8 ms·

Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes?

130 points by spicyj 17y ago

joezydeco 17y ago
Here's something that came to mind reading this: When the iPhone was announced (and once again when the SDK was announced) there was a fair amount of teeth gnashing and whining about Java not being supported. Haven't heard one peep about Java on iPad this time around. Will Flash suffer the same fate?
- holman 17y ago
  The Java-on-the-iPhone critics were less numerous from the start (or at least were not as vocal). But you're right, though; I think it's easier now to wonder if Java would offer anything compelling to the iPhone platform anyway (other than offering another way to run your own code, which is a different discussion entirely). As to your second question: Java is a fundamentally important language in its own right (the enterprise angle); its success was never really tied to the availability of client-side runtimes. Flash doesn't quite have that same luxury.
  - joezydeco 17y ago
    I'm kind of second-guessing my thought as well. In the early days (well, the first year, really) of the iPhone Apple was steadfast in their idea that everything would be web-based. No SDK needed. The concern over Java at that point was if it was going to be allowed on the phone at all. JME/J2ME was what the mobile industry was trending toward. The success of Cocoa Touch and the App Store has pretty much made J2ME a footnote (except for the few carriers still hanging on).
    - pyre 17y ago
      > The success of Cocoa Touch and the App Store has pretty much made J2ME a footnote So now all cellphone apps are written in Cocoa Touch?
      - joezydeco 17y ago
        Never said that. The ease and user experience of Cocoa Touch and Android make J2ME apps look so slow and ugly that I don't honestly believe any consumer will put up with those kind of devices for much longer. About a year ago I sat in a meeting with a carrier that proclaimed "We're not worried about iPhone" but in the same breath asked "so, how can we get an App Store running for our handsets?"
    - GHFigs 17y ago
      Apple was steadfast in their idea that everything would be web-based. Is there an actual quote to back this up? I was paying close attention back in the "shit sandwich" days and I don't recall this "steadfast" insistence being actually stated by anyone from Apple. What I do remember was just a big disappointment at the time and Apple's usual silence on future plans. And the web SDK they did offer did actually end up getting used widely, as Gruber mentions in this article. I'm not trying to argue, I just see this idea that Apple never planned a native SDK is repeated so often and yet it doesn't fly with what I remember.
      - joezydeco 17y ago
        I totally understand. In the flurry of it all we've all forgotten what you remembered: Apple never said anything to the point of "No SDK. Ever." Aside from Jobs' WWDC 2007 address there were rumors and signals that "web was all you're gonna get"[1][2], but obviously they planned an SDK that eventually was announced 9 months after the reveal. Or developer pressure convinced the staff to polish the internal tools and APIs for public use? I'm kind of sad that with the new secretive Apple, we'll never know the full story behind the scenes for a long long time to come. [1] http://theappleblog.com/2007/06/11/tab-wwdc-2007-live-coverage/ http://theappleblog.com/2007/06/11/tab-wwdc-2007-live-covera... [2] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/10/source-iphone-sdk-will-remain-web-based-for-the-foreseeable-future.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/10/source-iphone-sdk-...
  - wtallis 17y ago
    Ultimately, what made Java on the iPhone irrelevant was the fact that the App Store was dominated by hobbyists and independent programmers. Java is not a hobbyist's language; it is the language that the non-technical corporate executives tell you to use. Objective-C and Cocoa were a fun enough environment that individuals were willing to learn how to use them in order to cash in on the iPhone App gold rush. The iPad will probably get more attention from corporate software developers, but it will also be getting a lot more attention from the hobbyists who are drooling over the possibilities of the big multitouch screen, and they are the ones who will be creating the truly innovative apps. (Yes, there are now sound technical reasons to use Java in enterprise environments, but that's only because Sun's marketing got it into the corporations in the first place. Java was originally intended for embedded systems, and later for web browsers. It's completely failed on both platforms.)
    - jamesbritt 17y ago
