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What Killed Adobe Flash? (daringfireball.net) 230

Posted by msmash from the dissecting-the-frog dept.
An employee, who claims to have worked on the development of Flash, writes: Apparently, the world settled on the "One True Cause" for why Flash "died". Take for example this blogpost by John Gruber about FedEx... it ends with this consideration on Steve Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash": "If it had been an angry rant, it would have been easily dismissed without needing to be factually refuted -- "That's just Jobs being a prick again." The fact that it wasn't angry, and because it was all true, made it impossible to refute."

Impossible to refute. There's no doubt that this was the beginning of the end for Flash, right? Except that this is utterly wrong. I worked on Flash, and I worked on the thing that actually killed Flash. It is my strong belief, based on what I observed, that Steve Jobs' letter had little impact in the final decision -- it was really Adobe who decided to "kill" Flash. Yes, Flash was a bad rap for Adobe, and Steve's letter didn't help. But ultimately, what was probably decisive was the fact that developing Flash cost Adobe a ton of money. John Gruber, responding to the blogpost: To be clear, I don't think Jobs's letter killed Flash. But I don't think Adobe did either. Eventually Adobe accepted Flash's demise. What killed Flash was Apple's decision not to support it on iOS, combined with iOS's immense popularity and the lucrative demographics of iOS users. If Jobs had never published "Thoughts on Flash", Flash would still be dead. The letter explained the decision, but the decision that mattered was never to support it on iOS in the first place. It's possible that Flash would have died even if Apple had decided to allow it on iOS. Android tried that, and the results were abysmal. Web page scrolling stuttered, and video playback through Flash Player halved battery life compared to non-Flash playback.
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What Killed Adobe Flash? More

What Killed Adobe Flash?

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  • Several things (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:45AM (#54134573)
    But mainly, the enormous security risk, bad reputation, and lack of native support in browsers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 )

      But mainly, the enormous security risk, bad reputation

      No.

      lack of native support in browsers.

      That's exactly what John Gruber pointed out.

    • Re:Several things (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JoeMerchant ( 803320 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @10:27AM (#54134891)

      I'd go for DRM, simple and straight up, as the primary sinker of the Flash ship.

      Those ridiculously frequent "security updates" were almost entirely managing DRM holes, and it would seem they were managing the holes in whack-a-mole style without even attempting to design a more secure DRM solution. As a user, the update frequency killed my enthusiasm for Flash - if I could install it once and forget it, fine - I'll use it when a website says it needs it, but if I'm constantly having to install updates just to browse the web, no thanks.

      As a content provider, having to constantly evaluate the stream of Flash updates, determine which one broke our app for our users and which update version we need to tell them to use (and compatibility would fade in and out across the updates, you couldn't just go "old", you'd have one feature that died in versions 275 through 313, and another that only worked in 306 through 392, then you come up with a third compatibility problem that breaks functionality from 317 onward, so you've got to tell your users to use 314 through 316, if they want to access all the features they are paying for.

      Flash was not a good partner in the value delivery stream.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        Designers quickly realized that it was unusable for anything more than annoying ads and spyware anyway. It breaks back/forward navigation, takes ages to load, not everyone has it, doesn't work well/at all on mobile... And the HTML 5 got better and there was less need for it anyway.

        Ad blockers probably had a lot to do with it as well, as developers found a lot of their Flash apps were not even loading anyway. To get through they needed to base64 encode images into the HTML or at least not make it quite so ob

        • Re:Several things (Score:4, Informative)

          by JoeMerchant ( 803320 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @11:04AM (#54135157)

          It was the de-facto video delivery standard. BBC, security cameras, YouTube (for a while), everything played on Flash and most things only played on Flash for a while.

          Thank God it's dying.

        • Designers quickly realized that it was unusable for anything more than annoying ads and spyware anyway. It breaks back/forward navigation, takes ages to load, not everyone has it, doesn't work well/at all on mobile... And the HTML 5 got better and there was less need for it anyway.

