5 ms·

Why Flash is doomed

48 points by gnosis 17y ago

InclinedPlane 17y ago
Flash isn't doomed quite yet. Flash supplanted java as the primary form of interactivity on the web in the early years, and javascript + html has been making inroads but flash still has a significant advantage. Pure HTML/CSS/JS/Canvas/SVG designs are nearly as capable as flash, but there are still serious design defects in the system, major problems with client support and standardization, and a distinct lack of tooling. Today it takes a not insignificant amount of effort just to make a simple text box with a border having 4 rounded corners that displays correctly for >90% of a site's visitors using pure html/css techniques. Even if every internet user upgraded to a modern, standards compliant, CSS3 supporting browser tomorrow, there would still be a substantial hill to climb for designing good looking pure html/css sites, it would just be a slightly smaller hill. Almost certainly this will change, standards will get better, browser marketshare will continue to skew toward newer browsers, tooling will improve, but all of these things will take time. This is not a defense of flash, I don't think flash is good for the web even today, but until the very real problems of pure html/css design are put to rest (CSS4?) flash will still be seen as a go-to technology for a lot of things people want to do with the web.
- elblanco 17y ago
  > and a distinct lack of tooling Great comment. I think this is a principle problem. Any company that can put together a flash alternative toolchain half as good as Adobe's flash production toolchain is liable to make quite a bit of money. Abstract away the browser incompatibility nonsense with the tools, provide the right kinds of editors and development environments, and lots of the complexity should be hidden away in the dev envrionment.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    "I think this is a principle problem. Any company that can put together a flash alternative toolchain half as good as Adobe's flash production toolchain is liable to make quite a bit of money." I very much agree. HTML/CSS tooling in general is very poor today. Even something as simple as creating a cross-browser compatible semantic html + css website in a designer is very much lacking today, a lot of hand crafting is still necessary to achieve even moderately good results (e.g. efficient/performance friendly coding, search friendliness, consistent behavior and appearance across all popular browsers, aesthetically appealing result). And that doesn't even begin to touch a lot of the complicated process problems that html/css designing faces. For example, it'd be nice to be able to code design at a higher level than css in a language that gave you compile time warnings and errors, integrated into a build system that spit out verbose, commented inline css (to avoid caching issues) for debug/testing builds and minified, external, versioned css for production builds. And that's just a tiny corner of the whole tooling issue. Today tooling for web design is perhaps at the level of software engineering tooling in the early 70s. When web dev tooling finally catches up a lot of things will change and almost certainly a lot of people will have made a lot of money in providing that tooling.
- adriand 17y ago
  I think Flash is going to suffer because a lot of people just don't want to develop with it any more, for all sorts of reasons, not least the ones that have been popping up on HN lately (Apple products like the iPhone, non-OSS, etc.) There are tons of developers who would jump at the chance to switch to an alternative, and there are probably lots of developers who are reluctant to learn Flash for these reasons, but still want to be able to program nicely performing animations, interfaces and games. I fall into the latter category: Flash programming appeals to me because of what you can do with it, but I'm not interested in making a substantial investment of time into a platform that I would rather see replaced by OSS alternatives. (For similar reasons, I'm not planning on learning Obj-C to develop for the iPhone - I'd prefer to get good at developing mobile web applications using web technologies). The gradual shift in developer attention away from Flash over to alternatives is going to chip away at Flash over time, but I agree that it's going to take quite a long time. Ultimately I still find it hard to believe how far behind web browsers are when it comes to graphics. The stuff I was running on my 386 back in the day pretty much destroys anything you can do in a web browser. It's kind of sad when everybody gets super pumped that you can run a tiny, glitchy version of Wolfenstein 3D in a web browser. It's great that it runs. But shouldn't we be at full-screen Quake levels by now?