      Except you don't run Java code, you run JVM byte code, and there are an increasing number of entertaining ways to do that without writing any Java. The prospect of writing iStuff apps using Scala, Clojure (and one day I hope [J]Ruby) should be awfully appealing to innovative hobbyists, perhaps more so than using ObjC
      - pyre 17y ago
        On that note, is it possible to do that on Android? I know it's Java-based with their own low-level JVM or something like that.
        vetinari 17y ago
        Yes, it is, but it is currently not used for production. Dalvik does not care about language, it converts java class files to dex file. However, Scala/Clojure/etc have runtimes with quite significant initialization time, that gets lost on desktop, but not on mobile devices. Scala is getting there with minimal runtime, but Clojure still initializes too much and the startup time of Clojure application on Android is atrocious.
mark_h 17y ago
My favourite bit, regarding the infamous blue-boxes poster: Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264.
GeoJawDguJin 17y ago
The Hulu developers didn't pick Flash because it was "easy." They picked it because it allowed them to retain a high degree of control over their streaming video content -- control they would lose if they exposed an h.264 stream to an iPhone or iPad client. I think it could be five years or more before anyone watches Hulu or Netflix on any of these devices.
- catch23 17y ago
  No, I think the hulu developers picked flash because that's where the users are. They could have chosen java, or silverlight, but they chose flash for the same reason most sites choose flash. I'm sure if Hulu wanted to, they could develop a native app, just like the YouTube native app, for the iPhone, but my guess is that it wasn't part of their strategy initially. If netflix wants the iPad users, they would develop their own native app and ship it just like the other dozens of apps out there. In fact, it would give Hulu & Netflix greater control over their users with a native app. Hulu has already developed a desktop app, why wouldn't they develop a native app for the iPhone? Remember back in the IE4 & IE5 days? Lots of companies developed native ActiveX components that could be embedded into webpages because most users used IE4. I'm actually quite happy that Apple is forcing web companies out there to rethink open platforms. There's quite a few demos that show how powerful javascript & canvas can be already. It would be nice if we could replace the majority of flash apps with javascript, canvas, and webgl.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    I don't think it's fair to say that the Hulu developers "picked" flash. The number of technologies suitable for displaying video on the web in a reasonable way (pre-html5) is extremely limited, flash is pretty much the only game in town. Vimeo, youtube, break, etc, they all use flash. Now HTML5 is at least a reasonable alternative for a small fraction of web users but still Flash is the only reasonable option for video on the web today.
  - KC8ZKF 17y ago
    If Hulu or Netflix (which uses Silverlight) were to make a native application for iPad would Apple approve it? I don't know. Neither Hulu or Netflix could make an application without approval of both Apple and their content providers.
benologist 17y ago
A screenshot showing aviary working because they made a quicktime video alternate? Aviary's whole platform is a stunning example of how awesome Flash really can be, it's a suite of cutting edge design tools done in Flash and they haven't ported those to the iPhone - check them out if you want, their apps are just amazing: http://www.aviary.com http://www.aviary.com The 'games' they mention are not what TFB is showing either. Addicting Games (owned by MTV) is a casual game site with somewhere around a million daily visitors and 1000s of games you can just click to play, not apps you need to find, maybe buy, download and install. Even if that process is streamlined it doesn't scale to the extent Flash game sites do where at any time your investment in any game is just a click and countless other games are also just a click away.
- necubi 17y ago
  But the vast majority of flash games are useless on the iPhone and iPad, because they expect input mechanisms that those devices don't have. Though there's probably less variety, native games clearly provide a better experience because they are designed for the hardware.
  - glhaynes 17y ago
    Yes! It's extraordinary to me how much people forget this. Flash would be nice on the iPhone OS devices for movies, but a huge percentage of the games would be unplayable. No wonder Apple isn't interested.
  - benologist 17y ago
    In many cases you're right, Flash UI conventions are not going to generically hold true across the board for iPhones. A lot more would work than the current situation, where none do.
csmeder 17y ago
I'm liking John Gruber's posts more and more. Besides Paul Graham he might be favorite essayist right now.