          Ad blockers probably had a lot to do with it as well, as developers found a lot of their Flash apps were not even loading anyway. To get through they needed to base64 encode images into the HTML or at least not make it quite so obvious they were loading up some Flash crapware.

          I'm going to disagree with you there. While I've never written anything in flash I have used many many flash programs that were unrelated to ads and spyware. Yes, that stuff happened with flash. Guess what? It's happening with HTML5. Shocker, I know! The world is in need of HTML5 "popup" blockers currently... Guess what, several of those programs I still use. Could they be exploited? Yes. Could any program be exploited? Yes. Flash was frequently targeted because of the popularity. Same with Java.

          W

          • I remember when iOS was less popular the fanboys were all saying it was impervious to viruses and hacking! I have to admit (not to my credit) ...
            Apple tries very hard that it is.
            You know, every App is Sandboxed in a changeroot and runs with their own user/group id.
            Only exploitable bugs and most often only on jailbroken devices lead to such weaknesses.
            See: https://www.theiphonewiki.com/... [theiphonewiki.com]

            And calling one a fanboi just because he uses iOS/macOS is plain stupid IMHO.

            So I really wonder what that I did enjoy ru

          • Flash was frequently used for ads because of adobes suite which allowed "creatives" in advertising with no knowledge of programming to make advertisements. Of course with no knowledge of programming, they designed really bad ads that were in your face, broke good UI design, and sucked up every last resource in your PC (also killing battery life).

            The same thing will repeat itself in HTML 5, and will speed up as more software is written to produce ads in pure HTML 5 (probably from adobe again). Adobe has so

      • I'd go for DRM, simple and straight up, as the primary sinker of the Flash ship.

        Those ridiculously frequent "security updates" were almost entirely managing DRM holes, and it would seem they were managing the holes in whack-a-mole style without even attempting to design a more secure DRM solution. As a user, the update frequency killed my enthusiasm for Flash - if I could install it once and forget it, fine - I'll use it when a website says it needs it, but if I'm constantly having to install updates just to browse the web, no thanks.

        As a content provider, having to constantly evaluate the stream of Flash updates, determine which one broke our app for our users and which update version we need to tell them to use (and compatibility would fade in and out across the updates, you couldn't just go "old", you'd have one feature that died in versions 275 through 313, and another that only worked in 306 through 392, then you come up with a third compatibility problem that breaks functionality from 317 onward, so you've got to tell your users to use 314 through 316, if they want to access all the features they are paying for.

        Flash was not a good partner in the value delivery stream.

        Update frequency combined with a piss poor update methodology. Horribly intrusive installers accompany a flash update unless it's being done by a corporate system like Marimba. Same for Java, it's bad. An installer for a security update needs no UI at all. The software should have had an option to silently update as needed. If it had that, who would care if Adobe updated flash 5 times a day? Only people with metered internet.

    • Re:Several things (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ScienceofSpock ( 637158 ) <keith,greene&gmail,com> on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @11:10AM (#54135199) Homepage

      I believe if any *one* thing killed flash, it was HTML 5. You can do virtually anything in HTML 5 that you could in Flash, you didn't require a proprietary application to create it, and you didn't require your users to have a proprietary plugin to run it.

      As a web developer myself, that's what killed it for me.

    • There are so many vulnerabilities in Flash that it has seemed possible that Adobe is selling vulnerabilities, as the 2nd story linked below says. The only other theory is that Adobe Systems programmers have been getting no testing or other management.

      Articles keep criticizing Flash, Flash, Flash. They should criticize "Adobe Systems Management".

      It seems possible that Microsoft and other companies learned from Adobe Systems how much users were weak to abuse.

