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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

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.
  - yuhong 9y ago
    They still have it today (it was never truly "discontinued").
    - comex 9y ago
      The NPAPI version (i.e. all browsers but Chrome) was discontinued, but it was un-discontinued last year (after four years of no updates). http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2016/08/beta-news-flash-player-npapi-for-linux.html http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2016/08/beta-news-flash-p...
      - yuhong 9y ago
        Yea, and they still had to do security updates for it in the meantime. I guess that is part of why they "un-discontinued" it.
- intoverflow2 9y ago
  >I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code. We can hope but there were big-ish campaigns to get them to open source Freehand and then Fireworks and they just don't care and would rather you keep their monthly CC cheques flowing.
Endy 9y ago
I guess my feeling could be summed up with... if you're going to be on an unpopular system, expect a less-polished experience. When Windows took up 90% of desktop marketshare, and the rest was squabbled over by Mac, Linux, etc., the fact that Flash supported them at all should be seen as a blessing.
- reality_czech 9y ago
  I guess my feeling could be summed up as: bye, flash! We in the Mac/Linux sphere won't miss you.
- wlesieutre 9y ago
  Yes and no. It was nice to have support for that whole community of animations and games, even with crappy performance. And we could get to the godawful interactive-restaurant-websites where framerates didn't matter. But the existence of a terrible Mac port helped fuel its adoption as a web technology (versus something like ActiveX where you were Windows/IE only). Without that, maybe those restaurants would have stuck to HTML like they should have to begin with. Especially on the video side where people stared to pick FLV as a format, we'd have been much better off just getting an MPEG in the QuickTime plugin, probably with better frame rates and definitely not crashing my browser so often. As a portable web application platform, I suppose it was better than Java and I'm glad to have gotten access to those. But honestly that was a pretty niche use case.

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.
- yuhong 9y ago
  They still have it today (it was never truly "discontinued").
  - comex 9y ago
    The NPAPI version (i.e. all browsers but Chrome) was discontinued, but it was un-discontinued last year (after four years of no updates). http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2016/08/beta-news-flash-player-npapi-for-linux.html http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2016/08/beta-news-flash-p...
    - yuhong 9y ago
      Yea, and they still had to do security updates for it in the meantime. I guess that is part of why they "un-discontinued" it.
intoverflow2 9y ago
>I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code. We can hope but there were big-ish campaigns to get them to open source Freehand and then Fireworks and they just don't care and would rather you keep their monthly CC cheques flowing.

Endy 9y ago

I guess my feeling could be summed up with... if you're going to be on an unpopular system, expect a less-polished experience. When Windows took up 90% of desktop marketshare, and the rest was squabbled over by Mac, Linux, etc., the fact that Flash supported them at all should be seen as a blessing.

reality_czech 9y ago
I guess my feeling could be summed up as: bye, flash! We in the Mac/Linux sphere won't miss you.
wlesieutre 9y ago
Yes and no. It was nice to have support for that whole community of animations and games, even with crappy performance. And we could get to the godawful interactive-restaurant-websites where framerates didn't matter. But the existence of a terrible Mac port helped fuel its adoption as a web technology (versus something like ActiveX where you were Windows/IE only). Without that, maybe those restaurants would have stuck to HTML like they should have to begin with. Especially on the video side where people stared to pick FLV as a format, we'd have been much better off just getting an MPEG in the QuickTime plugin, probably with better frame rates and definitely not crashing my browser so often. As a portable web application platform, I suppose it was better than Java and I'm glad to have gotten access to those. But honestly that was a pretty niche use case.