jsz0 17y ago
In the midst of the iPad Flash controversy I think people are overlooking that Adobe has failed to deliver a major mobile Flash upgrade since early 2007. They missed their promise to deliver a beta for the Android and WebOS platforms in 2009. Android support is now projected for mid-2010. Since 2007 Apple has released 3 major versions of their iPhone OS, Google has announced, developed, and released a SmartPhone OS with 2 major revisions. Apple developed, announced, and will release the iPad before Adobe ships a modern mobile Flash for a large variety of devices. Linux & OSX support for Flash on the desktop is still subpar. If you think Flash is good or bad there are serious questions here about Adobe's ability to simply support this platform that is so widely relied on by developers.
- olefoo 17y ago
  Precisely. Not to mention the wonderful little easter egg that is flash-cookies which the user has no control over or visibility into. Adobe has let most of it's constituencies down.
  - DavidSJ 17y ago
    I didn't know about flash cookies. That's a mini scandal. Here's Adobe's terrible UI for viewing and deleting your Flash cookies: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...
    - KWD 17y ago
      That's actually bookmarked as the first item in my Firefox toolbar. Use it regularly, though also using the Better Privacy FF add-on. .
  - dzdzdzzz 17y ago
    At least there's some hope: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.html#browser http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht... "Flash Player 10.1 abides by the host browser's "private browsing" mode, where local data and browsing activity are not persisted locally, providing a consistent private browsing mechanism for SWF and HTML content. Private local shared objects behave like their public variants as long as Flash Player is in memory and local shared objects created during private browsing are removed when returning to public browsing mode. Existing shared objects are preserved but inaccessible until private browsing is turned off. Libraries in the Flash Player cache, like the Adobe Flex® framework, are unaffected by private mode. Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. No developer action required."
Niten 17y ago
As uneasy as I am about what the iPad might say about the future of personal computing, if it can deliver the death blow to Adobe Flash then I'm all for it. However, I do have my doubts. This article compares the iPad's Flash problems to Firefox's early problems with sites that were designed specifically for IE, but that's really an apples-to-oranges (Apples to Orange Foxes?) comparison. Firefox succeeded despite early incompatibilities because it targeted power users--the kinds of folks who can live with recurrent web browsing glitches, who can recognize broken sites and don't mind alt-tabbing back to IE where necessary. But the iPad's target demographic isn't the power user, it's the technological neophyte. iPad users may be less tolerant of things not "just working", and the iPad may therefore have a harder time of bridging that incompatibility gap than Firefox did. (And while Firefox users always had the option to fall back to IE--using Firefox and using IE were not mutually exclusive choices--what's the fallback option for iPad users when the content they want is only available with Flash? Carry a laptop with them, too?)
- wtallis 17y ago
  The lack of a fallback does seem to be the biggest issue. On the iPhone, it doesn't really matter, since none of the flash-based UIs would be usable on it anyways, so a separate version would still need to be developed. The iPad can afford somewhat PC-like interaction, so sites like Hulu could work if there was a flash plugin. What reassures me that Flash is on it's way down is the way web technologies have advanced and been adopted despite IE's dominance and Microsoft's reluctance to properly implement CSS and other newer web features. When Firefox hit the scene, IE was far more dominant than Flash is now, and yet it managed to fight its way into the mainstream. Web sites are now written to follow the standards everywhere that it's convenient, and CSS and JS hacks are used to make it work in IE. Sure, iPad users won't be as forgiving of broken sites as Firefox early adopters were, but their collective voice will be far more influential than the small band of rebels that broke the IE monopoly.
grayrest 17y ago
What I think every time I see the blue boxes screenshots: http://gr.ayre.st/s/images/go_flash.png http://gr.ayre.st/s/images/go_flash.png
- calcnerd256 17y ago
  That's what I think of every time I see a page that has flash on it. It makes me wish I knew of an easy way to install a fake flash plugin into Chrome that intentionally crashes immediately.
  - InclinedPlane 17y ago