      Stories:

      Adobe Flash Player: List of se [cvedetails.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        This. At the time that the decision to not support Flash was made, one of the major driving factors behind that decision was its terrible reliability. Flash was responsible for... IIRC, the #1, #2, and #3 most common crashes on Safari on the Mac. Now bear in mind that for all intents and purposes, every single crash of the Flash plugin was a security hole. The terrible quality of Flash led to stricter and stricter sandboxing of the plugins, shifting it into its own process so it couldn't gain root, etc

        • Flash is still crashing my Mac regularly.
          Not as often as it used to, but its habit to eat up CPU and crash the whole computer (instead of just the process it is running in) is pretty annoying. I only use it on two sites ... it is a nice feature that modern browsers have settings to allow Flash etc. only on specific sites.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sloppy ( 14984 )

      It can't be dead due to the enormous security risk, because the industry has supposedly accepted proprietary EME "content decryption modules." The one aspect of Flash that really mattered is still with us; it's just theoretically smaller (provided people abstain from installing the ones that will have them join botnets, mine bitcoins, etc).

    • security risk, bad reputation, and lack of native support in browsers

      Flash has has all those problems basically since the beginning. They aren't what killed it. What killed it is a viable alternative - HTML 5. Also the move away from desktop-based internet browsing. Your phone probably doesn't have Flash and might not support it at all. Whatever you wanted to do in Flash online - video conferencing, games - you're more likely to do with a native app on your phone.

    • Yeah, the hundreds of Adobe Flash security holes were what finally doomed Flash. When the browser providers started disabling obsolete and insecure flash plugins, it basically forced content providers to switch to HTML5 to insure that people could watch it.

  • Flash killed flash. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SensitiveMale ( 155605 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:45AM (#54134575)

    It was a resource hog and had shitty security.

    • Re:Flash killed flash. (Score:5, Funny)

      by Kiaser Zohsay ( 20134 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:49AM (#54134605)

      The Texas Defense: "The sumbitch needed killin."

    • Yep. Which is why it wasn't on iOS.

    • I would put it this way: Flash had high costs in terms of hardware resources, maintenance, and security that were already apparent on the desktop. Those costs became unacceptable on the new smartphone/tablet platform, where the technical bar was set much higher.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ebyrob ( 165903 )

        Flash was a security nightmare that's a given. It deserved to die and we're better off without it.

        But c'mon. secure smartphones? They're even worse.

  • Security and annoyances for me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Scoth ( 879800 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:47AM (#54134585)

    I never really minded flash in the earlier days, it enabled a lot of fun content. As time passed, it was the source of more and more security problems, and was used for more and more just plain annoyances like advertising. Had Adobe reworked it into a good, secure framework with some touch interface and power optimizations for mobile (I kept Flash around on Android for some time. It sucked the battery down hard while doing much of anything) it may have stayed relevant.

    HTML5 didn't help either, since it did a lot of what it was for anyway.

  • The crappy quality (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Adobe flash killed itself by being pure crap.

  • After Microsoft in general and Windows in particular, fixing Adobe in general and Flash in particular was my bread and butter for the last 20 years.

    • Don't worry, Windows 10 is giving you plenty of work.

      • Don't worry, Windows 10 is giving you plenty of work.

        My job has Windows 8 in test for tablets and Windows 10 for desktop. No ETA on production rollout. The powers to be might drop Windows 8 and use Windows 10 for tablets. Meanwhile, Windows 7 64-bit rollout is completed and Windows 7 32-bit is history. No rush to upgrade to Windows 10.

  • HTML 5 killed Flash. Next question? (Score:4, Informative)

    by BenJeremy ( 181303 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:55AM (#54134653)

    It's not perfect, but honestly, the ability to move to an even greater OS- and browser-agnostic platform has great appeal for developers.

    Flash has some great tools, though, and a decent codebase. I've used ActionScript/Flash to create mobile games, and now I have to find the time to port over my framework and products at some point.

  • It is absolute madness if you do not recognize the steadfast refusal of Apple to adopt Flash, along with the ensuing rise in the number of people who used phones and tablets to browse, as the #1 cause of The Fall of the House of Flash.

    Flash had other problems sure but it persisted and grew for years with those same problems. It was only wen someone came along that took user experience and security seriously in a way that was popular, that Flash finally met its long-overdue demise.

  • Win (Score:5, Funny)

    by puddingebola ( 2036796 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:57AM (#54134669) Journal
    It was Mrs. Peacock, in the Library, with the revolver.

