7 ms·

Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering

Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.

soup10 7y ago
"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.
- fastball 7y ago
  Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.
  - redisman 7y ago
    That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.
    - fastball 7y ago
      HTML5 video had significantly better performance in terms of CPU from the beginning, and I'm fairly certain the Flash video players weren't written by amateur programmers with bad programming practices.
  - koonsolo 7y ago
    That is not performance, that is resource usage. As a game developer who has programmed in ActionScript3, I can tell you that Flash was very performant for 2D graphics.
    - fastball 7y ago
      Requiring all of my computer's resources in order to get good performance is bad performance.
      - koonsolo 7y ago
        So basically any AAA game has bad performance.
        fastball 7y ago
        There is a difference between "the most graphic intensive games available spin up my CPU" and "literally any game on flash spins up my CPU".
- ken 7y ago
  > If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Why is it on Apple to save Adobe’a software? Why not Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google ... or Adobe? > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem iPhoneOS lacked support for Flash long before it had a native SDK. Jobs decided the answer was HTML, which is exactly the opposite of a locked-in ecosystem.
  - soup10 7y ago
    Why are you rewriting history? Apple didn't just decide not to embrace Flash, they actively decided to kill it. Apple banned flash based apps in their review guidelines and Adobe didn't see a way forward since Job's had decided everything but native apps were to be purged from the app store. Html 5 isn't a replacement for what flash offered, it wasn't then and it isn't now. Here is the Jobs quote from when this happened: "He takes a while to get there, but eventually he puts the notion into a nutshell. "Flash is a cross platform development tool," he says. "It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps."" ""Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs"
    - mthoms 7y ago
      You seem to be doing a little re-writing of history yourself right here: > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time Steve Jobs never even envisioned the App Store model when he decided against supporting Flash in Safari. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) : >... prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser. However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider, with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008 You can also read about an actual iPhone engineer's thoughts on the matter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-reason-steve-jobs-didn-202507266.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-r... Interesting tidbit: Apple was actually trying to work with Adobe to iron out Flash's security problems but was rebuffed. Anyways, the fact is, the App Store was actually an afterthought.... An accident of history that even Steve didn't see coming. The decision to forego Flash came way before that.
ken 7y ago
I hear this a lot, but where was the Android or BlackBerry or Windows phone that ran Flash acceptably fast, and without weekly security holes? Mobile killed Flash. It was a poorly implemented technology which was acceptable only during the era where electric power was unlimited, and people were in the habit of frequent reboots to update their OS anyway.
- rezmason 7y ago
  It's worth noting that the Flash platform originated on mobile devices, and pivoted to a Netscape Plugin when the mobile market proved to be premature (early nineties). For those of you half-considering building a Flash player replacement, I suspect the majority of Flash content (especially pre-AS3) can run performantly on modern mobile browsers with a canvas Context2D shim. Maybe even on 2010-era mobile devices.
- davidwitt415 7y ago
  Windows CE and Ipaq. I created mobile tour apps for museums like the Louvre, LA County Museum, SFMOMA and the Whitney that successfully served tens of thousands of people daily in the mid/late 2000s.
taurath 7y ago
Youtube has no interactivity either.
- HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
  Except that it can. Youtube lets producers (channels) post polls, let's consumers (viewers) post comments, and if channels want to, they can do something interactive- over a video series & etc.
  - zyx321 7y ago
    Youtube has no interactivity within videos. There used to be a little bit of it with annotations, but those were killed off ages ago. Compare that to Flash video series like Homestar Runner, every episode had little Easter eggs where you could click on background characters to unlock a bonus scene about them. It really helped you feel engaged with the medium in a way unmatched by anything but full-length video games.
  - EamonnMR 7y ago
    I maintain that communication is not interactivity. Especially when everyone writes and nobody reads.
dahart 7y ago
> Flash died because of Apple Hehe. Not really. Jobs may have put one nail in the coffin, but Adobe killed flash. And flash was already dying because of abusive ads and HTML5 before Apple said anything. Here’s one of the Flash developers backing that up: https://m.slashdot.org/story/324267 https://m.slashdot.org/story/324267
- ScottFree 7y ago
  Can confirm. I was doing flash game development when flash "died." One of the guys I worked with created the Flex compiler. He told me Adobe had a seriously bad combination of brain drain and code ossification. The motto on the flash team was "don't break the internet." For years, they were terrified of making any changes, especially ones that might break backward compatibility. This lack of ability to change anything meant their brightest never stuck around very long. This only made those who were left even more terrified to make any changes because the institutional knowledge was gone. It's a vicious cycle. By the time they realized they had to make serious changes and started work on stage3d, they didn't have the expertise necessary to pull it off.
  - Matthias247 7y ago
    > For years, they were terrified of making any changes, especially ones that might break backward compatibility. This lack of ability to change anything meant their brightest never stuck around very long. This only made those who were left even more terrified to make any changes because the institutional knowledge was gone. It's a vicious cycle. That's an interesting comment. I actually wonder whether this eventually happens for any successful product. At the end this gives competitors a chance to surpass the product. So it's definitely a cycle.
    - ScottFree 7y ago
      It happens to a lot of successful products over time, but it's not inevitable by any means. It's possible to make software that is viable long term. But, there are many ugly realities regarding the current state of Corporate America that encourages this cycle. For example, the fact that most engineers need to job hop in order to get promotions and raises. That makes it nearly impossible to build up long term institutional knowledge at any one company. Another example: everyone in a publicly held company, from the rank and file programmers to the CEO, are rewarded for short term sales at the expense of long term stability. We had a thread here not too long ago[0] about how being a "maintenance engineer" was career suicide. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224188
pier25 7y ago
Sure it didn't make much sense in the HTML5 world, but if Adobe hadn't killed the upcoming new version of the language and engine (I think it was called Flash Next) it would have been an amazing tool for making apps and games.
cma 7y ago
> A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever. AI can do a decent job upscaling flash-style content from low res videos.
- untog 7y ago
  Sure, but that is in no way preferable to a format that scales natively.

