nobody is creating
| new ones.
| thdrdt wrote:
| As far as I remember it was difficult to re-implement
| because the Flash player was backwards compatible with all
| Flash versions. And this was also why there were so many
| security issues.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > nobody is creating new ones.
|
| I sure wish that were true, but it's almost certainly not.
| asveikau wrote:
| Container escape vulnerabilities are always a concern. A
| nonzero amount of those have occurred.
|
| In this area, spectre and meltdown have caused huge
| shockwaves (no pun intended) in terms of things commonly
| assumed to be safe turning out not to be.
|
| That's not to say it's not a good approach, just that it
| doesn't bring security concerns to zero.
| Polylactic_acid wrote:
| Because everyone wanted flash gone. If it was possible to
| just run it as a wasm blob at the time we would end up with a
| bunch of websites still using flash for menus and video. Now
| that it has been dead for years we can bring it back for the
| stuff that can't be ported like games.
| bborud wrote:
| I think this is a useful cautionary tale.
| [deleted]
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| One of my fave Flash animations was a Stick Figure Animation,
| called "Time to Die."
|
| I don't know if it can still be found anywhere, but it was a riot
| (and rather bloody).
|
| You would pick which weapon they would "test," and one of the
| choices would result in a Snake Pliskin-type of character getting
| loose, and slaughtering everyone.
| cairoshikobon wrote:
| Does this mean we won't be able to access zombo.com anymore ?
|
| Truly an end of an era :(
| aclelland wrote:
| I'm still confused by the statement 'Flash-based content will be
| blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.'
| are they literally going to stop the flash player loading SWF
| files on the 1st of January?
| user5994461 wrote:
| Browsers will prevent from loading all flash content?
|
| They already block flash by default. The next step must be to
| remove the "run anyway" button and ignore the flash plugin.
| hartator wrote:
| We still don't have an easy way to make Flash-like games that
| work in the browser across platform.
|
| Shame on Adobe for killing all Macromedia products. Fireworks,
| Macromedia, and Flash.
| dpcan wrote:
| I still use Fireworks every day. It's the best graphic design
| tool ever created in my opinion. Everything else has become so
| complicated. With my Adobe Cloud subscription they still let me
| download it thankfully, but I'm a little worried that in 5
| years, when I upgrade my PC, I'll never be able to install it
| again.
| Jonnax wrote:
| Is there a standalone player for old flash content? If people
| wanted to still view old things created in it.
| lemcoe9 wrote:
| You might take a look at Flashpoint:
| https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
| pzmarzly wrote:
| As well as the underlying Flash Projector:
|
| https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht.
| ..
|
| https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/How_Flashpoint_Wor.
| ..
|
| https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Extracting_Flash_G.
| ..
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Yes, Adobe makes Flash Projector:
|
| * Windows:
| https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...
|
| * Mac:
| https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...
|
| * Linux:
| https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...
|
| You can just open the swf file you want and run it directly.
| It's great.
|
| Linux users might alternately want to use the community-
| packaged Flatpak:
| https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-Proj...
| All other links come from
| https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...
|
| Kind of stupid that these will also presumably be removed from
| Adobe's official download page, since this is exactly how Flash
| content ought to be run going forwards: as individual legacy
| files you've downloaded and inspected. I would advise
| downloading and backing up a copy now.
| josephcsible wrote:
| This won't work in practice for most Flash games. They're
| almost all "site-locked", so they refuse to execute anywhere
| except in a browser on the domain where they came from.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Well, most of the ones I've tried have worked. There was
| one swf that had to be put in a folder with the name of the
| domain it came from.
| andai wrote:
| I know SWFs can be decompiled -- can they be modified? Can
| the sitelock code be disabled or altered?
| josephcsible wrote:
| Yes, but I don't think it's something that would easily
| be automated, so every game would have to have its
| protection reverse engineered by hand.
| RinTohsaka wrote:
| https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
|
| Flashpoint is an archival project
| tomklein wrote:
| I've got flashbacks to the time when I started creating my first
| website at a young age in the 2000s. Flash was this unreachable
| height for me and I just started testing HTML and how the
| internet even works. Now I'm a full time software engineer and
| happy on how far the web has gone until today :)
| htk wrote:
| I don't know if everyone here is familiar with this, but the
| decline of Flash began or was greatly influenced by Apple's
| decision to not let flash run on iPhones/iPads. Steve Jobs even
| wrote an open letter about it[1].
|
| [1]https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
| scarface74 wrote:
| There is a lot more to the story. Adobe claimed that it could
| get Flash working on the first iPhone if Apple had allowed it.
|
| However, when Adobe did finally get Flash working on Android
| (barely) it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz processor. The
| original iPhone had 128Mb RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn't
| until five years later that the first iPhone had those specks.
|
| Not to mention that Adobe said they would have Flash working in
| the Motorola Xoom on day 1. It wasn't. Leaving the Xoom in the
| embarrassing position where you couldn't view the Xoom home
| page on the Xoom.
| buboard wrote:
| Another sign of the tech regression is that we don't have a
| robust alternative that does the things Flash did. No easy-to-
| use and publish editor, no robust video/audio streaming
| server/client combo. Today's HTML alternatives are so
| convoluted and bad to integrate that we need to use
| proprietary/closed platforms (e.g. Unity, youtube)
|
| Apple never really loved the web. Web animation and gaming are
| still behind what you could very easily do with flash,
| webrtc+video are horrible battery drains etc. Ironic,
| considering that one of the reasons that Jobs bashed flash was
| that it drained the battery. And that he replaced "not open"
| flash games with his own Closed Platform and App Store garden.
| The whole reasoning in that letter reeks of hypocrisy , it
| should be obvious in retrospect.
|
| On top of that , modern "HTML sites" are much worse
| performance-wise than the equivalent flash. Abandon flash :
| sure, it's old and unsafe and nobody wants browser plugins. But
| make sure you have a decent alternative first. We don't.
| duxup wrote:
| IMO Flash was already languishing and Steve's criticisms were
| valid.
|
| It was a big deal when Steve made the call, but I'm not sure
| the call was a random act of Steve as much as, Flash was hardly
| in great shape.
|
| It was home to a lot of content you couldn't find elsewhere,
| but Apple not supporting flash didn't happen in a vacuum.
| robertoandred wrote:
| On the contrary, people thought the iPhone not supporting
| Flash would make it a non-starter and give Android a huge leg
| up. Flash was viewed not as languishing but as a fundamental
| requirement.
| duxup wrote:
| Pundits being wrong doesn't really change the reality of
| the state of flash.
| uhhyeahdude wrote:
| That is one of the more well-reasoned and thoroughly explained
| pieces of corporate communication I've read. I wonder if the
| "Jobs style" has been widely adopted in the corporate world; I
| feel like I see it more and more often these days.
| micheljansen wrote:
| The writing was on the wall already, but Apple definitely put
| the final nail in its coffin.
|
| Just think about what might have happened though. Suppose the
| iPhone would have supported Flash, and supported it without
| performance or battery issues (a big if!). This would have
| allowed rich application development with a very mature
| toolchain for the pre-app store iPhone. How different things
| might have played out. That whole first wave of iPhone apps and
| games (air hockey, light saber, flash light, angry birds)?
| Flash!
|
| Who knows what the impact might have been on the App Store and
| the demise of Flash.
| cxr wrote:
| The other thing that was always notable about this letter is
| Jobs's own use of the term "PCs" to refer generically to a form
| factor (that would include Macs), and not the long-dead
| trademark for IBM's product line of home computers from the
| 1980s.
| DannyB2 wrote:
| Prior to the IBM PC, ironically, Steve Jobs had coined the
| term "personal" computer. Prior to this term, they were
| called "micro" computers "home brew", "toy", "small", etc.
|
| The idea of one man, one machine. A computer that is personal
| -- like a toothbrush is personal.
|
| It is irony that IBM used the term on its microcomputer.
| DannyB2 wrote:
| Flash did not run on every possible platform that web browsers
| ran on. Flash was a 2nd class citizen on Linux.
|
| Flash needed to move aside so that the web standards could
| advance to the point where Flash was no longer necessary.
|
| Not only did Flash need to die, but all browser plug ins:
| Flash, Java Applets, ActiveX and Silverlight.
|
| Now we have powerful browsers, web standards, and you can do
| amazing things in them, confident that it works on any client
| without 3rd party extensions.
|
| Flash (and Applets, ActiveX) served a short term purpose.
| Silverlight was an attempt, too late, to capture Flash's
| success.
| erichocean wrote:
| > _confident that it works on any client_
|
| LOL, I think you mean: on Chrome (and if we're lucky,
| Firefox).
| acdha wrote:
| I develop in Firefox and it's pretty rare that I have to
| spend time on other browsers, which was not the case a
| decade ago.
|
| It's also not like Flash was perfect at this: I ran into
| compatibility issues where something worked on Windows but
| not macOS or vice versa, and the frictional cost of having
| an unstable, primitive IDE was significant -- especially
| since Adobe typically ignored bug reports until the next
| major release, at which point they'd tell you that you
| should drop $500 for the privilege of seeing whether they'd
| fixed it.
| erichocean wrote:
| Firefox => Chrome works pretty well. The other direction?
| Not so much...
| DannyB2 wrote:
| I always love new whizbang browser features. But I avoid
| them until they are common enough in the end user base
| that I can actually expect to be able to use those new
| features.
|
| Now modern browsers that are self updating is a huge
| help.
| gmanley wrote:
| It really depends on what you are developing. If you are
| using cutting edge browser features. Things like WASM or
| new JS APIs, sure you'll likely run into
| incompatibilities. However, if you are building a pretty
| standard content website, not a single page app, from my
| experience, pretty much everything just works between
| browsers. This was definitely not the case 10 years ago.
| Especially when including IE in the mix.
| acdha wrote:
| These days, it really comes down to "Do you need to
| support IE?" -- even for fairly new features, if they're
| standard you should still check https://caniuse.com/
| first but it's likely that the answer will be "Yes" for
| everything except IE11 and, far less frequently, Mobile
| Safari.
| erichocean wrote:
| > _If you are using cutting edge browser features._
|
| This comment section is about Flash. We're only talking
| about "cutting edge browser features." Otherwise, I
| agree.
| DannyB2 wrote:
| The only troublesome browser is basically Internet
| Explorer. And even Microsoft threw in the towel on that.
| Edge wasn't bad, but now even it is simply Chrome in Edge
| clothing. There are other WebKit based browsers (eg,
| Safari) which are not based on Chrome or rather Chromium.
|
| In practice, I rarely have any trouble in recent years with
| browser compatibility.
| Helloworldboy wrote:
| Nobody uses linux
| xscott wrote:
| > Now we have powerful browsers, web standards, and you can
| do amazing things in them
|
| Flash had it's flaws, but it was a much more coherent
| interface for users and developers than what has become of
| the web. The mish-mash of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with all
| of the different styles of API) is really unappealing to me.