  • It was always sick (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kohath ( 38547 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:57AM (#54134675)

    What happened to Flash:

    1. Animating junk on web pages was never very useful, so people more-or-less stopped doing it. Flash saved itself by becoming a way to deliver web video.
    2. Decoding video with a general purpose CPU is very much inferior to decoding it with dedicated logic. Video standards were designed to enable dedicated logic decoders. CPU-based decoding used far, far too much energy so Flash couldn't compete or even come close.

    Flash became mostly useless. Then it became only a way to get your system hacked and added to a botnet. Then it became nothing.

    • 99% of people use the internet exclusively to look at animated junk on webpages.

    • Remember boo.com vividly, the whole site was rendered with flash and was a use-ability trainwreck
    • Agreed. Flash was awful back when it was a MacroMedia property, and all of the awfulness was deeply rooted in the product architecture. Even with Adobe's sizable war chest, they were never able to get rid of the insecurity or resource inefficiency. Vector animations were sorta-useful back when network bandwidth was extremely limited, but that era is gone now. Distribution of video via flash middleware no longer has any value, and in fact carries a plethora of liabilities.

      Flash should have been dead

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:58AM (#54134683)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • NodeJS? What does a networking library have to do with Flash?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Adobe killed Flash by being Adobe, in other words. Barely able to maintain a desktop app and clueless about what customers want, the very last company you would want writing browser plug-ins.

  • Browsers Killed Flash (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mentil ( 1748130 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:59AM (#54134687)

    Let's be real, the 'death of Flash' is only being talked about because the major web browsers are cutting support for it. An opinion posted by Jobs in 2010 related to a decision not to support Flash in iOS is supposedly the reason browser makers are cutting support for Flash in 2017? I'm not buying it. HTML5 video has everything to do with the death of Flash, as most usage of Flash was simply for audiovisual playback. Webgames and webapps used to use Flash, but how many people use those nowadays compared to mobile apps? Even on Android, which supports Flash? Youtube moving over to HTML5 video by default was the death knell of Flash. The constant drumbeat of 'more critical Flash vulnerabilities found and exploited in the wild, uninstall it already' didn't help, either. I wonder how Flash would've done if it were a) secure, and b) not a resource hog.

    • But... It ain't dead (yet) (Score:5, Informative)

      by RotateLeftByte ( 797477 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @11:17AM (#54135259)

      There are still a huge number of sites that just won't work without it. Yes you can fool most of them by tweaking your browser but that isn't the point.
      Adobe needs to put an execution date on it ASAP.
      That will be the only way if can truly be consigned to the trash can/wastebasket of history.
      It needs to die a horrible death.

  • Many things (Score:3)

    by DivineKnight ( 3763507 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @09:59AM (#54134695)

    But the top two from my list are 1.) constant updates (there are always zero-days, it seems, with Flash), and 2.) while Flash is great for content owners / providers, it sucks balls for content buyers / consumers (imagine trying to navigate a website entirely made out of Flash....yes, people have done this; try playing a Flash video when the streaming site is overloaded (can only buffer so much) or the embedded controls suck...it's a horror.

  • Why the post mortem? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jenningsthecat ( 1525947 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @10:07AM (#54134733)

    Flash doesn't need a post mortem, it just needs an obituary. Its death wasn't suspicious, and it didn't commit suicide. It was a cute, talented kid with promise, but as often happens, it became a shiftless, troublesome adult, partly as a result of the parenting mistakes of its narcissistic adoptive parent. Its lifestyle, shortcomings, and bad luck led it to an early death; it's time to close the casket, fill in the hole, place the gravestone, and move on.

    • Post mortem? There are still tons of websites, even ones that are being developed and maintainted today, that use Flash to display videos. I very regularely see the message "This content can't be played with your setup." and if you dig deeper it's always a Flash plugin...
      • Websites you see with that message for flash will also be not long for this earthly plane and as for ones being developed today? anything being developed today for flash is a stinking dead fish you don't want to touch, only a truly incompetent dev team would choose flash as the platform of choice at this junction in time and such a team making that decision you can treat as a huge warning sign to avoid their site and products.