    There's the FlashBlock extension, it's a bit primitive yet but still seemingly useful: http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/flashblock/ http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/flash...
  - FluidDjango 17y ago
    Every time i see a page with flash on it i think, "Sure glad i installed clickToFlash." [ —not affiliated with CTF... but not a fan of hyperkinetic ads and auto-start videos.]
- ajkirwin 17y ago
  I have never, never, EVER had flash crash. Nor has anyone else I know. But then, they all use PCs..
  - tumult 17y ago
    It's always easy to spot people who make a living programming solely in Flash. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon -- people will suddenly, and vocally, speak up in support of Flash with outlandish claims.
    - alex_c 17y ago
      I'm not sure who's making the outlandish claims here. I haven't programmed Flash in my life, but I can't say I've had Flash crash on me more often than, say, once a few months. Definitely not often enough that I notice it as a major annoyance, on either Mac or Windows. Now, Flash is annoying for other reasons, but crashing isn't one -- for me.
olalonde 17y ago
I'm all for seeing Flash die a slow death. However, I wouldn't celebrate Apple for making the web more open: their AppStore is the worst proprietary/closed platform out there.
halo 17y ago
There's always the status quo - that the majority of content producers will simply continue to make content using Flash that the iPhone and iPad can't access, and users mostly live with it with the occasional grumble, while the bigger providers will largely create dedicated applications to work-around the issue (and that isn't going to kill Flash). Let's get some perspective here. The iPhone currently represents around 0.45% of all web browsing (citation: http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/net_applications_mac_os_x_sees_market_share_dips_in_december_iphone_safari_/ http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/net_applicatio...). The iPhone's dent in Flash's market share represents at most a drop from 99% to 98%. For the iPhone and iPad to get the marketshare of Opera, this usage would need to triple. Would you radically redesign how your site works for Opera users? Developers do follow what their users have, but little has changed and users still have Flash. To make matters worse, there's no drop-in replacement. For the most common use-case of audio and video, we're in standards hell -- Firefox and Internet Explorer make up over 80% of web browsers on the Internet between them, and Mozilla aren't going to support the H.264 video tag and Microsoft are unlikely to support it in IE either. And in many other cases, websites are using Flash to do things they simply can't do in HTML (or even HTML5), whether DRM, streaming video, or something vastly more complicated.
callmeed 17y ago
Our company's bread and butter are Flash-based portfolio sites (and a good amount of bread, I might add). But I don't want Flash on the iPhone OS. I remember looking at one of our sites on my old Dell Axim—it sucked. I'm already working on new, non-Flash offerings and they're going to sell well (I think). I can do almost everything my clients want now w/o Flash—once HTML 5 is fully supported, everything. Like Gruber said, I don't care about Adobe, I care about me and my clients.
mixmax 17y ago
Gruber is right. I checked my site's stats, and to my surprise 8,4% of my visitors don't support flash.
- edd 17y ago
  Lots of other people on twitter are also checking their flash stats. You can see the results here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shareyourflashstats http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shareyourflashstats I would be intrigued to see some big players announce their stats also but anyone of any size usually keeps stats close to their chests.
  - ZeroGravitas 17y ago
    It would be interesting to see what the Flash stats for news.ycombinator.com are.
friism 17y ago
Don't forget Gordon, the open source Flash runtime implemented in Javascript and HTML5: http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon I don't think something like this will save Adobe's derriere though -- at best it'll be a fallback-option developers can use if they must include Falsh content.
- pyre 17y ago
  It doesn't provide everything that flash does, and IIRC only supports flash animations. Some things that flash provides that JavaScript (at least JS provided by the server) can't provide: Webcam and microphone access (think sites like ustream and stickam), exact font control (there was a demo site a while back that showed the same site rendered on different browsers to demonstrate how much even the placement of fonts differed), etc. I'm no proponent of Flash, but to say that Gordon can completely replace Flash is not the truth.