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    I agree, as do many other principled web-devs. Flash is not "of the web" even though today it is very much in the web. One hopes that the innate advantages of pure html/css/js designs will provide sufficient momentum to push the tooling and the rest to a state where it's absolutely better than flash. But that won't happen tomorrow, and probably not for several years.
  - est 17y ago
    iPhone is the new IE6
benologist 17y ago
What a laughable article. It's doomed because the iPhone doesn't have it and a tiny subset of Flash's capabilities are matched by HTML/CSS/JS? The only area that Flash is even remotely threatened is delivering video which may shift away from Flash over next decade, but that's assuming Adobe doesn't do anything at all to keep that market. Many mobile devices are getting full-featured flash players soon/now - http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200910/100509AFPforMobileDevicesandPCs.html http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/2009... The 'slow nature of proprietry software' ... in comparison to web standards???? The current standards for HTML/CSS/JS are a decade old, and HTML5 is years away from broad adoption. While web standards lag years - many sometimes - behind our evolving requirements there will be space for Flash and other plugins that more rapidly cater to new trends and technologies.
- icefox 17y ago
  A press release from adobe is not a very good citation for flash adoption. :) They wont exactly tell you about all the places flash isn't going to be.
- est 17y ago
  iPhone is the new IE6. HTML5 is the new <applet> which no one will bother install. There is a common fallacy among developers, we all assume what we like must be also liked by end-users and consumers.
  - gnosis 17y ago
    No, actually I've come to learn that what I hate will be what's most liked by end-users and consumers.
    - est 17y ago
      Call it time lag :)
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    "HTML5 is the new <applet> which no one will bother install." As easy as it is to be pessimistic about the browser technology of the average web user, I'm not so sure that HTML5/CSS3 is such a lost cause. Consider that already something like 1/4 to 1/3 of all web users in the US are using a browser that at least partially supports HTML5 or CSS3. Also consider that the more technologically sophisticated the audience of a particular site the more likely they are to use more modern browsers. Given these two simple facts and existing trends in browser marketshare (away from IE, toward FF, Chrome, Safari) I think there is a very real potential for some future major web venture (either de novo or as an evolution of an existing site) to have a strong case for relying on HTML5/CSS3 technologies. Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see just such a thing happen multiple times within the next year. As well there are many ways, as with html5 video, to take advantage of html5 features without abandoning support for "legacy browser" users. Which is the right way to do it just like any major refactoring/redesign effort. Look, take any major modern web site and open it up in a browser from 1997 and it just plain won't work, because modern sites are built using technology that wasn't supported back then. How did we get here from there? It was a long, slow, hard slog that was painful nearly every step of the way. Nevertheless, here we are, in all our modern CSS2(ish), AJAX, HTML4(ish) glory. Where will we be in 5 or 10 years? Certainly in a different world founded on different technologies and standards. How will we get there? It'll be a long, slow, hard slog just like it always is. But we'll still get there.
dpcan 17y ago
I will argue Flash is far from dead. Just this week I used Flash. A Client wanted to flip through photos, have words fade in over a period of time, and at the end, the logo was to fly in, glow, and then blend into the background. This was a perfect place to use Flash. Would I have done this in HTML and Javascript? No. Would I have created it in some other software and exported it as a video? No. It came to a few Kb in size when all finished and looked fantastic. I look at it this way: Aftereffects is to Video as Flash is to a Web Page. Your goal is to create something awesome, but if you suck at the program, you'll end up with crap. If you think that throwing out Flash will take the annoying ads and bad user interfaces of the world with it you are dreaming. Flash is a nice system for creating some great animations and UI's and I don't see any reason for it to die.
- ams6110 17y ago
  What do you do for people like me who browse with plugins disabled but Javascript allowed?