| It's rare, but when I do make an application out of a web
| page, I gravitate towards making a large canvas in the middle
| of a static page. This is exactly like having a Flash applet
| except the programming experience is worse, and animation is
| more complicated.
|
| Also note that Flash was usable standalone, and in addition
| to having much better development tools, giving someone a
| .swf file was much lighter weight than the Electron stuff.
| Moreover, Flash had an onramp for non-programmers which is
| pretty sorely lacking in the web world.
|
| I'll agree that modern web standards _can_ do everything that
| Flash did, but only in that "Turing Complete" kind of way
| where you can do everything with Brainfuck but you'd be
| happier in a different languge.
| DannyB2 wrote:
| I hear what you are saying. Long ago when I considered
| whether to use Flash or web standards, I had to consider
| all this.
|
| Back then, even though Flash was popular, I could foresee
| that it wasn't going to be around forever. Even before
| Steve Jobs announcement.
|
| I understand all the sugar coated addictiveness for
| developers that you point out. It is indeed very sweet. But
| if you find yourself (or your end user) in an environment
| where Flash is not supported, or treated as a 2nd class
| citizen, then this can be a deal killer. Even a business
| killer. This is a major DANGER sign that many Flash
| developers ignore or were unaware of.
| cat199 wrote:
| > Flash was a 2nd class citizen on Linux.
|
| Get the point you are making, but it was more that Linux was
| a 2nd class citizen for Adobe than flash was a 2nd class
| citizen on linux (though people would have still wanted a
| free/libre alternative even if Adobe fully supported linux)
| DannyB2 wrote:
| Linux wasn't a 2nd class citizen to the people who used
| Linux. Thus some people see Flash as an anomaly that needs
| to be replaced by web standards that are so good that Flash
| becomes unnecessary. That way all platforms get rich client
| capabilities including ones that weren't even invented yet
| (Raspberry Pi, Fuchsia, others).
|
| You can only see Flash as a good thing if you're using one
| of the platforms that are more equal than others. (And I
| include Java Applets, ActiveX, and Silverlight along with
| Flash.)
| thraway8195671 wrote:
| IMO it's almost certainly not the "open letter"; Flash was
| Adobe's effort of having a runtime that they controlled, to
| enable authoring rich content - you need to understand that
| Adobe didn't directly make money from the player, and the
| publicity it got from it was increasingly negative due to the
| usage in ads (which were often not very carefully programmed,
| if I may add so).
|
| So you have this combination where Flash Player was costing
| Adobe lots of money to maintain, while not contributing too
| much to the topline; and on top of it, we made a prototype of
| CSS regions (basically reflowing text inside/outside arbitrary
| shapes) that was met with a lot of initial enthusiasm by all
| browser vendors/ they all seemed eager to adopt it. So the
| executive that was in charge of the digital media division just
| saw the opportunity to cut huge costs, and put Flash on life
| support basically overnight - by basically outsourcing the
| runtime work to the browser community, and contributing as
| Adobe in the points where we felt it was essential. There's
| stuff that I'm not sure I can tell even now even though it's
| old news... but let's just say that there were very big
| industry players that were taken by surprise and would've
| otherwise supported Flash; the death of Flash on mobile and on
| the web at that point was far from being a foregone conclusion
| (in fact, Flash support was being touted at the time by Samsung
| as one of the reasons why Android is better than iOS).
|
| Now - don't get me wrong, I was not in any way among the
| decision makers. But I was in the development team - both for
| Flash player and for the prototype that I believe sealed
| Flash's fate. I may be wrong; but OTOH there's a good chance my
| recollection of the events is far closer to the truth than the
| random internet narrative.
| riffic wrote:
| Use of Flash was antithetical to the Open Web.
| Marazan wrote:
| So instead we get propriety apps. Good job.
| cryptoz wrote:
| The decline of Flash did not begin with Steve Jobs. Maybe
| accelerated, but definitely not started. Flash was already long
| on its way out due to many of the reasons Jobs listed.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Essentially, the web migrated to the mobile format and Flash
| was extremely ill-prepared to make that jump, inside and out.
| chc wrote:
| Yep. At the time, it was kind of a controversial decision. Now
| it seems obvious.
| ChrisSD wrote:
| That Flash should be deprecated wasn't controversial (at
| least amongst tech savvy people). What was controversial was
| not supporting it at all, because doing so locked out a lot
| of the web of the time. Especially certain enterprise sites
| but also a lot of video sites or even ordering a taxi in some
| cases.
|
| That said, the iPhone was in a particularly unique position
| to push through a change like this and force websites to
| adapt. iPhones were becoming popular with upper management so
| a website that didn't work for them was actually considered
| an issue worth addressing.
|
| Nowadays Chrome would also have a good chance of forcing
| similar changes.
| akersten wrote:
| Would this be considered anti-competitive today?
|
| Let's say you control a major internet browser (or have good
| knowledge to believe that your iPhone's Safari will become a
| major internet browser) and specifically exclude support for a
| competitor's platform (forcing people to the App Store/Apple
| ecosystem to create similar experiences). On its face, and
| outside the technical considerations of Flash as a platform, it
| seems like a move to directly subsume a huge market share.
|
| I'm surprised this angle hasn't gotten more discussion.
| Personally, I think the bar for anti-trust in tech is very,
| very high and this doesn't meet it (and neither would current
| shenanigans du jour) but interested to hear what others think,
| or how they think it's different. It's kind of nuanced since
| it's more like one vendor not _developing_ support for a
| competitor, rather than impeding them after-the-fact.
| macspoofing wrote:
| >Would this be considered anti-competitive today?
|
| No. Apple STILL has insane restrictions on creating your own
| HTML rendering engine. That is, neither Mozilla, nor Google,
| nor Microsoft can ship their browsers on iOS. Apple is still
| getting away with it, and that's probably because they aren't
| seen as a monopoly by regulators.
| jefftk wrote:
| On the other hand, are you going to say that creating a new
| platform gave them the obligation to design its browser in a
| way that allowed plug-ins?
| hannob wrote:
| > Would this be considered anti-competitive today?
|
| Disallowing a technology that is controlled by one company in
| favor of a technology that is standardized and can be and is
| implemented by many companies? I can't see how you even begin
| to think this is anti-competitive.
|
| (I do think that there's a lot problematic about apple's
| lockdown approach to devices. I think you can make an
| argument that the whole approach of device lockdown is
| problematic and should face some regulation. But picking out
| the flash deprecation seems like an odd way to highlight
| that.)
| sosborn wrote:
| > Would this be considered anti-competitive today?
|
| I think it would have been different if they were allowing
| other plug-ins to work on mobile Safari. They weren't anti
| Adobe, they were anti plugins. Flash just happened to be the
| most visible one in addition to being the most egregious
| example of what can go wrong with plugins.
| clairity wrote:
| it's clearly anti-competitive, then and now.
|
| whether it's an abuse of monopoly power or an anti-trust
| violation is open for debate (particularly, how you define
| markets for analytical purposes).
| bdcravens wrote:
| Given the high percentage of Android phones, there was no
| monopoly to abuse.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They had legitimate cause to keep a bloated, buggy,
| resource hog off of iPhone 1. Adobe had plenty of time to
| clean up their act and never has.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| It also signaled the end of the golden era of amateur 2D games
| and drawn movies (i.e. what Newgrounds was famous for).
|
| I feel like the modern creativity has been channeled into
| YouTube, IG, and TikTok. Not as much interactive content,
| unfortunately.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Flash sucked for a lot of things but what it was an unsung
| hero for was actually being an outlet and onramp for
| adolescent creativity.
|
| Children online during that era were not just staring into
| YouTube videos served up by the algorithm they were clicking
| around Flash compilation sites with animations, games etc and
| many would eventually pirate a copy of Flash.
|
| The beauty of the tool, especially in the AS2 era was you
| could open it up and start animating straight away but then
| to add sounds or loops you had to add little bits of code
| into the timeline. This was a perfect way for many to start
| dabbling with and understanding coding.
| detritus wrote:
| 'Adolescent' seems a bit dismissive, although I'm sure you
| didn't mean it that way.
|
| Flash opened up digital experience creation for a multitude
| of people of all ages - th emost interactively interesting
| web rode off the back of Flash for a good decade and more.
|
| Personally I never much liked Flash, and only resorted to
| it for things that were out of reach of my meagre
| capabilities, adding to HTML etc.
| asdff wrote:
| I think this is a little dismissive of kids today. How many
| kids actually bothered pirating a copy of Flash vs. just
| mindless playing bloons tower defense? You could argue that
| this low stakes gaming has been replaced by phone apps. But
| kids today are learning from what they watch on youtube:
| far more kids are making their own videos for their youtube
| channel or tiktok account and learning about av production
| in the process, than kids learning flash programming 15
| years ago. Sure it starts small with your phone camera, but
| look at the production quality of some of these
| influencers: they are investing in good cameras,
| microphones, lighting, sound proofing, editing software,
| and that is something you need to learn a little bit about
| video production to effectively set up, and these are still
| marketable skills.
| oliveshell wrote:
| > How many kids actually bothered pirating a copy of
| Flash?
|
| Lots.
|
| Lots and lots and lots.
|
| If you'd spent time back then looking at new submissions
| to the Newgrounds Flash Portal, you'd have seen how true
| that was.
|
| I knew a guy who became a professional 3D animator, and
| Flash was what got him into animation in the first place.
|
| It was bigger than you think. YouTube is not the same.
|
| Video production is a marketable skill, sure, but in my
| opinion a more boring, less expressive, less creative
| one.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| In some ways, I think the interactive component has migrated
| to Unity. It's in no way a direct successor, to be sure; even
| with the Unity web player there's nothing approaching the
| immediacy of Flash's authoring and playing experience.
| Browsing Itch.io does channel some of those early-2000s
| Newgrounds vibes, though.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Yeah, back in the days Flash was fun for creating simple
| interactive animations. I yet haven't found a good
| alternative.
|
| HTML+SVG+CSS+JS+Canvas+WegGL+... can do all the things, but
| there's no good and simple to use editor.
|
| For pure animations I recently found Synfig, which to me has
| a steeper learning curve and misses the interactivity Flash
| provided.
|
| In a way similar to the missing replacement of Delphi in the
| Web - simple tools for creating quite acceptable results
| quickly.
|
| All the tools I found till today either produces only crap,
| which falls apart quickly or one has to make it a real
| project with proper coding and everything.
| roblabla wrote:
| I mean, Adobe Animate (the new name for Adobe Flash) still
| exists, and can target HTML/JS/Canvas/WebGL. It still
| supports ActionScript 3.0, so the same platform that could
| be used to create animations and interactive games should
| still be usable.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| "should be" or "is"? Serious question. It's a while since
| I tried last and results were less than encouraging. But
| maybe it improved. (And then 20$/month is cheap for
| professional usage, but notable for fun or student
| projects)
| jjoonathan wrote:
| It used to cost $500 or something, but that isn't
| stopping people from framing Flash as a champion of
| adolescent creativity.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Back then it was easy to find a license key somewhere.