soup10 7y ago

"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.

fastball 7y ago
Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.
- redisman 7y ago
  That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.
  - fastball 7y ago
    HTML5 video had significantly better performance in terms of CPU from the beginning, and I'm fairly certain the Flash video players weren't written by amateur programmers with bad programming practices.
- koonsolo 7y ago
  That is not performance, that is resource usage. As a game developer who has programmed in ActionScript3, I can tell you that Flash was very performant for 2D graphics.
  - fastball 7y ago
    Requiring all of my computer's resources in order to get good performance is bad performance.
    - koonsolo 7y ago
      So basically any AAA game has bad performance.
      - fastball 7y ago
        There is a difference between "the most graphic intensive games available spin up my CPU" and "literally any game on flash spins up my CPU".
ken 7y ago
> If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Why is it on Apple to save Adobe’a software? Why not Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google ... or Adobe? > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem iPhoneOS lacked support for Flash long before it had a native SDK. Jobs decided the answer was HTML, which is exactly the opposite of a locked-in ecosystem.
- soup10 7y ago
  Why are you rewriting history? Apple didn't just decide not to embrace Flash, they actively decided to kill it. Apple banned flash based apps in their review guidelines and Adobe didn't see a way forward since Job's had decided everything but native apps were to be purged from the app store. Html 5 isn't a replacement for what flash offered, it wasn't then and it isn't now. Here is the Jobs quote from when this happened: "He takes a while to get there, but eventually he puts the notion into a nutshell. "Flash is a cross platform development tool," he says. "It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps."" ""Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs"
  - mthoms 7y ago
    You seem to be doing a little re-writing of history yourself right here: > Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time Steve Jobs never even envisioned the App Store model when he decided against supporting Flash in Safari. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store_(iOS) : >... prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser. However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider, with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008 You can also read about an actual iPhone engineer's thoughts on the matter https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-reason-steve-jobs-didn-202507266.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/apple-engineer-reveals-real-r... Interesting tidbit: Apple was actually trying to work with Adobe to iron out Flash's security problems but was rebuffed. Anyways, the fact is, the App Store was actually an afterthought.... An accident of history that even Steve didn't see coming. The decision to forego Flash came way before that.