  - ryanpetrich 17y ago
    Or people like me who just want to get to the content and don't care about the fancy effects?
    - elblanco 17y ago
      If you are anything like me, just substitute "data" for "content" and we're on the same page. I think lots of people don't actually want to make their content/data easily available to others.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
- rimantas 17y ago
  Would I have done this in HTML and Javascript? No. A couple of lines in jQuery. Would work on iPhone too. CSS transitions and animation is a nice way to create simple (and not so simple animation). Work on iPhone too. Hardware accelerated.
param 17y ago
Its interesting to see an article one year after it being published; and see how things turn out. Flash still seems to be pretty pervasive even today.
keefe 17y ago
"efforts like mine would reduce the number of sites using Flash and eventually eliminate non-standard technologies like Flash from the web." This is just totally stupid. No, no a bunch of opinionated tech snobs not installing flash is never going to impact the market enough to impact the language. The fact is that the new flash VM is actually very good and delivers a sophisticated UI framework that is actually very pleasant to work with. There is a movement to merge AS3 with actionscript as well. The reality is that we're all just writing distributed applications with increasingly thick clients.
- JoachimSchipper 17y ago
  InDesign is reputedly very good, but it's hard to argue that the Adobe PDF reader is equally good - it's bloated, full of security problems, etcetera. Similarly, Adobe's Flash design tools may be cool; but the Flash client sucks. The anti-Flash sentiment wouldn't be quite as prominent if there were a decent, lightweight open-source Flash player that ran well everywhere. (Of course, the semantic web people would still hate Flash.)
  - keefe 17y ago
    Hilariously I worked at one of the most well known semweb companies working on a flash client for 3 years :] I'm not talking about using flash design to make stuff, I'm talking about AS3 which runs in the new VM 9+ which is actually a full featured programming language.
- keefe 17y ago
  Should read as3 and javascript, don't know how to edit on phone
- Locke1689 17y ago
  The fact is that the new flash VM is actually very good and delivers a sophisticated UI framework that is actually very pleasant to work with. The Flash VM is shit on everything but Windows. Anyone who thinks that it is a well written piece of software is deluding themselves.
danielrhodes 17y ago
"Free/libre/open-source software advocate and standards proponent" These people are the vegans of the internet.
- robotron 17y ago
  More like the "this is the year of the Linux desktop" people.
  - melling 17y ago
    ...the year of the Linux phone. Android arrives in a big way. We're saving the desktop for last. :-)
    - nailer 17y ago
      The desktop wars are over. The web is the platform now. You should put your energy into making sure that platform stays open.
- gnosis 17y ago
  My heroes.
poppysan 17y ago
Are there no pro-flash devs? I for one love as3. It made flash so much lighter, more manageable, and far more developer friendly. As of today there are no solutions to match flash's breadth of capabilities, and I would be sad to see it go...
Osmose 17y ago
I just recently started working with FlashPunk (http://flashpunk.net/ http://flashpunk.net/), a really cool and simple library for game development using AS3 and Flex. Game development in Flash isn't going away for a LONG time, methinks.
yason 17y ago
Aside from the online games segment Flash still seems to be the necessary evil mostly to show video. Let's see what widespread HTML5 will do to it, codec licensing issues notwithstanding :)
Dbug 17y ago
I'm really surprised that those here don't seem to be placing much importance on the numerous security holes that Flash has brought to all platforms. The first serious one I'd heard of wasn't fixed for like a year and a half? How do people get the notion that a vulnerability that isn't see use in mass-scale exploits doesn't matter? The holes exploited selectively can certainly be a serious threat to industry or government. To the developers that feel no choice but to use Flash, I suggest you make sure your sites use Javascript from a minimal number of domains because cautious users aren't going to enable them in NoScript when a dozen show up. It might also help that any domains needed beyond that of the site have names which give away their function. Surfing as securely as possible includes enabling added functionality very selectively. Make sure that when you test your sites they're usable to people running Firefox with NoScript, with little or no granting of permissions.