| These days it takes more effort to bypass registration
| requirements etc.
|
| Thus folks in their adolescence got used to the tool and
| then got stuck and some later paid ...
|
| I don't want to know how many Flash games were made on
| copies of questionable legality ;)
| narag wrote:
| Do you remember IntraBuilder?
|
| https://www.drdobbs.com/borlands-intrabuilder-10/184415559
|
| It was a flop, but they did try.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The nice thing about Delphi was that one could start
| easily with a toy project and then turn it into a quite
| high quality product. With solutions like IntraBuilder
| one is tied into a tight framework, which integrates only
| in limited ways to the Web.
|
| The closest thing I know is Oracle Apex, which has its
| flaws, lock-in and costs $$$$ but some results I saw are
| quite nice and as a user hard to identify as being
| created by such a tool.
| rezmason wrote:
| > I feel like the modern creativity has been channeled into
| YouTube, IG, and TikTok. Not as much interactive content,
| unfortunately.
|
| Furthermore, all of these are privately controlled platforms.
| The notion of a web presence on today's web is dominated by
| behemoth social sites and their EULAs. Even if we create
| interesting interactive things, they're excluded from the
| primary modes of engagement.
| lattalayta wrote:
| I got into programming via Macromedia Flash, which was then
| purchased by Adobe and integrated into Creative Suite. It was
| pretty empowering to be able to quickly draw graphics on the
| stage, animate them with tweening, and then have the ability
| to add an identifier to an object to reference it with code.
| I could easily switch from visually animating something, to
| then trigger animations with code and callbacks, to getting
| more advanced and making full blown interfaces, games, and
| interactive content.
|
| Additionally, it was amazing that whatever you created in
| Flash could be exported and published to the web relatively
| easily. And it would look the same on all browsers. This was
| during the time where browser CSS support was abysmal and
| most web developers would spend their time exporting 9-slice
| images from Photoshop to be used as background images in
| tables to get rounded corners.
| amatecha wrote:
| Yup, the advent of Flash animations was the one time that
| almost all of my friends and I were able to produce _some_
| kind of animation. We all had silly little things we put on
| Newgrounds, when none of us (well, except me) had any prior
| animation experience. It was a pretty empowering experience
| and I remember the relative ease with which we could produce
| some pretty nice-looking stuff. Of course, that's about all I
| miss about Flash, but it was a really great time while it
| lasted. :)
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Flash didn't die a natural death, it was murdered by companies
| that resent any loss of control over their users. Complaints by
| Jobs weren't in good faith overall - Flash worked perfectly
| fine on Android back in the day. Jobs was just a control freak
| along with wanting to keep games/interactive content in the
| walled-off app store (plain web capability wasn't there yet at
| the time), Google can't collect data from Flash content as
| easily and wants its developers more focused on advertising
| than supporting the ever-dwindling feature list of Chrome (who
| cares about features like extension capability or viewing flash
| content when we already captured a ton of users bundling the
| browser with random installers and we can advertise on the
| google home page), and Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of
| blindly following everything Chrome does. We could still be in
| that brief utopia of new HTML5 capability coexisting with
| first-class Flash support if the politics played out
| differently.
| Longhanks wrote:
| > Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day.
|
| It absolutely did not. It was a huge battery drain and super
| unintuitive to navigate with touch.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| A web page designed with only desktops in mind will work
| poorly on a phone too - not Flash's fault.
| Longhanks wrote:
| Doesn't really matter whose fault it was: the experience
| was abysmal, which further led to its downfall.
| kraig wrote:
| i don't remember flash ever being very good at its job. the
| best there was at the time, but slow/buggy/crashing. i
| remember being very excited for html5 being able to replace
| it.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Flash did not "work perfectly fine" on Android.
|
| Arguably Flash never worked perfectly fine anywhere it ran.
| It was notorious for high CPU loads and security
| vulnerabilities. Putting it on a power-constrained mobile
| phone platform just emphasized these shortcomings.
| tpmx wrote:
| If Adobe would have invested reasonably in security (timely
| fixes, code quality reviews, silent auto-update by default,
| general attitude towards code quality in hiring/development)
| Flash might have had a chance. They didn't.
|
| Flash didn't work "perfectly fine" on Android - basically
| every product shipped with Flash was vulnerable at almost any
| point in time.
| cryptoz wrote:
| > Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day
|
| This is absolutely false. It was not fine, much less
| "perfectly fine".
|
| It was slow to touch respond, super laggy. You couldn't
| hover. Scrolling and tapping wasn't supported right. It broke
| browser navigation when you weren't expecting it.
|
| Flash never worked on Android fully.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| It also never made it out of beta though, right?
|
| I think it might have gotten better in time, particularly
| as mobile hardware itself got more powerful, and creators
| designed flash apps with mobile interfaces in mind.
| cosmotic wrote:
| You can add these to the list of selfish parties:
|
| Developers wanting full scripting support; this is what lead
| to all the security problems.
|
| Advertisers that turned an amazing animation system into a
| thing everyone hated.
|
| Macromedia and then (to a much larger degree) Adobe that took
| every possible wrong turn imaginable. What started as a
| system that allowed interactive vector animation to play from
| a floppy (native player AND media) turned into a bloated mess
| with features no one wanted or people wanted for only selfish
| reasons.
| dillutedfixer wrote:
| You make valid points. But for years malicious Flash applets
| were one of the primary ways malware was delivered over the
| web. For IT departments, unless a user absolutely needed it,
| it was removed from their system. There was a time where it
| seemed like there were new critical vulnerabilities in Flash
| every week, and it was a nightmare to keep up with. Security,
| or lack thereof, contributed greatly to its demise.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Flash also didn't live a natural life. In an ecosystem of
| incresingly open web standards and interoperation, it was a
| closed-source single-owner multimedia time-synchronized
| event-driven content engine embedded in what increasingly
| became an ecosystem of open-source multiemdia time-
| synchronized event-driven content engines owned by multiple
| companies.
|
| Flash ended up with a closed-source economic model of
| "Maintain a bunch of forks of our engine for every platform,
| hope people keep paying us for the dev tools" and it became a
| losing gamble.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of blindly following
| everything Chrome does.
|
| I think Mozilla's incentives for minimizing Flash were
| relatively aligned with their principles: Flash is a
| proprietary technology from a single company, not an open
| standard. I also think that's a valid criticism, and why a
| lot of other tech enthusiasts didn't mind seeing Flash die,
| either.
|
| I largely agree with you though--Flash was a good technology,
| and the clear line in the sand it created between "web pages
| as documents" and "interactive content" had a lot of
| advantages. I also don't think it was any more bloated than
| modern HTML web apps, although it felt heavier at the time
| due to our more limited hardware capabilities.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Was NSAPI not an open standard?
| narag wrote:
| You mean NPAPI, right?
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I think so, yes.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| Would that the line were as clear as you make it out to be.
| There were a metric craptonne of essentially all-document
| sites - the only "interactivity" being links - that were
| encased in inaccessible SWFs for (a) "pixel-perfect"
| rendering or (b) someone's idea of copy protection.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| My experience with Flash was that it was a nightmare of
| crashes and cpu usage on anything but Windows (i.e. Linux
| desktop, MacOS).
|
| I feel like a lot of people have a very rosy "nothing was
| wrong" view of Flash that I don't share. Jobs' letter was
| pretty welcome to anyone using a Mac, for one.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I can't say I ever had an issue with Flash on Mac or Linux.
| It was certainly heavier than normal web content, but so is
| modern html5 stuff.
| acdha wrote:
| The modern web bloat has just been due to huge amounts of
| JavaScript becoming common - if you compared basic video
| playback it was normally at least a factor of two worse
| playing the same video in Flash, which often meant the
| difference between dropping frames or playing smoothly.
|
| The big win was avoiding all of the crashes: every
| browser raced to move Flash out of the browser process
| because it was so common for Flash to crash and take the
| browser with it, and many of those were exploitable.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > The modern web bloat has just been due to huge amounts
| of JavaScript becoming common - if you compared basic
| video playback it was normally at least a factor of two
| worse playing the same video in Flash
|
| Well, sure, for simple video playback html5 is clearly
| superior. What I find more interesting though were
| flash's "interactive" capabilities--if you wanted to make
| an app that ran in the browser, it used to be you'd
| almost always use Flash. Now you just use tons of
| Javascript instead, and I think if anything that was a
| performance regression.
| acdha wrote:
| If you don't use a huge toolkit, a modern browser is
| massively faster - I last did benchmarks like 8 years ago
| and even then it was usually an integer multiple more
| memory or CPU for something done in Flash versus the
| browser and that was before accounting for the browser
| having better quality text rendering, color management,
| alpha effects, antialiasing, etc. Had Adobe not just
| stopped investing after they hit 90% marketshare that
| might have been different but they were sitting still for
| too long.
|
| The problem is that having made things like JS, the DOM,
| CSS, etc. so efficient just increased the threshold
| before performance forces developers to notice
| inefficiencies but that's a pretty portable problem, too
| -- we had to force Flash developers to test on older
| systems with slower connections the same way.
| sergeykish wrote:
| Do we have same time period in mind?
|
| 2006-2009: Gnash, hardly anything works, 2010: Youtube
| introduced html5 video
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| My years may be off by one, but iirc I was a Linux user
| in 2007-2008, switched back to Windows between 2009-2010,
| and then have used Macs ever since 2011. I recall Flash
| still being common in 2011.
| sergeykish wrote:
| I tried to get some facts. In 2006 I remember Gnash, it
| supports most SWF v7 features [1]. One could install
| firefox and flash in wine [2] (didn't know, didn't
| bother). And in 2008 there was native Linux Flash Player
| 9 [3] (too late). In 2010 still no hardware acceleration
| and no 64 bit support on Linux - in comments [4].
|
| So technical availability was issue just in 2006-2007.
| Yes, I remembered flash was ads so without plugin it was
| ads free experience before AdBlock. I liked it a lot. The
| only issue was "copy to clipboard" buttons, but could
| work around.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash_(software)
|
| [2] http://web.archive.org/web/20061030024511/https://www
| .howtof...
|
| [3] http://web.archive.org/web/20080430162104/https://www
| .howtof...
|
| [4] https://web.archive.org/web/20110511095927/http://blo
| gs.adob...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Odd, I explicitly remember using an official version of
| Adobe Flash in Linux.
|
| I can't seem to figure out when Linux support started,
| but the archived version of Flash Player 7 on Adobe's
| site[1] appear to include builds for Linux (as well as
| Solaris!). The earliest Linux installer in the download
| has a file timestamp of May 20, 2004.
|
| ---
|
| 1: https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-
| flash-playe...