130 points by spicyj 17y ago

Here's something that came to mind reading this: When the iPhone was announced (and once again when the SDK was announced) there was a fair amount of teeth gnashing and whining about Java not being supported. Haven't heard one peep about Java on iPad this time around. Will Flash suffer the same fate?

holman 17y ago
The Java-on-the-iPhone critics were less numerous from the start (or at least were not as vocal). But you're right, though; I think it's easier now to wonder if Java would offer anything compelling to the iPhone platform anyway (other than offering another way to run your own code, which is a different discussion entirely). As to your second question: Java is a fundamentally important language in its own right (the enterprise angle); its success was never really tied to the availability of client-side runtimes. Flash doesn't quite have that same luxury.
- joezydeco 17y ago
  I'm kind of second-guessing my thought as well. In the early days (well, the first year, really) of the iPhone Apple was steadfast in their idea that everything would be web-based. No SDK needed. The concern over Java at that point was if it was going to be allowed on the phone at all. JME/J2ME was what the mobile industry was trending toward. The success of Cocoa Touch and the App Store has pretty much made J2ME a footnote (except for the few carriers still hanging on).
  - pyre 17y ago
    > The success of Cocoa Touch and the App Store has pretty much made J2ME a footnote So now all cellphone apps are written in Cocoa Touch?
    - joezydeco 17y ago
      Never said that. The ease and user experience of Cocoa Touch and Android make J2ME apps look so slow and ugly that I don't honestly believe any consumer will put up with those kind of devices for much longer. About a year ago I sat in a meeting with a carrier that proclaimed "We're not worried about iPhone" but in the same breath asked "so, how can we get an App Store running for our handsets?"
  - GHFigs 17y ago
    Apple was steadfast in their idea that everything would be web-based. Is there an actual quote to back this up? I was paying close attention back in the "shit sandwich" days and I don't recall this "steadfast" insistence being actually stated by anyone from Apple. What I do remember was just a big disappointment at the time and Apple's usual silence on future plans. And the web SDK they did offer did actually end up getting used widely, as Gruber mentions in this article. I'm not trying to argue, I just see this idea that Apple never planned a native SDK is repeated so often and yet it doesn't fly with what I remember.
    - joezydeco 17y ago
      I totally understand. In the flurry of it all we've all forgotten what you remembered: Apple never said anything to the point of "No SDK. Ever." Aside from Jobs' WWDC 2007 address there were rumors and signals that "web was all you're gonna get"[1][2], but obviously they planned an SDK that eventually was announced 9 months after the reveal. Or developer pressure convinced the staff to polish the internal tools and APIs for public use? I'm kind of sad that with the new secretive Apple, we'll never know the full story behind the scenes for a long long time to come. [1] http://theappleblog.com/2007/06/11/tab-wwdc-2007-live-coverage/ http://theappleblog.com/2007/06/11/tab-wwdc-2007-live-covera... [2] http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/10/source-iphone-sdk-will-remain-web-based-for-the-foreseeable-future.ars http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2007/10/source-iphone-sdk-...
- wtallis 17y ago
  Ultimately, what made Java on the iPhone irrelevant was the fact that the App Store was dominated by hobbyists and independent programmers. Java is not a hobbyist's language; it is the language that the non-technical corporate executives tell you to use. Objective-C and Cocoa were a fun enough environment that individuals were willing to learn how to use them in order to cash in on the iPhone App gold rush. The iPad will probably get more attention from corporate software developers, but it will also be getting a lot more attention from the hobbyists who are drooling over the possibilities of the big multitouch screen, and they are the ones who will be creating the truly innovative apps. (Yes, there are now sound technical reasons to use Java in enterprise environments, but that's only because Sun's marketing got it into the corporations in the first place. Java was originally intended for embedded systems, and later for web browsers. It's completely failed on both platforms.)
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    Except you don't run Java code, you run JVM byte code, and there are an increasing number of entertaining ways to do that without writing any Java. The prospect of writing iStuff apps using Scala, Clojure (and one day I hope [J]Ruby) should be awfully appealing to innovative hobbyists, perhaps more so than using ObjC
    - pyre 17y ago
      On that note, is it possible to do that on Android? I know it's Java-based with their own low-level JVM or something like that.
      - vetinari 17y ago
        Yes, it is, but it is currently not used for production. Dalvik does not care about language, it converts java class files to dex file. However, Scala/Clojure/etc have runtimes with quite significant initialization time, that gets lost on desktop, but not on mobile devices. Scala is getting there with minimal runtime, but Clojure still initializes too much and the startup time of Clojure application on Android is atrocious.