  • Apple (Score:5, Informative)

    by chispito ( 1870390 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @10:18AM (#54134811)
    Apple killed Flash, or at least threw the first stone by disallowing it on their mobile devices. They did it because they saw the writing on the wall. Flash was a security nightmare, and really only existed as a stopgap because bandwidth used to be a far more of a premium and there were no web standards for streaming video, audio, and animation. This is mostly fixed with HTML5.

    Believe me when I say this is uncharacteristic of me, but, "Thanks Steve Jobs [apple.com]!"
    • The other thing not mentioned is that Apple would have easily allowed Flash on iOS had Adobe managed to come up with a mobile version that addressed Apple's performance concerns. In his memo, Jobs even mentions this. They waited and waited for Adobe and finally gave up. Many rabid Android fans at the time were more than gloating when they got Flash to run on their Androids . . . until they actually used it and found it a buggy, battery draining mess just as Jobs had said it was.
      • I don't believe that Apple would have easily allowed Flash on iOS if it had performed well. Flash on iOS would have provided a simple path for people to write applications for iOS without paying the 30% apple tax.

      • Actually Flash is not banned from iOS, it is only not supported in any App coming from Apple.
        There are a few browsers in the AppStore that come with a build in Flash Engine.

  • Legit Alternative (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sehryan ( 412731 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @10:20AM (#54134817)

    The reason Flash died is that there was finally a legitimate alternative in form of HTML5 video.

    No one wanted to use Flash. But there was no other way to serve video as effectively as it did. Once HTML5 video arrived and was supported by the major browsers, Flash's days were numbered.

  • ...if this topic is the best the editors can come up with...

  • Silverlight (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Definitely Silverlight.

  • Who cares? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @10:27AM (#54134889)

    There's on one reason it died but who cares? Honestly, we should just be happy it did die!

  • It was a combination of the facts that Adobe didn't have good lawyers and that there weren't neophobic executive types at Apple that could force us to keep using it. I mean that's why Java and Flash stuck around on the browser for so long. Before Steve Jobs was like "hell fuck no" to client side Java and Flash, the browser makers had zero guts to take on the legal and perceived market share ramifications of saying no.

    Remember when Microsoft tried to ditch Java they got sued: http://tech-insider.org/java/r.. [tech-insider.org]

  • Macromedia had two popular web plugin platforms in the early 2000s - Flash and ShockWave (for publishing Macromedia Director content online). Shockwave got a good 3D engine with built-in Havok physics (ShockWave3D, developed by Intel if I'm not mistaken), Flash didn't get a 3D engine, although many Flash devs asked for it. When Director was neglected, first by Macromedia and then very, very seriously by Adobe (which let Director die completely), ShockWave3D, which started as a very promising Web3D technolog

  • Battery Life == Advertising Bloat (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @10:48AM (#54135025)
    I suspect if you looked closer, a lot of the power sucking attributed to flash is actually due to bloated advertising stacks. The advertising bloat hasn't gone away, they just converted it to javascript.

  • Designers miss WYSIWYG (UI rant) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @10:51AM (#54135053) Journal

    One thing that layout and UI designers miss about Flash is WYSIWYG. Web (non) standards display differently under different browser and OS brands, versions such that you either have to test under a gijjillion client variations, or live with rendering mistakes. I HATE THAT and it makes me scream bloody murder. I want WYSIWYG dammit! Even slashdot often gets it wrong, as menus overlap when they shouldn't, etc.

    And WYSIWYG doesn't mean that you have to settle on one screen size, it just means that if you test under size X it renders the same way under a client set for size X. Essentially the server does any resizing so that one doesn't have to rely on an inconsistent client. The client just sends it's preferred screen size and the server renders it and sends "dumb" coordinate-based vectors back: no client-side auto flow or "float" shit. Floats can float up my ass; floaters are what you find in the john.