| sergeykish wrote:
| I don't know, checked more - 1999 Macromedia introduces
| Flash Player for Linux [1], I see traces of v5, v6, v7
| [2], [3]. Never heard about them, in my circle there was
| consensus "flash does not work on Linux". Strange
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070520080719/http://www
| .allbus...
|
| [2]
| http://dsc.soic.indiana.edu/publications/flashjan01.html
|
| [3]
| http://www.penguintutor.com/blog/viewpost.php?id=wp140
| fulafel wrote:
| Indeed, and it was always a security disaster delivered as
| a closed blob. More so than today because there was no
| sandbox.
| yurlungur wrote:
| I think most tech oriented people can appreciate the
| downsides of Flash. But in retrospect it no doubt enabled a
| level of creativity that any replacement technology hasn't
| achieved to nearly the same degree. Some creators seemed to
| have moved away with Flash's decline.
| asciident wrote:
| I think that's rewriting history a bit. The decline certainly
| didn't begin with Apple's decision. Apple saw where things were
| headed, and jumped on (an early) bandwagon. Everyone already
| hated and was avoiding flash at that point. I hope in a few
| years people don't start saying that Apple killed Flash, as I
| remember specifically that was not what happened at that time.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Jobs did this so that Apple could get the 30% cut on apps
| downloaded from the App Store. Otherwise everyone would just
| play Flash games that Apple got no cut of. Follow the money!
| robertoandred wrote:
| Apple doesn't get a cut of free games.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| They actually tried to get Flash running on Android for a
| while
|
| Not sure what came of that. I will probably need to google
| more
| pixelbath wrote:
| There was a Flash Player for Android, but the app existed
| only as a standalone player for playing .swf files. A
| couple mobile browsers did include it as a plugin so Flash
| content over the web mostly worked, but performance and
| user experience were not great.
| mobilio wrote:
| Also it was power hungry app that drain too fast battery.
| trianglem wrote:
| It absolutely did. I was a Adobe Flex developer when Adobe
| handed over Flex to Apache and watched the whole thing
| crumble. Jobs definitely led the way on that.
| qwertox wrote:
| I agree. Google wasn't really sure how to go about it in
| Android, we really have to thank Apple for this step. It
| was historical and the best that could happen to all of us,
| specially when the Flash cookies are taken into
| consideration.
| empath75 wrote:
| People said at the time and for years aferwards that it would
| cause the iphone to fail. Multiple companies made 'supports
| Flash' a major part of the marketing.
|
| > https://techpinions.com/apple-claim-chowder-product/34156
| manigandham wrote:
| Flash was _not_ hated. It was at its peak during 2008 when
| Flash games were making millions on Facebook and every media-
| related site used Flash interfaces. I remember being on
| Flashkit.com back then, and watching design houses like
| 2advanced.com release their next project.
|
| Apple's decision was a major factor, along with HTML5 finally
| being supported by browsers with native functionality for
| animations and video support that had vastly superior
| performance. In the next 4 years, mobile took off like crazy
| beyond anyone's expectations and by the time the legendary
| iPhone 4 was released, Flash was at the beginning of the end.
| golergka wrote:
| Is it? I remember that even a similar pocket device such as
| PSP was able to play flash at the time, despite it being a
| huge memory hog. Until iPhone, any similar device that
| couldn't run flash was perceived as, simply, buggy.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The PSP had a very outdated version of Flash (for the time)
| that wasn't compatible with a lot of content.
|
| It did work sometimes though, and it was great when it did.
| The Wii--while not portable--also supported an (outdated)
| version of Flash that I recall working quite well. There
| were even some Flash games explicitly designed to be used
| with the Wii Remote (although they couldn't really do
| anything special, they only had access to the IR pointer).
| cousin_it wrote:
| > _Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that
| point._
|
| "Everyone"? I loved it. Kids loved it. The people who hated
| and killed it were programmers, and to this day they haven't
| created any alternative that kids would love as much.
|
| It's similar to the murder of Dreamweaver. Actual designers
| who draw pixels on the screen loved it. Programmers hated it,
| pushed CSS instead, and visual editing of the web died.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| If visual editing of the web died, why do I see squarespace
| ads everywhere?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Squarespace is template-based. The developer created the
| overall site structure/layout, and the user is just
| changing out the content.
|
| Their templates are quite flexible, and there's a lot of
| them, but it's not quite creating something original.
| kelnos wrote:
| It's regrettable that there's no good replacement for it,
| but Flash had deep by-design security issues that there was
| no way to fix (in addition to the garden-variety security
| bugs that Adobe seemed too incompetent or unwilling to
| fix). Flash had to go.
| Bud wrote:
| "Visual editing of the web"? Flash was hostile to the open
| web, not a useful part of it.
| andi999 wrote:
| I found it totally inaccessible. I knew how to programm in
| C, C++98 with QT, Python, but I couldnt figure out just how
| to get started with flash. Somehow i must have missed the
| easy part of it.
| sireat wrote:
| You could just write Actionscript .
|
| It was quite a pleasant and consistent experience
| compared to writing browser JS at the time(10+ years
| ago).
| andi999 wrote:
| How to call it? Call it by using script tag in HTML? Call
| it from javascript? Fileextension '.as'?
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| At the time Flash was used extensively for UI development,
| and artists were able to pretty easily create animations
| and author their own screens.
|
| Nowadays the technology has gone to other places and more
| than ever artists are locked out of the workflow and
| reliant on programmers to implement even the most trivial
| of things.
| gridlockd wrote:
| Programmers _have_ to make simple things more
| complicated, otherwise they will program themselves out
| of a living.
|
| https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/cpp.htm
| Shorel wrote:
| I think Godot is a very strong candidate for something that
| people can love as much.
| JimDabell wrote:
| There was already a strong decline underway, but there were
| plenty of people who were convinced it would stick around.
| Apple's decision was the nail in the coffin.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I think that's rewriting history a bit. Sure, many of us
| nerds knew that Flash was problematic abandonware and sort of
| wished it would go away long before Apple launched a nuke at
| it, but we were the exception. Most people then, as now,
| didn't really understand or care how damaging flash was to
| the tech ecosystem. Sure, they saw a few annoying ads and
| security warnings, but they broadly considered them "worth
| it" for the content. Apple not only spoke up about Flash
| being the industry limiting factor regarding device
| responsiveness, battery performance, and security, but they
| did something about it in the face of widespread condemnation
| and resentment that hasn't dissipated to this very day.
| hrktb wrote:
| I'd argue the point is not how the public felt about about
| Flash, but how device makers saw it.
|
| Flash didn't make it on any other mobile platform. Serious
| attempts were being made way earlier than the iPhone,
| including for Symbian [0], making it available for high end
| feature phones. But all of them were horribly limited, and
| none could solve the rift between desktop Flash and low
| power devices flash.
|
| Jobs saying that Flash won't make it on the iPhone was the
| equivalent of announcing that the iPhone wouldn't use Intel
| chips, it was just putting a stake on a dead body so
| everyone could stop trying to revive it.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Mobile_devices
| kitotik wrote:
| And yet the lack of flash was generally in the top 3 reasons
| iPhone would never be a success(along with lack of
| copy/paste).
|
| If apple had rolled out support for flash, the native app
| boom probably would have looked a lot different as company's
| wouldn't have felt as much pressure to modernize their whole
| customer facing digital strategy.
| liquidise wrote:
| As an AS3-focused developer in the years around 2010, this is
| too heavy-handed. The Apple announcement followed a youtube
| announcement in Jan 2010 of an experimental HTML5 video
| player. It took years for that player to become the standard.
| Apple may well have seen the writing on the wall, but to say
| "everyone hated or was avoiding flash" is objectively false.
| xtracto wrote:
| Yup, in 2012 I was writing web video players and ad-serving
| platforms for a video streaming company. It was all Flash,
| because there were no real alternatives. HTML5 was just
| kind of starting but HTML5+Video+JS did not allow to
| develop logic as complex as what AS3 provided.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| This comports well with my memory of the time. I remember
| there being a lot of "Flash sucks" sentiment online, but no
| decent alternatives. The days of entire UIs done in Flash
| was largely over by 2010, IIRC, but there were still things
| like video playback that couldn't be handled easily without
| Flash. I remember explicitly installing Flash on Linux,
| simply so I could watch Youtube with relatively little
| friction. In my mind, by that time, that was the main
| purpose of having Flash around at all.
|
| I am really glad HTML 5 has matured to the point that it
| has. Not having to have an entirely separate runtime
| environment running in the browser window makes things so
| much more stable than before. Now, if only we could figure
| out a way to make having lots of tabs not be painful, and
| maybe get a bit of a handle on memory usage, I think I
| might very well be out of things to complain about in terms
| of basic browser usability. ;)
| JiNCMG wrote:
| If you were a laptop used then you hated flash. Except for
| a few times where the heat in the building was down and
| playing a flash video will transform your laptop to a desk
| space heater.
| bdcravens wrote:
| I don't think anyone hated it, but it definitely wasn't in
| the "loved" category either - more of a "tolerated it as a
| necessary evil"
| elicash wrote:
| I think the way to settle this -- and I'm not taking
| sides here -- is to look at the original Hacker News
| reception to this letter:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310
| bdcravens wrote:
| Going back to the original comment, "Everyone already
| hated and was avoiding flash at that point", I think you
| have to look at as being a broader concern than HN, a
| subculture that doesn't reflect "everyone".
| elicash wrote:
| I don't think by "everyone" they meant people who weren't
| aware of what flash was and users. Just the people who
| could conceivably be trying to avoid it -- creative types
| and developers.
| Izkata wrote:
| Even people who weren't aware.
|
| I distinctly remember a general dislike by people who
| didn't know the name of the technology, because parts of
| my highschool's homepage were implemented in Flash, and
| it didn't load right. In 2005-2006. They recognized it
| primarily because it was slow and messed with the right-
| click context menu.
| thedonkeycometh wrote:
| LOL at the python devs in the thread, such hope.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Hey, this thread is great, thanks for the link!
| koonsolo wrote:
| Let's face reality here: Apple didn't care about the HTML5
| standard, they just wanted games to go through their own app
| store instead of being freely available on the web.
|
| To this day iPhone still doesn't fully support HTML5: you
| cannot put a game canvas into fullscreen mode on iPhone (all
| other devices, including iPad, do support this).
|
| And when PWA's became available, they were very slow in
| supporting Add To HomeScreen. And when they did, nobody knew
| about it.
|
| So yeah, don't think apple did it to support standards. They
| did it to keep control within their own appstore.
| scarface74 wrote:
| So in that case you should see a plethora of successful
| profitable games on Android right?
|
| The iPhone had the ability to add a page to the home screen
| on day 1. Web apps were Jobs "Sweet solution" for apps on
| the original iPhone.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Even to this day it is not fully supported, so please cut
| the bullshit
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/51160348/pwa-how-to-
| prog...
| scarface74 wrote:
| It's not fully supported because you have to click the
| "share button" and scroll down and click on "add to home
| screen"?