48 points by gnosis 17y ago

Flash isn't doomed quite yet. Flash supplanted java as the primary form of interactivity on the web in the early years, and javascript + html has been making inroads but flash still has a significant advantage. Pure HTML/CSS/JS/Canvas/SVG designs are nearly as capable as flash, but there are still serious design defects in the system, major problems with client support and standardization, and a distinct lack of tooling. Today it takes a not insignificant amount of effort just to make a simple text box with a border having 4 rounded corners that displays correctly for >90% of a site's visitors using pure html/css techniques. Even if every internet user upgraded to a modern, standards compliant, CSS3 supporting browser tomorrow, there would still be a substantial hill to climb for designing good looking pure html/css sites, it would just be a slightly smaller hill. Almost certainly this will change, standards will get better, browser marketshare will continue to skew toward newer browsers, tooling will improve, but all of these things will take time. This is not a defense of flash, I don't think flash is good for the web even today, but until the very real problems of pure html/css design are put to rest (CSS4?) flash will still be seen as a go-to technology for a lot of things people want to do with the web.

elblanco 17y ago
> and a distinct lack of tooling Great comment. I think this is a principle problem. Any company that can put together a flash alternative toolchain half as good as Adobe's flash production toolchain is liable to make quite a bit of money. Abstract away the browser incompatibility nonsense with the tools, provide the right kinds of editors and development environments, and lots of the complexity should be hidden away in the dev envrionment.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  "I think this is a principle problem. Any company that can put together a flash alternative toolchain half as good as Adobe's flash production toolchain is liable to make quite a bit of money." I very much agree. HTML/CSS tooling in general is very poor today. Even something as simple as creating a cross-browser compatible semantic html + css website in a designer is very much lacking today, a lot of hand crafting is still necessary to achieve even moderately good results (e.g. efficient/performance friendly coding, search friendliness, consistent behavior and appearance across all popular browsers, aesthetically appealing result). And that doesn't even begin to touch a lot of the complicated process problems that html/css designing faces. For example, it'd be nice to be able to code design at a higher level than css in a language that gave you compile time warnings and errors, integrated into a build system that spit out verbose, commented inline css (to avoid caching issues) for debug/testing builds and minified, external, versioned css for production builds. And that's just a tiny corner of the whole tooling issue. Today tooling for web design is perhaps at the level of software engineering tooling in the early 70s. When web dev tooling finally catches up a lot of things will change and almost certainly a lot of people will have made a lot of money in providing that tooling.
adriand 17y ago
I think Flash is going to suffer because a lot of people just don't want to develop with it any more, for all sorts of reasons, not least the ones that have been popping up on HN lately (Apple products like the iPhone, non-OSS, etc.) There are tons of developers who would jump at the chance to switch to an alternative, and there are probably lots of developers who are reluctant to learn Flash for these reasons, but still want to be able to program nicely performing animations, interfaces and games. I fall into the latter category: Flash programming appeals to me because of what you can do with it, but I'm not interested in making a substantial investment of time into a platform that I would rather see replaced by OSS alternatives. (For similar reasons, I'm not planning on learning Obj-C to develop for the iPhone - I'd prefer to get good at developing mobile web applications using web technologies). The gradual shift in developer attention away from Flash over to alternatives is going to chip away at Flash over time, but I agree that it's going to take quite a long time. Ultimately I still find it hard to believe how far behind web browsers are when it comes to graphics. The stuff I was running on my 386 back in the day pretty much destroys anything you can do in a web browser. It's kind of sad when everybody gets super pumped that you can run a tiny, glitchy version of Wolfenstein 3D in a web browser. It's great that it runs. But shouldn't we be at full-screen Quake levels by now?
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  I agree, as do many other principled web-devs. Flash is not "of the web" even though today it is very much in the web. One hopes that the innate advantages of pure html/css/js designs will provide sufficient momentum to push the tooling and the rest to a state where it's absolutely better than flash. But that won't happen tomorrow, and probably not for several years.
- est 17y ago
  iPhone is the new IE6

benologist 17y ago

What a laughable article. It's doomed because the iPhone doesn't have it and a tiny subset of Flash's capabilities are matched by HTML/CSS/JS? The only area that Flash is even remotely threatened is delivering video which may shift away from Flash over next decade, but that's assuming Adobe doesn't do anything at all to keep that market. Many mobile devices are getting full-featured flash players soon/now - http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200910/100509AFPforMobileDevicesandPCs.html http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/2009... The 'slow nature of proprietry software' ... in comparison to web standards???? The current standards for HTML/CSS/JS are a decade old, and HTML5 is years away from broad adoption. While web standards lag years - many sometimes - behind our evolving requirements there will be space for Flash and other plugins that more rapidly cater to new trends and technologies.

icefox 17y ago
A press release from adobe is not a very good citation for flash adoption. :) They wont exactly tell you about all the places flash isn't going to be.
est 17y ago
iPhone is the new IE6. HTML5 is the new <applet> which no one will bother install. There is a common fallacy among developers, we all assume what we like must be also liked by end-users and consumers.
- gnosis 17y ago
  No, actually I've come to learn that what I hate will be what's most liked by end-users and consumers.
  - est 17y ago
    Call it time lag :)
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  "HTML5 is the new <applet> which no one will bother install." As easy as it is to be pessimistic about the browser technology of the average web user, I'm not so sure that HTML5/CSS3 is such a lost cause. Consider that already something like 1/4 to 1/3 of all web users in the US are using a browser that at least partially supports HTML5 or CSS3. Also consider that the more technologically sophisticated the audience of a particular site the more likely they are to use more modern browsers. Given these two simple facts and existing trends in browser marketshare (away from IE, toward FF, Chrome, Safari) I think there is a very real potential for some future major web venture (either de novo or as an evolution of an existing site) to have a strong case for relying on HTML5/CSS3 technologies. Indeed, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see just such a thing happen multiple times within the next year. As well there are many ways, as with html5 video, to take advantage of html5 features without abandoning support for "legacy browser" users. Which is the right way to do it just like any major refactoring/redesign effort. Look, take any major modern web site and open it up in a browser from 1997 and it just plain won't work, because modern sites are built using technology that wasn't supported back then. How did we get here from there? It was a long, slow, hard slog that was painful nearly every step of the way. Nevertheless, here we are, in all our modern CSS2(ish), AJAX, HTML4(ish) glory. Where will we be in 5 or 10 years? Certainly in a different world founded on different technologies and standards. How will we get there? It'll be a long, slow, hard slog just like it always is. But we'll still get there.