    It's probably the dumbest invention I've seen in my many decades of IT. Great job security perhaps, but sucky productivity as we fight with the plague of fat-client versionitus. Makes DLL-Hell look good in comparison. Now we got Client-Hell.

    Damned humans! Its like a mom or wife that randomly rearranges your room while at work or in the basement. Whoever invented auto-flow deserves to have wake up one day to find that one of their girlfriend's tits are on her crotch and another on her back, but her snatch is now where her nose used to be. Hell, the client-floaters probably WANT it that way, sicko Picasso pervs!

    I hope something like Flash with WYSIWYG comes back, as an open standard. The schizophrenic client problem is the main reason PDF's still live. Managers, customers, and/or designers decide where the put stuff and it STAYS there; imagine that. It stays where they actually want it and you satisfy their request as they sketched it. No drifting, screwy overlaps, or surprises when browser version N + 1 comes out. It's like magic! Imagine a Beowulf cluster of shit that stays where you actually PUT it. Imagine all the people living in WYSIWYG harmony, like God, I mean the Matrix admin, wanted it. Shifty shifters go to the basement to be Picasso BBQ.

    • God I hate applications designed by people like you. So many controls that get lopped off the screen or massive empty space because I dared to use the "wrong" resolution.

      If you are not able to test an infinite number of resolutions (and that's not physically possible), then "I MUST HAVE WYSIWYG!!!" is awful.

    • But in the end, it's ugly. Years ago I worked for a big company that re-did (via a 3rd party) their whole website, it was stuck in 800x600 !!! In this time we had 15" monitor in 1024x768 screen, it was not that bad, but 2 years after and 17" in 1600x1040 then 1920x1080 and it was horrible, the website was a small blue area surrounded by black bars.

  • Yawn (Score:2)

    by dcw3 ( 649211 )

    Chicken, Egg, which came first? Who gives a crap? Same w/Flash.

  • Not dead yet (Score:4, Informative)

    by grumbel ( 592662 ) <grumbel+slashdot@gmail.com> on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @11:01AM (#54135123) Homepage

    Flash isn't dead yet. While most mobile webpages no longer use it, on the desktop you still see it pretty frequently. As for its impending death, that has been a long while coming:

    * using Flash to design a whole website became mostly unnecessary due to HTML/CSS becoming more powerful

    * using Flash for vector animation became replaced by regular video and Youtube

    * using Flash as video player became unnecessary due to HTML gaining a <video> tag

    I am not quite sure what happened with Flash and gaming, Newgrounds.com is still around, but you rarely hear about it anymore. Doing games in HTML with <canvas> and WebGL is now possible as well, but I don't really see those very often. I assume Unity and mobile gaming took mostly over what was once done in Flash.

    However what really killed Flash was Adobe no longer supporting it. When software is full of security and performance issues, it's no surprise that people will move away from it. Flash got popular in the first place because it did things that your browser wouldn't be able to do on it's own. But while browsers got more powerful, Flash just sat there and didn't really improve much at all.

    • When phone stores, Steam, and other "indie" channels came around, everybody stopped making games for free. This is why you see very few games made in HTML5, as well, and almost everything you get from places like Itch.io are made in Unity or is a native executable.

      I actually miss Flash. Despite all the hate, the reason why it was around for so damn long is because it was actually good at what it did. The only reason HTML5 killed it is because almost everyone was using it for video. For animation and gam

  • Wrong Again! Programming Killed Flash. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TheCowSaysMoo ( 4915561 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @11:01AM (#54135129)

    iOS didn't kill Flash. Nor did Steve Jobs. Nor did Adobe. MACROMEDIA KILLED FLASH!... because they allowed it to become what it was never intended to be.

    Way back in the mid 1990s, Macromedia acquired FutureSplash -- an ANIMATION product used by Disney, FOX (for the Simpsons), and others -- and renamed it Flash. I used Flash 2 for ANIMATION and it was a great tool.