|
| From iOS 1.0 designers figure out how to design a "Add go
| home screen" banner in html that would point to the right
| place.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure GP is referring to all the PWA-friendly
| features that are missing on iOS, of which there are
| many.
| scarface74 wrote:
| He said specifically add to home screen. If the
| "plethora" of PWA features are available for Android,
| where is the thriving market of web based games on
| Android?
| kyralis wrote:
| This is completely false. You're forgetting the original
| iPhone did not have a native SDK - the original plan was
| for 'apps' to just be web apps. It was only a year later
| that the SDK was released after the huge demand for one, so
| claiming that they didn't initially support flash to drive
| people to an App Store that didn't exist is incorrect.
| noobaccount wrote:
| I worked at Apple. I don't remember but I'm pretty sure
| perf just sucked, and I'm guessing there weren't enough
| people to deal with it. Like, you are giving way too much
| credit to strategic thinking. It wasn't like that. Nobody
| had a crystal ball.
| mywittyname wrote:
| They certainly saw how profitable iTunes was and saw an
| opportunity to replicate that success with applications.
| They may not have predicted web browsers becoming as
| capable as they are, but I suspect that senior management
| saw a threat of mobile websites as app replacements. Even
| free apps generate revenue for Apple.
| goalieca wrote:
| The iPhone did two amazing things:
|
| 1) it offered full web browser experience. No one had done
| this in a phone yet. They also banned flash from day 1 and
| favoured development using standard web technologies. The
| side benefit from all of this is that the data demands
| crippled our cellular networks and forced major
| infrastructure upgrades :)
|
| 2) Apple took control out of the carriers hands. By
| standardizing on the web, no more special+favoured
| applications! Just load a web page :)
| jfkebwjsbx wrote:
| That is completely false.
|
| Apple didn't standardize anything on the web, nor followed
| standards.
|
| What Apple wanted (and achieved) was to push their App
| Store to control everything and get that 30% of sales on
| top.
|
| Even to this day Safari does not support standards that
| other browsers do. And, of course, they don't allow other
| browsers to run on iOS.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Your claim is false. When Apple made the decision to not
| allow Adobe Flash on iOS, there was no App Store. Apple
| did not allow third-party apps, and writing HTML5 was the
| only way for any third party to run anything on iOS.
|
| That changed later, and clearly Apple enjoys the 30% now,
| but the grandparent comment is 100% accurate, and your
| first three sentences are 100% false.
|
| The fourth statement is accurate, though!
| jfkebwjsbx wrote:
| You talk as if "web apps" and "Apps" in general (in a
| phone) were a thing back then.
|
| They were not. Apple was selling a browser in a phone
| which was a new concept for normal customers.
|
| Blackberries were a thing back then and the iPhone killed
| them because of this.
| Dotnaught wrote:
| The iOS App Store preceded the Flash ban.
|
| "Apple introduced the App Store on July 10, 2008 with 500
| apps" https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2018/07/app-store-
| turns-10/
|
| Apple's Flash restrictions were published in draft form
| in April 2010.
| http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2010/04/20/on-adobe-
| flash-c...
|
| And justified by Steve Jobs that same month:
| https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
| kyralis wrote:
| This is cherry-picking articles to create a false
| timeline. The iPhone never supported Flash. There was
| never a "Flash ban" so much as there was _never Flash_.
| kodt wrote:
| You can get Firefox and Chrome for iOS...
| jfkebwjsbx wrote:
| No, you cannot. They are wrappers of Safari's engine.
| robertoandred wrote:
| You're laughably false.
| mdoms wrote:
| Wasn't the iPhone in USA exclusive to one carrier for,
| like, a decade? Meanwhile in the rest of the world carriers
| never really had any power over how we used our devices or
| what was on them.
| Tostino wrote:
| It was exclusive for AT&T from 2007 until 2011 I believe.
| jm4 wrote:
| Definitely rewriting history to say they started it, but it
| was the nail in the coffin for Flash. Many developers hated
| Flash by then and were advocating against it. Although it was
| starting to decline, the marketing people and some wannabe UX
| types were still pushing it. The Steve Jobs essay is when the
| anti-Flash movement went mainstream and it was awesome. Prior
| to that, there was a question of whether Apple would support
| it. Once it was definitive that they wouldn't, the writing
| was on the wall that Flash would not survive. It validated
| what many of us had been saying for at least a couple years
| and made it easy for us to dismiss Flash.
| [deleted]
| radley wrote:
| Sorry, that is precisely what happened.
|
| In the Linux / programming world Flash was a pariah that
| didn't conform to their standards. But it was booming for
| creatives and end-users. In 2010, almost all websites used
| Flash video and Flash gaming was exploding on Facebook.
| (Apple had to fake their Keynote to demonstrate the iPhone
| could view the "entire internet.")
|
| Security complaints are a weak argument: both Apple and
| Google have had security issues on their proprietary
| platforms. (I'll concede Adobe was a very poor steward.)
|
| Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an
| exciting new platform to lock out competition. The iPhone
| wasn't powerful enough to play Flash and made Apple look
| weak. The iPhone business model depends on consumer lock-
| down, so making Flash compatible was counter-productive.
| catalogia wrote:
| I hadn't used flash on linux, my primary environment at
| work and home, for _years_ at that point. Flash was already
| hated and widely criticized in developer circles. It was
| already on the way out. Apple jumped on the trend early,
| but they didn 't start it.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| > Security complaints are a weak argument
|
| Performance, performance, performance. Battery life
| matters. Smooth animations matter.
|
| People seem awfully sure Apple's anti-Flash move was 100%
| motivated by platform-building and 0% by perf. I'm not so
| sure it was 100%/0%, because I actually saw how shockingly
| bad Flash perf was, and I saw how big Apple's perf push was
| at the time.
|
| One time (2010-ish?) I accidentally left SpinControl.app
| open after a dev session for ~1 week. SpinControl was an
| app that would automatically dump a stack trace whenever
| any application failed to drain its event queue for more
| than a few seconds and beachballed. Super handy. In any
| case, when I came back to development and noticed
| SpinControl, I was surprised to find that 100% of the
| hundreds of stack traces collected after my development
| session involved flash. Not 99%, not N-1, literally 100%.
| WebKit was finding its way into different applications so
| the symptoms weren't limited to Safari, but I still
| suspected that I had a filter enabled or something. Surely
| Flash couldn't have accounted for 100% of my beachballs? I
| triggered a Mail.app reindex, and sure enough, a stack
| trace popped up in SpinControl, this time in sqlite, as
| expected. It wasn't an instrumentation problem. Flash had
| literally been 100% responsible for all of my beachballs
| over the past week. Crazy.
|
| This was around the time that Apple started to push
| developers away from APIs that made it impossible for Apple
| to aggregate background thread wakeup events to save
| battery life. In other words: they were willing to
| sacrifice goodwill to obtain perf.
|
| I'll grant you that platform considerations likely played a
| big role in Apple's decision, but also remember that Flash
| was literally the single largest performance-limiting
| factor when it came to desktop freezes and battery life at
| the time, and that probably played a role too.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _The iPhone wasn 't powerful enough to play Flash..._
|
| No, Flash Lite ran on significantly-less-powerful feature
| phones. (Remember, in the early days of the iPhone, Flash
| was desktop-only.[1])
|
| > _Jobs ' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging
| an exciting new platform to lock out competition._
|
| You speak as if Jobs instigated this when in reality, this
| was a response to Adobe holding Jobs' platforms hostage for
| a long time, and in many ways. Flash's ongoing instability
| and inefficiency on MacOS was just the straw that broke the
| camel's back.
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/2010/04/adobe-flash-jobs/: _"
| Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large
| screens, not the user experiences you want to create in
| these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS," Luh
| said. "It wasn't designed with that in mind at all."_
| duskwuff wrote:
| Roughly nothing used Flash Lite, outside of a few weird
| embedded use cases like the Chumby. Web content was
| almost exclusively full-on Flash.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Roughly nothing used Flash Lite, outside of a few
| weird embedded use cases like the Chumby._
|
| I recall it a bit differently. By December 2006, Adobe
| claimed that Flash Lite had shipped on 220 million
| devices[1].
|
| That was probably the apex, though -- by 2010, it was all
| over.
|
| > _Web content was almost exclusively full-on Flash._
|
| Yes, always IIRC. Flash Lite content wasn't delivered via
| the web.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite
| wtracy wrote:
| I'd love to have someone with firsthand knowledge fill me
| in here, but:
|
| I've seen Flash-based feature phones do all kinds of
| things that desktop Flash struggled to do on (then-
| contemporary) desktop PCs. I can only conclude that Flash
| Lite had a significantly different codebase than desktop
| Flash, with very different performance characteristics.
|
| Just because "Flash could do it on a feature phone"
| doesn't mean that a smartphone could keep up with the
| full Flash plugin. Look at the performance disaster that
| Flash on Android was.
| unwiredben wrote:
| I spent a year of my life trying to get Flash Lite
| working well as a browser plugin on an unreleased Palm
| phone around 2007-2008. Flash Lite wasn't anywhere ready
| for handling the Internet Flash content of the day; it
| performed terribly on the chips that mobile phones had
| then and wasn't a well behaved plugin. This was when the
| Intel XScale and early TI OMAP SOCs were the primary
| choice for mobile phones.
| derrick_jensen wrote:
| Its a lot easier for Apple to fix security issues within
| the Apple ecosystem than it is for Apple to pressure Adobe
| to fix the problem, port it over to the suite
| iOS/iPadOS/macOS, and distribute the fix to whoever needs
| it, as well as communicating the gravity of the issue, post
| mortem, adjacent attack vectors and surface area, etc.
|
| I'm not saying you are entirely wrong about consumer lock
| down, but for various reasons, consumer lock down can be
| objectively better for the developer and user experience,
| and it is easier to move fast when you have fewer
| dependencies at play.
| mushbino wrote:
| I was a Flash developer at the time and this is exactly
| what happened. Flash development went from being highly in
| demand and the highest paying to basically dead with this
| announcement. I felt that if the rug could be pulled out
| that quickly, I'd just focus on design and that's where
| I've been ever since.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| Performance was the big issue. Not just on Apple devices
| but on all devices. Same laptop running Windows, same video
| from Youtube if you play and pause on both (SWF and HTML).
| The Flash video will keep the fans running at high speed.
| Remember the first few phones with Flash could play through
| a 2 hour movie without a charger. To optimize Flash, Adobe
| needed to cut off compatibility and they knew if they do
| that then why would anyone continue with Flash when HTML/JS
| was getting feature parity.
| nathancahill wrote:
| Yep. I remember jailbreaking the original iPhone (or maybe
| the 3G) and installing some version of Flash on it for
| games. My friends all had Sony-Ericssons with some type of
| mobile Flash player. On the iPhone, Flash content sucked
| the battery to 0% in about 30 minutes, the phone would get
| super hot.
|
| Edit: I guess the project to run Flash Lite on Sony-
| Ericsson was called Project Capuchin?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn5He1Wxl-Q
| Shorel wrote:
| Flash was a resource hog in any platform. And worse: It
| made resource intensive something that should have been
| very efficient from the start.
|
| How is that I could play videos smoothly in Windows 95 but
| ten years later the same video at a lower resolution made a
| newer computer crawl? The answer is Flash.
|
| I don't care if other people wanted Flash games. I hated
| Flash video and celebrated every little bit of its demise.
| chasing wrote:
| It was a calculated sucker punch at a piece of software
| which was not designed with mobile or touch experiences in
| mind _and_ was so tremendously buggy and unstable that it
| caused all sorts of issues on normal desktop browsers. A
| lot of people used Flash at the time, but a _lot_ of people
| were also extremely frustrated with Adobe 's apparent
| disinterest in making it a truly great piece of software.
| Steve Jobs wanted that mess kept as far away from Apple's
| shiny new platform as possible -- a completely justifiable
| stance.
