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I don't know about Linux, but back when Flash was relevant the Mac version always felt like an inefficient crashy dumpster fire to me. I don't have a source to

I don't know about Linux, but back when Flash was relevant the Mac version always felt like an inefficient crashy dumpster fire to me. I don't have a source to back this up, but I always assumed that was a big part of why Jobs was so uninterested in supporting it on iOS.

mattnewton 9y ago
Yup https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. "
- kbenson 9y ago
  That's... interesting, and it also smacks of quite a bit of PR to me. If an app causes your OS to crash, and that problem persists for several years, you can no longer blame that squarely on the app. Your OS should not allow an app to crash it. It happens anyways, and that means you have a bug in your OS at best (and possibly an exploit). All this means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep their OS from crashing. Sure, flash was crap, but keeping crap software from crashing your computer is one of the things the OS does.
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    I think he meant "crashes logged on Mac OS" not that the operating system itself crashed
    - kbenson 9y ago
      That's definitely not what that phrasing means, and I find it hard to believe that it would have been accidentally overlooked in a PR piece like this. To me that means the likely explanations are that either it actually caused Macs to crash (which I seem to recall from experience it could, at least occasionally), or that Jobs is purposefully trying to shift OS instability blame to an application, which I think is possible. Or some combination thereof.
      - nardi 9y ago
        As is common, Apple uses the term “panic” to describe the OS itself failing. “Crash” is reserved for applications.
        jacoblambda 9y ago
        I believe that also applies to most UNIXes and UNIX-likes. <rambling> I really like that terminology though, it makes quite a bit of sense. When you witness a crash(you are not part of the crash, you were simply witnessing/interacting with the thing that crashed. You are not necessarily harmed), it is not like the whole world is falling apart. There was a crash, it is horrible and now you have to save what you can. This applies both digitally and in real life. Think crashing a drone or watching a plane crash. You rush to the scene and call for help, but you are not harmed. Now when the OS fails, it stops everything and can potentially result in significantly more data loss than a standard application crash. Much like when a person is in an accident involving a vehicle. It is no longer just a crash, it is now a panic. When you end up in an accident you don't think "oh ya that crash" you think panic, not the word, the feeling. </rambling> Sorry for the rambling on, it kinda just happened. But ya that terminology is great.
        kbenson 9y ago
        If that's so, then the way it was worded seems needlessly unclear. It specifically says it caused Macs to crash. The normal terminology (and proper English) would be to say "cause Mac applications to crash" when referring to the applications and not the OS or hardware. It's like someone saying "Windows crash" is supposed to refer to Windows applications because people say blue screen instead of crash usually. Even if you accept the terminology, it's applied to the wrong subject. As I said, I can't imagine that distinction having escaped notice in a PR piece such as this.
        snowwrestler 9y ago
        You need to let this go. You're trying to argue something that everyone understood well at the time. Thousands of news stories followed up on every detail in that letter and it was very clear what Apple meant.
    - wlesieutre 9y ago
      This was also published not too long after Snow Leopard came out (August 2009), which is when Safari first split plugins out to a separate process, as long as you were running it in 64-bit mode. Before that it could bring down the whole browser, after it would only kill itself and require pages to be reloaded. So it's not like Apple wasn't doing anything about it. Obviously a positive change in general, but the push to prioritize that and get it done must have been 99% aimed at problems caused by Flash. And even after that was implemented, an ad crashing flash in one window would still bring down a video player in another, if I'm remembering right. Still a crappy user experience.
  - masklinn 9y ago
    They mean application crashes, not the entire OS. And Flash was the reason they rewrote Safari's plugin system to load them in a separate process so as not to crash the entire browser. This was released around the same time as the open letter.
  - j45 9y ago
    IIRC at the time, Flash lite powered or existed on many more mobile phones than did iOS. Neat stuff to read into the history of. Many of the things in this letter were true, but Apple itself was holding back some things. iOS had it's own battery management issues at this time (even though it was 1-2 generations ahead of Android power management). Cutting to the bone of power management has paid dividends for Apple, the iPhone generally manages power much better than any Android phone I use. The latest Nexus phones from Google started to change that drastically and I hope that continues.
mrpippy 9y ago
Exactly, and the Linux version was similarly bad and unmaintained. I don't think they released a 64-bit x86 version until 2008/2009 when Linux on amd64 had been common since 2005 if not before. I remember having to either keep a 32-bit browser around just for Flash or use (impressive) hacks like nspluginwrapper. I suspect the crappiness of the Mac/Linux versions was not because of developer incompetence, but a severe lack of developers/resources for those teams. Hopefully there are some managers at Adobe who realize that, if they hadn't shipped a crappy product for so many years used by every Mac user, they could have made an actual case for their ability to support high-quality Flash on iOS.
- kakwa_ 9y ago
  I could not agree more. The Linux version was really badly maintained for ages. Circa 2014, I had to do weird stuff like sed on the .so flash plugin to bump artificially its version string from 11 to 12 This was to work around a requirement for VMware VCenter UI which required flash versions newer that the one available for Firefox at that time (11.2 IIRC). I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code. It's probably not the most beautiful code in the world, but at least, it would provide a reference implementation and help other implementations a lot.
  - chungy 9y ago
    As much as I personally dislike Flash, I have to agree that making it open source would be a net benefit to the world, even if only for preservation of existing media.
  - gmmeyer 9y ago
    Flash on Linux was discontinued in 2012: http://www.pcworld.com/article/250784/for_flash_on_linux_there_are_open_player_alternatives.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/250784/for_flash_on_linux_the... Even back then you had to do hacks to get it to work. But after that it became very hard to get anything to work. Eventually someone came out with a service called pipelight that I used to use that would allow you to use windows only plugins in Firefox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight. It worked great until I didn't need it anymore.
jakobegger 9y ago
Yes. Flash was unusably slow on MacOS. Stuff that ran smooth on Windows would stutter and lag on the Mac.
- GirlsCanCode 9y ago
  Maybe, just maybe, that's because Windows is a better OS.
curun1r 9y ago
It was bewildering how bad Flash on the Mac was. Simple animations and videos would spin all of my cores up into the high 90s%. I installed a CPU throttling command line tool and would set the flash process to 30% of one core and the animation or video would still play fine, with no noticeable degradation in quality or framerate. I've always wondered whether part of the monetization of Flash was an embedded Bitcoin Miner or other such code to make use of our spare CPU cycles.
- egypturnash 9y ago
  Flash has always been crap on the Mac. Always. I was working with it around 2000-05 and the player was always like half as fast as a similarly specced Windows machine. Plus there were some wonderful Mac-only bugs in v5 of the editor that cropped up when you tried to edit files big enough to contain a whole cartoon. And by "wonderful" I mean "I lost a week of my life to editing a cartoon in five minute bursts of work, followed by having to reboot the entire system because Flash had crashed so hard it refused to run until I did that."
intoverflow2 9y ago
Adobe always used to blame OS X for being literally half the performance of the Windows version claiming it wasn't their fault (Mac team was a fraction of the size I heard). Then Jobs wrote "Thoughts on Flash" and magically a month or so later the Mac version ran a ton better and continued to get better for about a year. Have little sympathy for such a reactionary approach to user experience when the majority of Flash authoring occurred in ad agencies running Macs.