mark_h 17y ago

My favourite bit, regarding the infamous blue-boxes poster: Ends up a bunch of them, including the porno site, already have iPhone-optimized versions with no blue boxes, and video that plays just fine as straight-up H.264.

GeoJawDguJin 17y ago

The Hulu developers didn't pick Flash because it was "easy." They picked it because it allowed them to retain a high degree of control over their streaming video content -- control they would lose if they exposed an h.264 stream to an iPhone or iPad client. I think it could be five years or more before anyone watches Hulu or Netflix on any of these devices.

catch23 17y ago
No, I think the hulu developers picked flash because that's where the users are. They could have chosen java, or silverlight, but they chose flash for the same reason most sites choose flash. I'm sure if Hulu wanted to, they could develop a native app, just like the YouTube native app, for the iPhone, but my guess is that it wasn't part of their strategy initially. If netflix wants the iPad users, they would develop their own native app and ship it just like the other dozens of apps out there. In fact, it would give Hulu & Netflix greater control over their users with a native app. Hulu has already developed a desktop app, why wouldn't they develop a native app for the iPhone? Remember back in the IE4 & IE5 days? Lots of companies developed native ActiveX components that could be embedded into webpages because most users used IE4. I'm actually quite happy that Apple is forcing web companies out there to rethink open platforms. There's quite a few demos that show how powerful javascript & canvas can be already. It would be nice if we could replace the majority of flash apps with javascript, canvas, and webgl.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  I don't think it's fair to say that the Hulu developers "picked" flash. The number of technologies suitable for displaying video on the web in a reasonable way (pre-html5) is extremely limited, flash is pretty much the only game in town. Vimeo, youtube, break, etc, they all use flash. Now HTML5 is at least a reasonable alternative for a small fraction of web users but still Flash is the only reasonable option for video on the web today.
- KC8ZKF 17y ago
  If Hulu or Netflix (which uses Silverlight) were to make a native application for iPad would Apple approve it? I don't know. Neither Hulu or Netflix could make an application without approval of both Apple and their content providers.

benologist 17y ago

A screenshot showing aviary working because they made a quicktime video alternate? Aviary's whole platform is a stunning example of how awesome Flash really can be, it's a suite of cutting edge design tools done in Flash and they haven't ported those to the iPhone - check them out if you want, their apps are just amazing: http://www.aviary.com http://www.aviary.com The 'games' they mention are not what TFB is showing either. Addicting Games (owned by MTV) is a casual game site with somewhere around a million daily visitors and 1000s of games you can just click to play, not apps you need to find, maybe buy, download and install. Even if that process is streamlined it doesn't scale to the extent Flash game sites do where at any time your investment in any game is just a click and countless other games are also just a click away.

necubi 17y ago
But the vast majority of flash games are useless on the iPhone and iPad, because they expect input mechanisms that those devices don't have. Though there's probably less variety, native games clearly provide a better experience because they are designed for the hardware.
- glhaynes 17y ago
  Yes! It's extraordinary to me how much people forget this. Flash would be nice on the iPhone OS devices for movies, but a huge percentage of the games would be unplayable. No wonder Apple isn't interested.
- benologist 17y ago
  In many cases you're right, Flash UI conventions are not going to generically hold true across the board for iPhones. A lot more would work than the current situation, where none do.

csmeder 17y ago

I'm liking John Gruber's posts more and more. Besides Paul Graham he might be favorite essayist right now.