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| "Almost all websites used flash video" que? Most websites
| don't use video at all, neither then or now.
| aspaceman wrote:
| Think this is pretty pedantic. A valid reading of the
| sentence implies that of the sites that used video,
| almost all used Flash video.
| spideymans wrote:
| > The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash and made
| Apple look weak
|
| No. Flash was too resource intensive to work on any mobile
| devices. Flash on Android was an utter disaster. It ate
| through your battery life, was unusably slow and couldn't
| even properly format Flash content for mobile, touch-based
| devices. As the world moved to a primarily mobile-based
| computing environment, Flash's death was all but inevitable
| unless Adobe could do something to rectify these issues.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Android continued to tout their ability to utilize Flash as a
| competitive edge long after Jobs' letter.
| ksec wrote:
| If my memory serves me correct, not all Android phone
| support Flash.
| Tostino wrote:
| And it was, at the time I had a full browser in my pocket
| and on my tablet that was able to do just about everything
| I could on my PC, whereas iPhone/iPads of the time were
| simply unable to do some of the tasks I was able to.
|
| I did not _like_ flash on Android, but I was happy to have
| it available when things were still transitioning away from
| it.
| Lammy wrote:
| It was terrible on mobile and I also avoided it, but it seems
| naive to not consider that Apple were being protective of
| their new platform and didn't want any alternative
| application runtimes to take hold.
|
| Remember that the entire reason Adobe bought Macromedia/Flash
| in the first place (besides sheer market dominance) was to
| provide themselves a technical path forward from most of
| their products' classic Mac OS roots into the 64-bit/mobile
| era we're currently in. It's very obvious when you go back
| and see that the first version of Photoshop with a Flash-
| based UI and the first (Windows) 64-bit version of Photoshop
| were both CS4. Compare that to Photoshop CS3 where you don't
| have to dig very deeply into the Windows version's files
| before you start hitting the layers of what are obviously
| classic-Mac-style Resources.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| It's terrible on desktop too.
| Lammy wrote:
| What you say _!!!_
| thedonkeycometh wrote:
| No, it was literally Steve Jobs in 2010 saying he didn't want
| flash on mobile. Then it collapsed quite quickly after that
| as the barriers went up. 10 years later and mobile games
| still need to be made in Unity or Unreal. The new Meatboy
| won't come from HTML5, even if development was as easy. All
| the 3d engines you have in HTML5 owe a debt to actionscript
| and flash and still don't perform as well.
|
| People don't realise how liberating and easy the multimedia
| of the flash years were. You could literally make a animated
| film and show it globally in an hour. Nothing comes close,
| still. Maybe we'll get a Web Assembly flash tool, when we all
| have 8Ghz PCs.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| They 100% killed flash, and thankfully so.
|
| The rest, as happened many times, followed Apple.
|
| The reasons for banning flash were totally on point.
| eli wrote:
| That was a big deal at the time, but Flash was on the decline
| well before then and it was obvious where things were headed.
| You could technically run Flash on early Android phones, but it
| was horribly slow and barely functional. Too processor
| intensive, too hard to make responsive content, and that's on
| top of all the security and other concerns. Flash was never
| going to survive the shift to mobile.
|
| Apple made a similar decision in the late 90s when they didn't
| ship a floppy drive in the iMac. Perhaps they hastened its
| demise, but not by much.
| bdcravens wrote:
| > Apple made a similar decision in the late 90s when they
| didn't ship a floppy drive in the iMac. Perhaps they hastened
| its demise, but not by much.
|
| To be fair, Apple's influence was far greater in the smart
| phone space than the PC space.
| eli wrote:
| You're right, but I really do think it was inevitable.
| Flash Lite just didn't run well on any of its supported
| platforms at the time, and the then-new technology "HTML5"
| had the advantage of being simpler and more open. The main
| thing Flash had going for it was the inertia from
| developers who already knew it.
|
| If you're interested here's a blogpost from Adobe's
| developer relations person at the time of Flash on Mobile's
| demise http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarific
| ations-o...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| So, while it's still easily available, are there any particular
| flash games or content I should check out?
| pier25 wrote:
| Adobe announced it in _2017_.
|
| That's how it's done, Apple.
| FillardMillmore wrote:
| What are we to do about all the useful tools, pages and games
| that were either written in or utilized Flash? I realize some of
| this stuff will be rewritten in HTML5, but what about the things
| that are not?
|
| How will we preserve all those classic flash games that we wasted
| our time playing in the early 2000s?
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Why should they be preserved? Why should it stick around
| forever?
|
| The "useful tools" have been replaced with better tools
| available today. It's the same reason why most people don't use
| a rock and chisel to build a house - better tools exist and
| older tools have been abandoned or mentioned in history books.
|
| Plenty of games, musical bands, and artwork over the last
| century have been lost to time and forgotten. There's plenty of
| Jazz music in the 1930's and 40's that was never recorded to
| paper or vinyl. And that's OK. People moved on to other forms
| of art.
| mahoho wrote:
| I think most people would agree that it's worthwhile (for
| various reasons) to preserve art if there are reasonable
| means to do so. Obviously there is a lot of artwork we've
| managed to preserve for centuries or millennia. There's no
| reason we need to wistfully resign ourselves to "the way of
| the world" here.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| If you bought a board game in the 1930:s, chances are you can
| still play it if you've been careful when handling it.
|
| If you bought a cast iron skillet in the 1940:s, chances are
| you can still cook with it if you've treated it right.
|
| If your favorite game is a Flash game bought in 2010, you
| will not be able to play it anymore.
|
| Is it because software is not as tangible that we accept just
| how fleeting its permanence is?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| This isn't about losing the copies of the art itself. Imagine
| if all chisels in the world _stopped working_. That would not
| be okay.
|
| But I think you can use the standalone flash player?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| _shrug_ Never build a towering edifice on a closed-source,
| closed-protocol, single-company-owned engine and infrastructure
| ever again, because there is no solution to this problem?
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| You're right, we should all write software exclusively for
| Linux, and then only on RISC-V CPUs! :)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I mean, you joke, but that would make you immune to this
| kind of problem.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Right, and that's why I phrased it as I did. I agree with
| the great grandparent, kind of--if you _have_ the ability
| to use 100% open technologies, you absolutely should, and
| power to you!
|
| But at the same time, proprietary technologies rules much
| of our world, back then, now, and likely in the future.
| acdha wrote:
| A better way of looking at this is from the perspective of
| where they make money: targeting Windows makes sense
| because it's core to Microsoft's business, their reputation
| is heavily linked to it via all of those enterprise
| contracts, and their revenue scales directly with the
| number of people using Windows.
|
| In contrast, Flash was an Adobe acquisition which they
| never had a clear vision for and the model of selling tools
| but giving away the runtime for free meant that your app
| being popular didn't make more money for them. Anything
| security-exposed like this needs substantial amounts of
| ongoing maintenance funding but from Adobe's perspective
| that was mostly overhead or something Google would
| subsidize for them.
| RandomGuyDTB wrote:
| This but unironically. I can get C code from the 70s to
| compile in GCC but I can't get Windows programs released
| twenty or so years ago to run in Win10. Open software will
| always be easier to support and always be more stable than
| proprietary software, because one invites a free community
| of maintainers and the other one tells them that they
| aren't welcome. In the short-term, writing for proprietary
| systems is fine, but if you want your application to be
| use-able after you die you should probably open-source your
| stuff and make it compatible with free platforms.
| DannyB2 wrote:
| Absolutely.
|
| And that was a bit obvious in the late 80's. Somewhat obvious
| in the 90's. Very obvious in the early 2000's.
| jakogut wrote:
| Not necessarily, WebAssembly is a potential viable host for
| implementing/emulating Flash. See here:
| https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-
| with...
| CM30 wrote:
| Well, for the games and animations this exists:
|
| https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
|
| Got mentioned on this site a few times too.
| sosborn wrote:
| > How will we preserve all those classic flash games that we
| wasted our time playing in the early 2000s?
|
| I assume the same way we preserve long dead consoles.
| Emulation. It isn't difficult to set up a VM with older copies
| of windows.
| qwertox wrote:
| I don't get it why my Windows 10 installation is still
| downloading updates for Flash Player. I deselected it in some
| setting which was to be found somewhere (Windows 10 settings are
| a horrible maze), but for some reason it still thinks it needs to
| protect me from this deactivated piece of malware.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out
| pengaru wrote:
| Kongregate's John Cooney did a flash games postmortem @ GDC which
| seems appropriate here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65crLKNQR0E
| davidgerard wrote:
| So, there have been a pile of open source Flash emulation efforts
| - gnash, Shumway ...
|
| They all seem to get half way then flounder.
|
| What's up with that?
| sitzkrieg wrote:
| my biggest hope is that government entities stop making training
| content in flash. the freaking DISA cybersecurity training is in
| flash for crying out loud
| dsthode wrote:
| I won't say it's not about time, but the decision to block the
| execution of flash content after said date and the removal of the
| downloads, complicates matters for system administrators.
|
| We have a legacy blade enclosure at the office that needs an old
| version of flash for configuration, and also our vSphere web
| interface is flash based.
| tekstar wrote:
| Don't worry, there will still be thousands of sites hosting flash
| player update exes just waiting for you to download
| micheljansen wrote:
| Flash was a dumpster fire of performance and security issues and
| being a closed platform in direct competition with the web we
| have today, I won't shed a tear over this.
|
| What will be sorely missed though, are the brilliant authoring
| tools that Flash came with. For a very short time in history
| there was one tool that allowed designers and developers to truly
| collaborate on rich interactive experiences. It was amazing what
| that unlocked.
| bbayer wrote:
| Flash Player itself has a lot of security vulnerabilities but
| Adobe Flash as IDE still has no competitor even today IMHO. There
| is no such tool that combines code and graphics with ease like
| Adobe Flash. You can use it as an animator, you can use it as
| graphic designer, you can use it as developer. All these features
| just came together perfectly and it made sense. I am still
| missing this usability.