ken 7y ago

I hear this a lot, but where was the Android or BlackBerry or Windows phone that ran Flash acceptably fast, and without weekly security holes? Mobile killed Flash. It was a poorly implemented technology which was acceptable only during the era where electric power was unlimited, and people were in the habit of frequent reboots to update their OS anyway.

rezmason 7y ago
It's worth noting that the Flash platform originated on mobile devices, and pivoted to a Netscape Plugin when the mobile market proved to be premature (early nineties). For those of you half-considering building a Flash player replacement, I suspect the majority of Flash content (especially pre-AS3) can run performantly on modern mobile browsers with a canvas Context2D shim. Maybe even on 2010-era mobile devices.
davidwitt415 7y ago
Windows CE and Ipaq. I created mobile tour apps for museums like the Louvre, LA County Museum, SFMOMA and the Whitney that successfully served tens of thousands of people daily in the mid/late 2000s.

taurath 7y ago

Youtube has no interactivity either.

HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
Except that it can. Youtube lets producers (channels) post polls, let's consumers (viewers) post comments, and if channels want to, they can do something interactive- over a video series & etc.
- zyx321 7y ago
  Youtube has no interactivity within videos. There used to be a little bit of it with annotations, but those were killed off ages ago. Compare that to Flash video series like Homestar Runner, every episode had little Easter eggs where you could click on background characters to unlock a bonus scene about them. It really helped you feel engaged with the medium in a way unmatched by anything but full-length video games.
- EamonnMR 7y ago
  I maintain that communication is not interactivity. Especially when everyone writes and nobody reads.

dahart 7y ago

> Flash died because of Apple Hehe. Not really. Jobs may have put one nail in the coffin, but Adobe killed flash. And flash was already dying because of abusive ads and HTML5 before Apple said anything. Here’s one of the Flash developers backing that up: https://m.slashdot.org/story/324267 https://m.slashdot.org/story/324267

ScottFree 7y ago
Can confirm. I was doing flash game development when flash "died." One of the guys I worked with created the Flex compiler. He told me Adobe had a seriously bad combination of brain drain and code ossification. The motto on the flash team was "don't break the internet." For years, they were terrified of making any changes, especially ones that might break backward compatibility. This lack of ability to change anything meant their brightest never stuck around very long. This only made those who were left even more terrified to make any changes because the institutional knowledge was gone. It's a vicious cycle. By the time they realized they had to make serious changes and started work on stage3d, they didn't have the expertise necessary to pull it off.
- Matthias247 7y ago
  > For years, they were terrified of making any changes, especially ones that might break backward compatibility. This lack of ability to change anything meant their brightest never stuck around very long. This only made those who were left even more terrified to make any changes because the institutional knowledge was gone. It's a vicious cycle. That's an interesting comment. I actually wonder whether this eventually happens for any successful product. At the end this gives competitors a chance to surpass the product. So it's definitely a cycle.
  - ScottFree 7y ago
    It happens to a lot of successful products over time, but it's not inevitable by any means. It's possible to make software that is viable long term. But, there are many ugly realities regarding the current state of Corporate America that encourages this cycle. For example, the fact that most engineers need to job hop in order to get promotions and raises. That makes it nearly impossible to build up long term institutional knowledge at any one company. Another example: everyone in a publicly held company, from the rank and file programmers to the CEO, are rewarded for short term sales at the expense of long term stability. We had a thread here not too long ago[0] about how being a "maintenance engineer" was career suicide. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224188 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21224188

pier25 7y ago

Sure it didn't make much sense in the HTML5 world, but if Adobe hadn't killed the upcoming new version of the language and engine (I think it was called Flash Next) it would have been an amazing tool for making apps and games.

cma 7y ago

> A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever. AI can do a decent job upscaling flash-style content from low res videos.

untog 7y ago
Sure, but that is in no way preferable to a format that scales natively.