jsz0 17y ago

In the midst of the iPad Flash controversy I think people are overlooking that Adobe has failed to deliver a major mobile Flash upgrade since early 2007. They missed their promise to deliver a beta for the Android and WebOS platforms in 2009. Android support is now projected for mid-2010. Since 2007 Apple has released 3 major versions of their iPhone OS, Google has announced, developed, and released a SmartPhone OS with 2 major revisions. Apple developed, announced, and will release the iPad before Adobe ships a modern mobile Flash for a large variety of devices. Linux & OSX support for Flash on the desktop is still subpar. If you think Flash is good or bad there are serious questions here about Adobe's ability to simply support this platform that is so widely relied on by developers.

olefoo 17y ago
Precisely. Not to mention the wonderful little easter egg that is flash-cookies which the user has no control over or visibility into. Adobe has let most of it's constituencies down.
- DavidSJ 17y ago
  I didn't know about flash cookies. That's a mini scandal. Here's Adobe's terrible UI for viewing and deleting your Flash cookies: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager03.html http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplay...
  - KWD 17y ago
    That's actually bookmarked as the first item in my Firefox toolbar. Use it regularly, though also using the Better Privacy FF add-on. .
- dzdzdzzz 17y ago
  At least there's some hope: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.html#browser http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/features.ht... "Flash Player 10.1 abides by the host browser's "private browsing" mode, where local data and browsing activity are not persisted locally, providing a consistent private browsing mechanism for SWF and HTML content. Private local shared objects behave like their public variants as long as Flash Player is in memory and local shared objects created during private browsing are removed when returning to public browsing mode. Existing shared objects are preserved but inaccessible until private browsing is turned off. Libraries in the Flash Player cache, like the Adobe Flex® framework, are unaffected by private mode. Supported in Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. No developer action required."

Niten 17y ago

As uneasy as I am about what the iPad might say about the future of personal computing, if it can deliver the death blow to Adobe Flash then I'm all for it. However, I do have my doubts. This article compares the iPad's Flash problems to Firefox's early problems with sites that were designed specifically for IE, but that's really an apples-to-oranges (Apples to Orange Foxes?) comparison. Firefox succeeded despite early incompatibilities because it targeted power users--the kinds of folks who can live with recurrent web browsing glitches, who can recognize broken sites and don't mind alt-tabbing back to IE where necessary. But the iPad's target demographic isn't the power user, it's the technological neophyte. iPad users may be less tolerant of things not "just working", and the iPad may therefore have a harder time of bridging that incompatibility gap than Firefox did. (And while Firefox users always had the option to fall back to IE--using Firefox and using IE were not mutually exclusive choices--what's the fallback option for iPad users when the content they want is only available with Flash? Carry a laptop with them, too?)

wtallis 17y ago
The lack of a fallback does seem to be the biggest issue. On the iPhone, it doesn't really matter, since none of the flash-based UIs would be usable on it anyways, so a separate version would still need to be developed. The iPad can afford somewhat PC-like interaction, so sites like Hulu could work if there was a flash plugin. What reassures me that Flash is on it's way down is the way web technologies have advanced and been adopted despite IE's dominance and Microsoft's reluctance to properly implement CSS and other newer web features. When Firefox hit the scene, IE was far more dominant than Flash is now, and yet it managed to fight its way into the mainstream. Web sites are now written to follow the standards everywhere that it's convenient, and CSS and JS hacks are used to make it work in IE. Sure, iPad users won't be as forgiving of broken sites as Firefox early adopters were, but their collective voice will be far more influential than the small band of rebels that broke the IE monopoly.