    Along comes Flash 3 and the introduction of MovieClips and transparency. Transparency was pretty straightforward, but MovieClips were not. MovieClips contained an animation (and timeline) that could then be placed in the main animation timeline. So, if you had an animation of a character dancing in a MovieClip, you could add that MovieClip to the main animation timeline and make the dancing character move up, down, sideways, whatever.

    The introduction of MovieClips also brought some basic programming beyond the even more basic timeline actions that previously existed (solely for the purpose of starting, stopping, etc. an animation). You could now add your (stopped) dancing character MovieClip to the main timeline, and then add a button to the main timeline and add a "Tell Target" action to tell the MovieClip to start playing. This "Tell Target" programming was VERY basic, but it was sooooooooo confusing to most Flash animators because the FAR majority of them were truly animators, not programmers. In fact, MovieClip programming was so confusing to the animators' mindset that the "macromedia.flash" user group was constantly inundated with questions about "Tell Target." The concept of targeting "_level0" or the "_parent" or such made absolutely no sense to most animators. As a regular contributor to macromedia.flash, I eventually made a small website of "Tell Target" FAQs that was quite popular at the time.

    What happened after that is what eventually killed Flash. Some people are great animators. Some people are great programmers. A very rare few are great at both. The ones that were great at both and using Flash started making some of the best Flash websites around. They were getting accolades left and right and being featured everywhere Flash was talked about. Gabocorp, 2Advanced, Der Bauer, etc. were thrust into the spotlight with their ability to combine great animation with great Flash programming to make jaw-dropping Flash websites.

    With these kinds of websites garnering a lot of attention, the ever-increasing demand for more/better Flash programming started. Flash 4 add variables, input fields, the first real ActionScript, and other programming-based enhancements. Read through the list of versions after Flash 3 and most include more and more and more programming enhancements. Flash 5 introduced ActionScript 1.0 and Flash 7 had ActionScript 2.0 and on and on and on... until Flash died.

    Security issues? Not a problem if Flash isn't a programming platform. Resource hog? Not (as much of) a problem if Flash ins't a programming platform. Unable to run on a mobile device? It's VECTOR GRAPHICS!!! Not a problem if Flash isn't a programming platform.

    The interesting part is that in the wake of Flash's death, Animate survives... as an ANIMATION platform. Want to meet Flash developers who aren't looking for work right now? They're the ones who never stopped using it for Animation. Personally, I used Flash for a LOT of programming, but I also used it for a LOT of animation. With the shift of branding from Flash to Animate, I'm happy to see the return to the core purpose of Flash 1.0: ANIMATION!

    If you look at the enhancements for Animate 2015 and 2017, you'll see a lot of items related to animation and graphics and not a lot related to programming. This is the way it should be... and probably the way it always should have been. Flash as a programming platform always should have been a separate product, like Flex, so it could live/die on its own merits, or lack thereof.

  • 1) Flash was, like a lot of other Internet technologies, terrible.

    2) Flash was disliked for unrelated reasons by people who happened to be in a position to kill it. They then pointed to the fact that Flash is terrible, which is true, but wasn't the real reason--look at all the other equally terrible stuff that's still around.

  • The Apple fans will say Jobs and Apple did. But while Apple complained about Flash and threw temper tantrums over it, they never offered anything to replace it (at least not alone). HTML5 (along with Javascript and CSS) is what replaced Flash and kiled it.

    The only reason Flash ever became a thing was because web designers were begging the W3C to add multimedia capability to the HTML spec. The W3C saw the web as a medium of information exchange (the way Berners-Lee originally envisioned it was a way fo

  • What killed Flash was Apple's decision not to support it on iOS, combined with iOS's immense popularity and the lucrative demographics of iOS users.

    Um, iOS is barely at 10-20% market penetration. The hypothetical immense popularity contest went to Android a long time ago.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Karlt1 ( 231423 )

      In developed countries, iOS has a much higher market share than 10% - 20%. I doubt marketers and app developers care that a there are a lot of $50 Android devices in developing countries. Even in developed countries, the iaverage income of iOS users is higher than Android users.