| [deleted]
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I didn't have Flash on my computer for several years, but I
| installed it last week. I'm planning to take the GRE, which is
| being given remotely due to Covid. A proctor watches you through
| your webcam, which I find this completely creepy, but what can I
| do?
|
| Anyway, this system apparently requires Flash.
| asdff wrote:
| If you took it at a testing center they would have a camera on
| you too.
| josephcsible wrote:
| The camera in the testing center can't see in your house.
| Majestic121 wrote:
| What is a GRE ?
| [deleted]
| gizmo686 wrote:
| A standard test for applying to grad schools.
| andybak wrote:
| What's a grad school?
|
| (not joking. Not a US citizen)
| [deleted]
| saghm wrote:
| Somewhere you can get a masters (or doctorate) degree;
| "grad" here is short for "graduate", which is used to
| describe degrees one gets after receiving a bachelors (or
| "undergraduate" degree). Most major colleges in the US
| offer both graduate and undergraduate degrees, but the
| admissions process for a graduate degree is separate;
| once you get an undergraduate degree from an institution,
| you still need to apply to enroll in a graduate program
| there or elsewhere. It's not at all uncommon for people
| to attend grad school somewhere different than they went
| to undergrad, especially if they don't attend grad school
| immediately after undergrad (as some people work for
| several years before deciding to go back and get a
| masters degree).
| clairity wrote:
| also, an associates is an undergrad degree too.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| Outside of the USA, it wouldn't be a degree, just a
| diploma. And there would be a distinction between a
| college that awards diplomas and a degree-granting
| universtity (which, to make matters more complicated than
| necessary, usually has member colleges which are not the
| same as the non-university colleges that award
| skills/technical diplomas).
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I just learned that while in the US "grad school" means
| "after an undergrad/bachelor degree", in the UK, the term
| is "post-grad". Not to be confused with post-doc.
|
| And in many countries, you can do bachelors, masters and
| PhD at 3 different institutions. But in the US, usually
| you have to do masters-PhD in one institution, even if
| you already have a masters (or is this only in my
| field?). In other countries, such as France, bachelor-
| masters is common to do together, in only 4-5 years (or
| is this only in my field?).
| swimfar wrote:
| "But in the US, usually you have to do masters-PhD in one
| institution, even if you already have a masters"
|
| That is definitely field specific. I think physics often
| bundles masters/PhD together. And maybe there others too.
| But for all of the fields of engineering that I'm
| familiar with they are completely separate programs.
| saghm wrote:
| > In other countries, such as France, bachelor-masters is
| common to do together, in only 4-5 years (or is this only
| in my field
|
| Some schools in the US offer this to undergrads as well;
| the fancy term that some schools use for this is
| "submatriculation", which people sometimes shorten to
| "submat".
| azinman2 wrote:
| Post graduate (meaning college) education. Masters/PhD
| eben-ezer wrote:
| https://www.kaptest.com/gre/what-is-the-gre
| lb1lf wrote:
| A Graduate Record Examination; a standardized admission test.
|
| If you hope to be admitted to grad school in the US (and
| Canada, methinks), the GRE is mandatory at many, if not most,
| establishments.
| asdff wrote:
| The tide is starting to change although it is departmental
| specific. In biology, some of the best departments in the
| nation are waiving the GRE because wouldn't you know, being
| able to do high school algebra in a certain amount of time
| and having a wide nonscientific vocabulary are not good
| predictors of your ability as a scientist.
| anderspitman wrote:
| A more cynical explanation is they're willing to take
| anyone's money.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If that were the case, they'd have to be also seeing
| fewer applicants, or opening up more spots for students.
| (Since I'm not familiar with what GP is referring to, I
| can't say if that's the case, but they would be much
| better indicators.)
| hughes wrote:
| GREs are accepted by some Canadian graduate admissions
| departments, but generally not required.
| eben-ezer wrote:
| My wife is currently in didactic year of PA school. When they
| went remote, there was a period of about half a day when they
| told all of the students they had to turn on their cameras (but
| not their mic) via Zoom during every test the rest of the year.
| They changed their minds quickly when they realized most of the
| students were not on board with it and most of the faculty
| didn't want to have to 'proctor' over Zoom.
| elromulous wrote:
| This level of incompetence is exactly what I expect from the
| college board.
|
| They have no incentive to improve. They are a government funded
| "non profit" monopoly.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Well, they're using some larger system called "ProctorU", so
| it's not just the college board.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| I took the GRE in 2011 and I recall driving to a strip mall in
| rural Seattle and sitting in front of a Dell PC, underneath
| moldy ceiling tiles, and doing the test on some kind of
| virtualized, _greyscale_ Windows 3.1 environment. My memory may
| be exaggerating at this point, but it was shockingly old.
| anderspitman wrote:
| Was the UX bad or just different than you expected?
| [deleted]
| vangelis wrote:
| The internet would be a lot duller without some of the creativity
| Flash animations allowed, imagine a world without Cirno's Perfect
| Math Class.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_bQNPG2OyE&
| cosmotic wrote:
| If it's of such low value that it's being discontinued and all
| the browser vendors are blocking it; why not open source?
| macspoofing wrote:
| I suspect the Flash runtime has a bunch of patent-encumbered,
| licensed software and codecs and the effort to secure those
| licenses for open-source release is too much effort/money.
| dharmab wrote:
| Flash evolved into Adobe Animate, which is used today for many
| television shows:
|
| https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...
|
| Disclaimer: I work for Adobe, but not on Animate.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I doubt open sourcing the player would hurt that revenue
| stream.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| DannyB2 wrote:
| Good question. Why not open source?
|
| All it takes is someone (or group) interested enough to expend
| the resources necessary to re-implement it. But browsers are
| not going to support binary extensions. So an implementation
| might be in WebAssembly / JavaScript -- but then Flash becomes
| just a translation or transpile layer onto existing web
| technology.
|
| If nobody implements an open source Flash, that is the proof
| that it is not sufficiently interesting to anyone with
| resources to build it.
| saos wrote:
| Good news
| thePunisher wrote:
| Flash Player is possibly the worst piece of software ever
| written, with literally HUNDREDS of vulnerabilities discovered so
| far. If I tried I most likely couldn't produce that many
| vulnerabilities in software.
|
| Anyway, if Adobe had rewritten Flash in Rust it could've lived on
| for years and years. Instead they were completely clueless on how
| to fix it.
| pull_my_finger wrote:
| Good thing Haxe[1] and OpenFl[2] are around and doing well.
|
| [1] - https://haxe.org/
|
| [2] - https://www.openfl.org/
| ellisv wrote:
| Interestingly clicking on the link in Safari prompts a "Would you
| like to use Flash?" user dialog...
| egberts1 wrote:
| I think I can speak for millions of security-minded folks: Well,
| it's about time.
| aasasd wrote:
| I hoped to live to the day when Flash is dead, so at least
| something good has happened in my life (a few years ago already).
|
| Now, looking forward to PDF being abandoned for scientific
| publication and 'white papers'.
| ohsik wrote:
| It's time to go lol
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| Flash became popular because of 2 things:
|
| 1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content
| mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier
|
| 2/ it's API that provided things that were not possible when
| browsers had none of these API (video streaming, socket
| programming...). At some point you could even write 2D shaders or
| inject C/C++ code with something called Alchemy.
|
| Point 2 is now largely covered by browser web API, although one
| might argue that the performances might not be always as good as
| they were in flash, especially when it comes to vector graphics
| or realtime audio processing. But 3D and webgl are more
| performant than flash in the browser.
|
| Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent, and even Adobe
| Animate isn't really doing exactly what flash did when it comes
| to authoring content for browsers. So there is still a potential
| market here. I'd like to see something node based when it comes
| to coding. Artists love their nodes.
|
| The real problem is obviously running old flash content like
| games. Some of these games were really good. I remember playing
| one which was a hotel management simulator and it was really
| really fun. But it's a bit like a these jar games in the 2000'
| one cannot run on modern mobile phones anymore. Without an effort
| to preserve these, they will all be lost.
| seanalltogether wrote:
| 1. If Macromedia was still the author of
| Flash/Dreamweaver/Fireworks through the html5 transition days,
| I imagine all of those products would still be providing big
| benefits to web content creators. I genuinely believe that
| Adobe never understood the value of these products and the
| communities that formed around them. Adobe as a company didn't
| know how to foster and grow this half developer / half designer
| user base.
| SXX wrote:
| Adobe failed exactly same way as tons of other proprietary
| software developers. Instead of embracing open source and
| leading the industry standard they wanted to keep tight
| control over everything: standard, runtime and toolset.
|
| They was so over controlling so there was whole game
| development industry where literally every company used Flash
| for UI for decade, but with 3rd-party proprietary runtime
| simply because Adobe ignored that market completely.
|
| If they only moved Flash into open source when it was on peak
| of it's popularity they would probably still sell their
| proprietary tools to so much larger audience.
| bsder wrote:
| > 1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive
| content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier
|
| Why is it that with all our computer power, we somehow can't
| create _authoring tools_ as good as we had in the past?
|
| HyperCard, DreamWeaver, Visual Basic 6, etc. all seem to be
| _dramatically_ better for common people (read: not career
| programmers) than any modern equivalent we have.
| SXX wrote:
| Your common people back then were far more computer-literate
| than most of career programmers today. Requirements for the
| entry into profession is so much lower from any point of
| view: time, difficulty and cost.
|
| Another side is that programming and web is no longer novelty
| so common people prefer to just pay for someone else for
| their time rather than learn anything on their own.
|
| Most people prefer to pay their auto mechanic, plumber or
| electrician even though most of people are capable of fixing
| many of their problems just by following simple tutorial and
| common sense. Programming is no different here: it's just
| easier or more time efficient to pay to someone else.
| bsder wrote:
| > Your common people back then were far more computer-
| literate than most of career programmers today.
|
| I absolutely don't buy this.
|
| My father, a high school English teacher, could barely run
| a spreadsheet that I set up for his grades--something that
| basically everyone can do today without blinking.
|
| And even _he_ could use Hypercard.
|
| It's the tools, not the people.
| pier25 wrote:
| > Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent
|
| The other day I was researching how to add simple procedural
| animations to some web-based interactive content for a museum.
|
| This would have been a breeze with Flash. You just passed the
| .fla to the animator/illustrator and they would create the item
| in the library for you. Then you could simply animate that
| display object in your code and the artist would be able to
| modify it without breaking anything.
|
| I came up with this solution using DragonBones[1] so that the
| artists could work on their own. And then I could render those
| animations with Pixi[3].
|
| I agree an all-in-one solution would be much nicer but not sure
| there is a market for it.
|
| [1] http://dragonbones.com/en/index.html
|
| [2] https://pixijs.io/examples/#/plugin-
| dragonbones/eyetracking....
| MayeulC wrote:
| Wouldn't something like this work in a game engine that can
| export to Webassembly, like Godot?
|
| Though in either case, you lose the web platform, with its
| accessibility (aria, screen readers) and forward
| compatibility (like the one we had with the move to
| smartphones, etc).
| dublin wrote:
| Yeah, there are a few really good things that will soon be lost
| forever, for instance the classic National Lampoon "Rigging of
| a Ship" Flash movie. Also, I'm not sure, but I think the
| absolute Scott Adams classic story of how he passed as a-hole
| mission statement consultant "Ray Mebert" was posted in Flash
| at the San Jose Mercury News' site years ago. (This is
| literally live-action Dilbert trolling of teh Logitech exec
| tean that all think this guy is an idiot, but are afraid to say
| so because he was brought in by the CEO...) If exists on the
| net at all anymore, it's probably only at Archive.org.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What was the hotel sim called?
| samcrawford wrote:
| On point 2: socket programming hasn't caught up to the same
| level of performance as Flash had. Try sending or receiving
| gigabits per second with WebSockets. In my own tests last year
| on reasonably modern hardware with a 10Gbps Intel NIC, Chrome
| was the worst performer (around 3Gbps before the CPU was
| completely saturated), and Edge was the best at around 5.5Gbps.
| I didn't compare with Flash last year to be fair, but
| historically it was much better. A native app on the same
| hardware was generating 10Gbps over the network at <20% CPU
| usage.
| afrcnc wrote:
| This was announced in 2017. It's already removed from all
| browsers already.
| edgarvaldes wrote:
| The EOL was announced back then, with the same date of december
| 2020, as far as I recall.