grayrest 17y ago

What I think every time I see the blue boxes screenshots: http://gr.ayre.st/s/images/go_flash.png http://gr.ayre.st/s/images/go_flash.png

calcnerd256 17y ago
That's what I think of every time I see a page that has flash on it. It makes me wish I knew of an easy way to install a fake flash plugin into Chrome that intentionally crashes immediately.
- InclinedPlane 17y ago
  There's the FlashBlock extension, it's a bit primitive yet but still seemingly useful: http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/flashblock/ http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/flash...
- FluidDjango 17y ago
  Every time i see a page with flash on it i think, "Sure glad i installed clickToFlash." [ —not affiliated with CTF... but not a fan of hyperkinetic ads and auto-start videos.]
ajkirwin 17y ago
I have never, never, EVER had flash crash. Nor has anyone else I know. But then, they all use PCs..
- tumult 17y ago
  It's always easy to spot people who make a living programming solely in Flash. It's kind of an interesting phenomenon -- people will suddenly, and vocally, speak up in support of Flash with outlandish claims.
  - alex_c 17y ago
    I'm not sure who's making the outlandish claims here. I haven't programmed Flash in my life, but I can't say I've had Flash crash on me more often than, say, once a few months. Definitely not often enough that I notice it as a major annoyance, on either Mac or Windows. Now, Flash is annoying for other reasons, but crashing isn't one -- for me.

olalonde 17y ago

I'm all for seeing Flash die a slow death. However, I wouldn't celebrate Apple for making the web more open: their AppStore is the worst proprietary/closed platform out there.

halo 17y ago

There's always the status quo - that the majority of content producers will simply continue to make content using Flash that the iPhone and iPad can't access, and users mostly live with it with the occasional grumble, while the bigger providers will largely create dedicated applications to work-around the issue (and that isn't going to kill Flash). Let's get some perspective here. The iPhone currently represents around 0.45% of all web browsing (citation: http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/net_applications_mac_os_x_sees_market_share_dips_in_december_iphone_safari_/ http://www.macsimumnews.com/index.php/archive/net_applicatio...). The iPhone's dent in Flash's market share represents at most a drop from 99% to 98%. For the iPhone and iPad to get the marketshare of Opera, this usage would need to triple. Would you radically redesign how your site works for Opera users? Developers do follow what their users have, but little has changed and users still have Flash. To make matters worse, there's no drop-in replacement. For the most common use-case of audio and video, we're in standards hell -- Firefox and Internet Explorer make up over 80% of web browsers on the Internet between them, and Mozilla aren't going to support the H.264 video tag and Microsoft are unlikely to support it in IE either. And in many other cases, websites are using Flash to do things they simply can't do in HTML (or even HTML5), whether DRM, streaming video, or something vastly more complicated.

callmeed 17y ago

Our company's bread and butter are Flash-based portfolio sites (and a good amount of bread, I might add). But I don't want Flash on the iPhone OS. I remember looking at one of our sites on my old Dell Axim—it sucked. I'm already working on new, non-Flash offerings and they're going to sell well (I think). I can do almost everything my clients want now w/o Flash—once HTML 5 is fully supported, everything. Like Gruber said, I don't care about Adobe, I care about me and my clients.

mixmax 17y ago

Gruber is right. I checked my site's stats, and to my surprise 8,4% of my visitors don't support flash.

edd 17y ago
Lots of other people on twitter are also checking their flash stats. You can see the results here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shareyourflashstats http://search.twitter.com/search?q=shareyourflashstats I would be intrigued to see some big players announce their stats also but anyone of any size usually keeps stats close to their chests.
- ZeroGravitas 17y ago
  It would be interesting to see what the Flash stats for news.ycombinator.com are.

friism 17y ago

Don't forget Gordon, the open source Flash runtime implemented in Javascript and HTML5: http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon I don't think something like this will save Adobe's derriere though -- at best it'll be a fallback-option developers can use if they must include Falsh content.

pyre 17y ago
It doesn't provide everything that flash does, and IIRC only supports flash animations. Some things that flash provides that JavaScript (at least JS provided by the server) can't provide: Webcam and microphone access (think sites like ustream and stickam), exact font control (there was a demo site a while back that showed the same site rendered on different browsers to demonstrate how much even the placement of fonts differed), etc. I'm no proponent of Flash, but to say that Gordon can completely replace Flash is not the truth.