      I'm not sure if it's still the case, but years after Android had a much higher market share, Google was making more money off of IOS users than Android users.

  • The final nail, was when Adobe's own executive exclaimed that he saw HTML5 as the future. When these words were said, Adobe pretty much pointed a shotgun at it's developers and pulled the trigger.

    Why did Adobe's CEO say this? Because he was stupid. Even thought true, it was not what a CEO was supposed to do. But Adobe saw HTML5 as their holy grail. They would be able to have their cake and eat it too. They could write tools and take Flash developer and update it to create HTML5 content, and save millions o

    • I also warned people, that they criticized and hated Flash because of how it was used intrusively by marketers. Pop-over ads, etc. I warned and said that with Flash dead, they would simply turn to HTML5. Except now it would be native, and you'd no longer be able to block their ads. And I was right.

  • The premise is wrong (Score:3)

    by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @12:06PM (#54135765)

    There wasn't one single cause of Flash being killed. So everyone arguing for or against Steve Jobs being the cause is irrelevant. Jobs did bring focus to the ever growing problem that was Flash.

    Flash originally was a solution to a problem that Web users/content creators had: With multiple platforms and browsers like OS X, Windows, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc, how do web designers create consistent look and functionality for animations and video. While some browser specific optimizations were required for pages, animations and video had to work pretty much the same.

    How Adobe did it was to code at very low levels the APIs needed to run everything. When CPUs and operating systems all had to do the work this wasn't much of a problem. Where it became more of a problem was when the work was being offloaded to GPUs and the OS became better at using the GPU. Flash unfortunately ignored these optimizations till very late. By that time, the reputation of it being a resource hog was well earned. For example, on OS X, there was a demo that showed how inefficient Flash was by taking the same video and putting it in two containers: MKV and Flash. The MKV container ran at low CPU usage while the Flash container ran at 100%. From what I remember this only happened on Flash for OS X so the problem was entirely Adobe's.

    The second problem was security. Over time OS became more aware of the need for enhanced security. Flash unfortunately again was very late to fixing these in a serious way. Because of how Flash was written at a low level, it also was more of security hole as Flash requires escalated privileges to run/install.

    The last problem was mobile UI. Flash was designed to be used with a mouse and pointer. When smart phones still relied on this UI, Flash would be fine. When they started moving towards touch-centric UIs, the promise of Flash was diminished. As consumers started to use more smart phones than computers, the original idea of using one platform to reach all users was negated.

  • Flash... (Score:3)

    by m.dillon ( 147925 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2017 @12:12PM (#54135833) Homepage

    What did it in should be obvious... one security exploit after another, non-stop, for over 8 years. HTML5 might have been the final nail in the coffin but Flash really did itself in.

    When Flash was originally conceived by Macromedia very little thought went into security, because at the time security wasn't a big issue (the Internet was still fairly small, compared to today, and hackers had not yet really ramped up on a large scale). The entire codebase was inherently insecure and trusting of the flash handed to it.

    In all that time, ever since that first flash product went out the door, right on up to today, nobody did more than basic hand-waving around the security problems. I'm sure they will claim that they tried... but no... they really didn't.

    In the end, people finally got tired of the endless stream of security exploits.

    -Matt

  • Simply put, it wasn't FOSS. If it were, it could have been fixed, enhanced, ported, etc. Might have actually become something useful. The question isn't "what killed flash?", the question is "who killed flash?" and the answer to that is Adobe. It didn't have to die, they just never gave it a chance to live.
  • The constant updates drove me insane! That's definitely what killed Adobe Flash, I mean it's just like Java that way!
  • Steve Jobs was mad because Flash killed Quicktime. Tit for tat retaliation.

  • "That's just Jobs being a prick again.

    nope...wrong

    Flash died because it was an inferior standard for the internet.

    It was bloated, unsecure, proprietary, slow, and required too many updates.

    In fact, analyzing Flash's design is a good way to learn what *not* to do at every development point.

    Steve Jobs may have been a 'prick' but not when he was banning flash from his devices. It was simply good sense.

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