mattnewton 9y ago

Yup https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. "

kbenson 9y ago
That's... interesting, and it also smacks of quite a bit of PR to me. If an app causes your OS to crash, and that problem persists for several years, you can no longer blame that squarely on the app. Your OS should not allow an app to crash it. It happens anyways, and that means you have a bug in your OS at best (and possibly an exploit). All this means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep their OS from crashing. Sure, flash was crap, but keeping crap software from crashing your computer is one of the things the OS does.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  I think he meant "crashes logged on Mac OS" not that the operating system itself crashed
  - kbenson 9y ago
    That's definitely not what that phrasing means, and I find it hard to believe that it would have been accidentally overlooked in a PR piece like this. To me that means the likely explanations are that either it actually caused Macs to crash (which I seem to recall from experience it could, at least occasionally), or that Jobs is purposefully trying to shift OS instability blame to an application, which I think is possible. Or some combination thereof.
    - nardi 9y ago
      As is common, Apple uses the term “panic” to describe the OS itself failing. “Crash” is reserved for applications.
      - jacoblambda 9y ago
        I believe that also applies to most UNIXes and UNIX-likes. <rambling> I really like that terminology though, it makes quite a bit of sense. When you witness a crash(you are not part of the crash, you were simply witnessing/interacting with the thing that crashed. You are not necessarily harmed), it is not like the whole world is falling apart. There was a crash, it is horrible and now you have to save what you can. This applies both digitally and in real life. Think crashing a drone or watching a plane crash. You rush to the scene and call for help, but you are not harmed. Now when the OS fails, it stops everything and can potentially result in significantly more data loss than a standard application crash. Much like when a person is in an accident involving a vehicle. It is no longer just a crash, it is now a panic. When you end up in an accident you don't think "oh ya that crash" you think panic, not the word, the feeling. </rambling> Sorry for the rambling on, it kinda just happened. But ya that terminology is great.
      - kbenson 9y ago
        If that's so, then the way it was worded seems needlessly unclear. It specifically says it caused Macs to crash. The normal terminology (and proper English) would be to say "cause Mac applications to crash" when referring to the applications and not the OS or hardware. It's like someone saying "Windows crash" is supposed to refer to Windows applications because people say blue screen instead of crash usually. Even if you accept the terminology, it's applied to the wrong subject. As I said, I can't imagine that distinction having escaped notice in a PR piece such as this.
        snowwrestler 9y ago
        You need to let this go. You're trying to argue something that everyone understood well at the time. Thousands of news stories followed up on every detail in that letter and it was very clear what Apple meant.
  - wlesieutre 9y ago
    This was also published not too long after Snow Leopard came out (August 2009), which is when Safari first split plugins out to a separate process, as long as you were running it in 64-bit mode. Before that it could bring down the whole browser, after it would only kill itself and require pages to be reloaded. So it's not like Apple wasn't doing anything about it. Obviously a positive change in general, but the push to prioritize that and get it done must have been 99% aimed at problems caused by Flash. And even after that was implemented, an ad crashing flash in one window would still bring down a video player in another, if I'm remembering right. Still a crappy user experience.
- masklinn 9y ago
  They mean application crashes, not the entire OS. And Flash was the reason they rewrote Safari's plugin system to load them in a separate process so as not to crash the entire browser. This was released around the same time as the open letter.
- j45 9y ago
  IIRC at the time, Flash lite powered or existed on many more mobile phones than did iOS. Neat stuff to read into the history of. Many of the things in this letter were true, but Apple itself was holding back some things. iOS had it's own battery management issues at this time (even though it was 1-2 generations ahead of Android power management). Cutting to the bone of power management has paid dividends for Apple, the iPhone generally manages power much better than any Android phone I use. The latest Nexus phones from Google started to change that drastically and I hope that continues.