dpcan 17y ago

I will argue Flash is far from dead. Just this week I used Flash. A Client wanted to flip through photos, have words fade in over a period of time, and at the end, the logo was to fly in, glow, and then blend into the background. This was a perfect place to use Flash. Would I have done this in HTML and Javascript? No. Would I have created it in some other software and exported it as a video? No. It came to a few Kb in size when all finished and looked fantastic. I look at it this way: Aftereffects is to Video as Flash is to a Web Page. Your goal is to create something awesome, but if you suck at the program, you'll end up with crap. If you think that throwing out Flash will take the annoying ads and bad user interfaces of the world with it you are dreaming. Flash is a nice system for creating some great animations and UI's and I don't see any reason for it to die.

ams6110 17y ago
What do you do for people like me who browse with plugins disabled but Javascript allowed?
- ryanpetrich 17y ago
  Or people like me who just want to get to the content and don't care about the fancy effects?
  - elblanco 17y ago
    If you are anything like me, just substitute "data" for "content" and we're on the same page. I think lots of people don't actually want to make their content/data easily available to others.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
rimantas 17y ago
Would I have done this in HTML and Javascript? No. A couple of lines in jQuery. Would work on iPhone too. CSS transitions and animation is a nice way to create simple (and not so simple animation). Work on iPhone too. Hardware accelerated.

param 17y ago

Its interesting to see an article one year after it being published; and see how things turn out. Flash still seems to be pretty pervasive even today.

keefe 17y ago

"efforts like mine would reduce the number of sites using Flash and eventually eliminate non-standard technologies like Flash from the web." This is just totally stupid. No, no a bunch of opinionated tech snobs not installing flash is never going to impact the market enough to impact the language. The fact is that the new flash VM is actually very good and delivers a sophisticated UI framework that is actually very pleasant to work with. There is a movement to merge AS3 with actionscript as well. The reality is that we're all just writing distributed applications with increasingly thick clients.

JoachimSchipper 17y ago
InDesign is reputedly very good, but it's hard to argue that the Adobe PDF reader is equally good - it's bloated, full of security problems, etcetera. Similarly, Adobe's Flash design tools may be cool; but the Flash client sucks. The anti-Flash sentiment wouldn't be quite as prominent if there were a decent, lightweight open-source Flash player that ran well everywhere. (Of course, the semantic web people would still hate Flash.)
- keefe 17y ago
  Hilariously I worked at one of the most well known semweb companies working on a flash client for 3 years :] I'm not talking about using flash design to make stuff, I'm talking about AS3 which runs in the new VM 9+ which is actually a full featured programming language.
keefe 17y ago
Should read as3 and javascript, don't know how to edit on phone
Locke1689 17y ago
The fact is that the new flash VM is actually very good and delivers a sophisticated UI framework that is actually very pleasant to work with. The Flash VM is shit on everything but Windows. Anyone who thinks that it is a well written piece of software is deluding themselves.

danielrhodes 17y ago

"Free/libre/open-source software advocate and standards proponent" These people are the vegans of the internet.

robotron 17y ago
More like the "this is the year of the Linux desktop" people.
- melling 17y ago
  ...the year of the Linux phone. Android arrives in a big way. We're saving the desktop for last. :-)
  - nailer 17y ago
    The desktop wars are over. The web is the platform now. You should put your energy into making sure that platform stays open.
gnosis 17y ago
My heroes.

poppysan 17y ago

Are there no pro-flash devs? I for one love as3. It made flash so much lighter, more manageable, and far more developer friendly. As of today there are no solutions to match flash's breadth of capabilities, and I would be sad to see it go...

Osmose 17y ago

I just recently started working with FlashPunk (http://flashpunk.net/ http://flashpunk.net/), a really cool and simple library for game development using AS3 and Flex. Game development in Flash isn't going away for a LONG time, methinks.

yason 17y ago

Aside from the online games segment Flash still seems to be the necessary evil mostly to show video. Let's see what widespread HTML5 will do to it, codec licensing issues notwithstanding :)

Dbug 17y ago

I'm really surprised that those here don't seem to be placing much importance on the numerous security holes that Flash has brought to all platforms. The first serious one I'd heard of wasn't fixed for like a year and a half? How do people get the notion that a vulnerability that isn't see use in mass-scale exploits doesn't matter? The holes exploited selectively can certainly be a serious threat to industry or government. To the developers that feel no choice but to use Flash, I suggest you make sure your sites use Javascript from a minimal number of domains because cautious users aren't going to enable them in NoScript when a dozen show up. It might also help that any domains needed beyond that of the site have names which give away their function. Surfing as securely as possible includes enabling added functionality very selectively. Make sure that when you test your sites they're usable to people running Firefox with NoScript, with little or no granting of permissions.