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| I knew Flash would not be supported further, but did not know
| that Adobe planned on totally removing even the old versions
| from their web site at that point. It seems like an unusual
| approach to the end of life for previously gratis software,
| even if there are special reasons for it in this case.
| rkagerer wrote:
| Not only that, it sounds like the latest version(s) might
| already have a timebomb in them to prevent playback of
| content after the sunset date, and they seem to be
| aggressively pressuring everyone to stop using it:
|
| >Q: Will Adobe make previous versions of Adobe Flash Player
| available for download after 2020?
|
| >A: No. Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages
| from its site and Flash-based content will be blocked from
| running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.
|
| >Q: If I find Flash Player available for download on a third-
| party website, can I use it?
|
| >A: No, these versions of Flash Player are not authorized by
| Adobe. Customers should not use unauthorized versions of
| Flash Player.
| calebegg wrote:
| Still works fine for me in Chrome 83.
| FakeRemore wrote:
| Apparently it's being removed in January 2021.
|
| https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Flash-Support-
| Rem...
| matlo wrote:
| RIP
| space_ghost wrote:
| Installing Flash used to be one of the very first things I did
| when configuring a new system. Now? I can't even remember the
| last time I actually used it.
| merlyn wrote:
| Because it is bundled in with most OSs now. You have it without
| even realizing it. ... For now ...
| mark-r wrote:
| Considering how often Flash was found to have a security bug,
| I've been actively avoiding it for years.
| [deleted]
| notRobot wrote:
| This has been a looooooong time coming. Very few websites still
| use flash.
|
| The only sad thing about it is that it'll become much harder to
| play thousands of old-school flash games.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player
|
| Newgrounds, at least, will never have its players lose the
| ability to play its old Flash games.
| jason0597 wrote:
| Why can't Adobe open source flash? It would be a massive help to
| people trying to create alternative implementations of flash to
| keep legacy websites working
| throw_m239339 wrote:
| The compiler to generate SWF files is open source I believe.
|
| Not the player. I imagine it's burdened with licensed software
| and patents of all kind. Or they just don't want to do anything
| with it anymore, which is equally valid.
| macintux wrote:
| It was terribly insecure throughout its life. I can only
| imagine how many more security vulnerabilities would be exposed
| once it goes open source.
| jason0597 wrote:
| Does it really matter now? Pretty sure only nostalgic web
| users use flash to view old games, clips and such
| macintux wrote:
| Apparently bank logins, online exams...
| yokto wrote:
| There's a fairly popular open source letter to petition to open
| source flash: https://github.com/open-source-flash/open-source-
| flash
|
| But it doesn't look like it made Adobe change it's mind...
| srathi wrote:
| Someone please give this memo to Citibank which still uses Flash
| for their virtual credit card number feature! [1]
|
| [1] https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-
| Account-N...
| morganvachon wrote:
| Not to mention Trustwave, which requires a Flash plugin to load
| their PCI compliance interface. The irony is deafening.
| guerrilla wrote:
| That made me laugh out loud, but it's somewhat on part with
| that circus.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| I dunno, maybe it's better if no one does. I expect they'd just
| remove the feature instead of rewriting it.
| e40 wrote:
| They'll lose me as a customer if they do. I suspect there are
| lots of other people in the same boat.
| mehrdadn wrote:
| Yeah, I'm not sure they'll care. Bank of America did
| exactly this. :\ Maybe Citi will feel differently but I
| wouldn't keep my hopes up.
| srathi wrote:
| Funny part: they provide a binary for offline usage, but it
| is Windows only. MacOS doesn't exist for them!
| mehrdadn wrote:
| Does the binary not use Flash internally?
| dooglius wrote:
| It does. Source: I tried to run it under Wine and got
| directed to a download-flash page.
| Twirrim wrote:
| I ran in to some hassles just last week with some online proxy
| voting site for some shares I hold. I couldn't see the document
| they were asking me to vote on because this well known proxy
| vote site "securely" hosts the content using Flash. Of all the
| ridiculous things to use. I'd be willing to bet the document
| was a PDF underneath it. My only option was to request a paper
| copy of the document so that I could make the right decision
| which is an utterly absurd waste of ink and paper.
| e40 wrote:
| I tweeted at @AskCiti last weekend and their response was
| underwhelming.
|
| I recommend everyone that uses Citi's virtual CC's to do the
| same. They need to get off their ass and fix this.
| haolez wrote:
| Genuine question: if Flash weren't a security nightmare, would it
| be a better environment for producing games and dynamic content
| than what we have today? I've never done anything in Flash.
| andai wrote:
| Add-on question: what _do_ we have today? Has anything filled
| this void?
| stjo wrote:
| HTML5, the canvas API and all the new browser APIs right
| after it.
| firloop wrote:
| I wonder how much this will enable another wave of "Adobo Flash
| Player Browser Toolbar"-like adware since the official source
| will be removed.
| pmlnr wrote:
| Happy Tree Friends, Weebls' Stuff, z0r.de - the internet would be
| - will be! - different without Flash.
| omnibrain wrote:
| I have
| http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html in
| my bookmarks. A really beautiful depiction of the Sixtine Chapel.
| But I have no Idea how to load it on a modern OS. I have also no
| idea if the vatican has plans to update ist for more modern
| technologies.
|
| There are even more
| http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/index_en.html if you dig
| around a little, but I have no clue how to preserve them...
| azinman2 wrote:
| "Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site
| and Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe
| Flash Player after the EOL Date."
|
| This blocking seems really dumb to me. At least throw up a
| warning. It will cause old web content to be completely
| inaccessible, throwing away years of human creativity. Most
| likely there will be some legacy systems somewhere that will then
| use a hacked version of flash laden with malware because it's the
| only thing available so some legacy system written by long gone
| people can be used.
| TeddyDD wrote:
| > It will cause old web content to be completely inaccessible,
| throwing away years of human creativity.
|
| Good. It's great lesson for content creators and consumers
| about relying on proprietary formats.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| > Good. It's great lesson for content creators and consumers
| about relying on proprietary formats.
|
| How old are you? There is nothing wrong using proprietary
| formats and at the time there were no other alternatives.
| Macromedia were the pioneers of internet animation.
|
| Even with HTML5 today there still isn't anything that allows
| me to produce a quick web animation with the likes of the
| Macromedia Flash. Adding that Flash would always produce the
| same result on any device that could support it. Mobile
| Phones, Symbian and even Palm tablets all supported it at one
| point.
|
| Proprietary isn't the issue here, it's the monopoly that
| Adobe is. Adobe could of more and happy propped this up but
| no; like all major buyouts, bleed the product out to die. If
| it wasn't for Macromedia, Adobe wouldn't be what it is today.
| wegs wrote:
| Proprietary is exactly the problem here. Your work can die
| at the whim of a corporation.
|
| It gets even worse with product activation.
|
| Even if something is proprietary but without activation,
| you can sort of preserve it. I can spin up an old version
| of WordStar in MS-DOS on my computer, and open up old
| WordStar documents. I can start up Windows 3.1 if I want in
| a VM. It's not as good as something open like LaTeX, but
| it's not completely useless.
|
| If you use Adobe CS, and Adobe goes under, changes business
| models, or takes down its activation servers for any
| reasons, your life's work might be dead. Few corporations
| survive forever. Even fewer products do. That's why a lot
| of us avoid rights-managed or some types of cloud-based
| software for critical work (although a lot of cloud-based
| has very good export options, so I don't hesitate to use
| e.g. Google Docs).
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Proprietary was all you had back in 2000:s -- And in this
| case, Adobe is still live and kicking. For a company who
| made $2.95B on net income last year, pish.
|
| To execute a kill switch of "you are never allowed to run
| flash again" is far from fair, Adobe is the problem.
| However I will agree to differ; your work can die at the
| whim of a corporation.
| wegs wrote:
| Nah. In 2000, you could do what you wanted with Java
| Applets. Plus, you had desktop apps and all sorts of
| other options too. Was Flash technically better for a lot
| of uses? Without a doubt. But that's a choice one makes.
| At the time, I chose open (or at least more open), and
| I'm glad I did.
|
| And Adobe is still alive, as are others like IBM,
| Microsoft, and friends. On the other hand, SGI, DEC,
| Sybase, Novell, SCO, and tons of other companies are
| dead. And some companies, like HP, are technically alive,
| but all their product lines from that era are dead.
|
| Getting burned once or twice is enough to understand that
| the organizational, political, and human sides tend to
| matter more than the technical. Older folks tend to chose
| stable, open solutions. Younger folks who haven't gone
| through that yet tend to chose technically glitzy
| solutions.
| gnulinux wrote:
| You say Adobe being a monopoly is the problem, but you
| don't realize the proprietary format of Adobe allows it to
| be a monopoly. If flash source code was open, there would
| be alternative flash implementations.
| cryptoz wrote:
| I think hacked versions of Flash are statistically more likely
| to be secure than the official version, though.
|
| Why do you think that the official Flash player would provide a
| secure environment going forward? It never has, and so without
| Adobe's active support, I imagine it would get even worse.
| Official Flash has always been a security nightmare.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > I think hacked versions of Flash are statistically more
| likely to be secure than the official version, though.
|
| I would think exactly the opposite, primarily because you
| have no idea who put together that hacked copy. God knows
| there is already enough malware that pretends to be an update
| to Adobe Flash.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| I feel like I'm going to make a a VirtualBox image dedicated
| purely for Flash viewing.
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