mrpippy 9y ago

Exactly, and the Linux version was similarly bad and unmaintained. I don't think they released a 64-bit x86 version until 2008/2009 when Linux on amd64 had been common since 2005 if not before. I remember having to either keep a 32-bit browser around just for Flash or use (impressive) hacks like nspluginwrapper. I suspect the crappiness of the Mac/Linux versions was not because of developer incompetence, but a severe lack of developers/resources for those teams. Hopefully there are some managers at Adobe who realize that, if they hadn't shipped a crappy product for so many years used by every Mac user, they could have made an actual case for their ability to support high-quality Flash on iOS.

kakwa_ 9y ago
I could not agree more. The Linux version was really badly maintained for ages. Circa 2014, I had to do weird stuff like sed on the .so flash plugin to bump artificially its version string from 11 to 12 This was to work around a requirement for VMware VCenter UI which required flash versions newer that the one available for Firefox at that time (11.2 IIRC). I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code. It's probably not the most beautiful code in the world, but at least, it would provide a reference implementation and help other implementations a lot.
- chungy 9y ago
  As much as I personally dislike Flash, I have to agree that making it open source would be a net benefit to the world, even if only for preservation of existing media.
- gmmeyer 9y ago
  Flash on Linux was discontinued in 2012: http://www.pcworld.com/article/250784/for_flash_on_linux_there_are_open_player_alternatives.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/250784/for_flash_on_linux_the... Even back then you had to do hacks to get it to work. But after that it became very hard to get anything to work. Eventually someone came out with a service called pipelight that I used to use that would allow you to use windows only plugins in Firefox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight. It worked great until I didn't need it anymore.

jakobegger 9y ago

Yes. Flash was unusably slow on MacOS. Stuff that ran smooth on Windows would stutter and lag on the Mac.

GirlsCanCode 9y ago
Maybe, just maybe, that's because Windows is a better OS.

curun1r 9y ago

It was bewildering how bad Flash on the Mac was. Simple animations and videos would spin all of my cores up into the high 90s%. I installed a CPU throttling command line tool and would set the flash process to 30% of one core and the animation or video would still play fine, with no noticeable degradation in quality or framerate. I've always wondered whether part of the monetization of Flash was an embedded Bitcoin Miner or other such code to make use of our spare CPU cycles.

egypturnash 9y ago
Flash has always been crap on the Mac. Always. I was working with it around 2000-05 and the player was always like half as fast as a similarly specced Windows machine. Plus there were some wonderful Mac-only bugs in v5 of the editor that cropped up when you tried to edit files big enough to contain a whole cartoon. And by "wonderful" I mean "I lost a week of my life to editing a cartoon in five minute bursts of work, followed by having to reboot the entire system because Flash had crashed so hard it refused to run until I did that."

intoverflow2 9y ago

Adobe always used to blame OS X for being literally half the performance of the Windows version claiming it wasn't their fault (Mac team was a fraction of the size I heard). Then Jobs wrote "Thoughts on Flash" and magically a month or so later the Mac version ran a ton better and continued to get better for about a year. Have little sympathy for such a reactionary approach to user experience when the majority of Flash authoring occurred in ad agencies running Macs.