43 ms·

Goodbye, Flash

331 points by tech234a 7y ago

Brendinooo 7y ago
At this point, the only thing I think about is Homestar Runner! Not sure I've come across a Flash site in a long time otherwise.
- dano 7y ago
  https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ had some fun little games written in flash.
- moltensodium 7y ago
  The adtech industry embraced flash in a big way, youtube was defaulting to the flash player until four years ago. Plus the dozens of flash ads and trackers that were (and still are) placed into many ad networks. Now that the adtech firms switched to building the browser and the cluster of html5 technologies have matured it's easier to track people natively. That's really the only reason flash went away.
  - eddieh 7y ago
    There was no Flash on the most popular smartphone (before Android took over). When ad tech went mobile they couldn't use Flash. So, ad tech shifted to web tech.
- wgerard 7y ago
  There's quite a few flash games/etc. that will be lost to the ages. Quite interesting if you think about it! A bit of an antithesis to the idea that what's on the web is preserved forever.
  - asdfman123 7y ago
    Isn't there some way to preserve them, kind of like what people did with DOS boxes?
    - entropicdrifter 7y ago
      There are frameworks that let you compile flash games/apps/videos into native executables with pretty good compatibility (so minimal porting effort). That's probably the best we've got besides using an out-of-date insecure browser.
    - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
      I'm sure there will be, there are a few implementations/emulators out there. Gnash, Shumway, Lightspark, and Ruffle. Ruffle seems to be pretty promising, it's being worked on by Newgrounds people and it's written in Rust to target the desktop and WASM. It looks like they can do animations and audio now, and they're working on the various versions of ActionScript.
      - azakai 7y ago
        Sadly Flash is incredibly hard to write a 100% implementation for. That's why there are so many attempts; they've all failed (but they can work well for specific Flash games/apps).
        skissane 7y ago
        It would be great if Adobe could open source their existing Flash Player at some point. I struggle to see how doing so would harm them commercially. Even if an open source player is available, browser vendors have no interest in supporting it, so it won't be supported with browsers. It isn't going to take away interest in their newer pure HTML5 authoring tools.
  - kgwxd 7y ago
    There's nothing to run Flash media outside a browser? Obviously that wouldn't help anything dependent on proprietary server functionality, but that's true of any software.
    - EamonnMR 7y ago
      There's this: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ Looks like it got dropped from Ubuntu though.
    - alisonatwork 7y ago
      I went through this a few weeks ago and found a site that explains how to run Flash games standalone: https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-flash-swf-files-outside-your-web-browser/ https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-flash-swf... Basically there is a program you can download from Adobe called Flash Player Projector Content Debugger, then you just point that at the .swf and go. An open source emulator would be better in the long term, but for now this is easier than trying to find a browser that still supports Flash natively.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        You really don't need a tutorial to use Flash Projector. :) • Windows: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flashplayer_32_sa.exe https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3... • Mac: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flashplayer_32_sa.dmg https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3... • Linux: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flash_player_sa_linux.x86_64.tar.gz https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3... Download the version for your platform and open the swf file you want to run. That's it. Linux users can also use the community-packaged Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-Projector https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-Proj... All other links come from https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...
    - Kaiyou 7y ago
  - michaelbrave 7y ago
    There is an emulation project trying to save as much as possible https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
robertoandred 7y ago
Steve was right.
- benologist 7y ago
  Steve was right very briefly but in hindsight it's pretty irrational to expect a piece of software to not run on a powerful CPU without contrived restrictions like being "banned". We'd have the full Adobe Flash IDE on the iPad next year if Jobs had no grudge and we just waited for the software and hardware to improve. Photoshop's halfway there and SQL Server made it to Linux and Windows made it to ARM.
  - slig 7y ago
    Flash did not run properly on powerful desktop Macs back in the day, how could he expect that Adobe would sort it out for the iPhone?
    - benologist 7y ago
      The solution was to wait for the software to get better, the hardware to get better, the batteries to get better - today the Flash IDE could run on Windows tablets not much bigger than the iPad Mini, authoring content where before it couldn't even play it back.
      - slig 7y ago
        Why should Apple wait for some other company when they were perfectly capable of shipping something way better? Adobe had the opportunity, and they missed.
        benologist 7y ago
        I think a better question is why should Apple persecute anybody's software? Especially just because it's not yet performing well on a new, power-sipping processor and architecture. It will be years before anything complex runs well on their watches, that's a stupid reason to sabotage anyone's efforts.
totaldude87 7y ago
>>Flash, you inspired the web. Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to continue your legacy. remember that time when Steve jobs kept out flash from iPhone /iPad vs Google's stance to go full on support for flash on mobile :)
- willis936 7y ago
  Remember when it was possible to have interactive animated vector graphics on the internet?
  - jjtheblunt 7y ago
    I know you're making a joke, but thought SVG has been there and working since before Apple outlawed Flash for its battery draining behaviour.
    - willis936 7y ago
      On paper you’re right. The most interactive svg content I’ve seen are small demos and even those have to be hunted for. You don’t have to (or at least you didn’t in the past) have to look very hard to find large amounts of quality flash content. Good tools were ripped out of artists’ hands and the internet is worse for it. Where’s the replacement?
    - why-oh-why 7y ago
      Yeah have you tried authoring and animating SVG in 2008? Full of (browser support) holes and extremely poor performance, even on the "powerful" iPad in 2011. Flash by comparison would have been a breeze even on mobile.
    - irrational 7y ago
      It has been 10 years yet nobody has created a true replacement for Flash using SVG, Canvas, JS, etc. I wonder why?
      - jjtheblunt 7y ago
windsurfer 7y ago
One of the first "commercial" games I worked on was a Flash (Flex) game that I licensed to a few of the big Flash games sites at the time. I haven't looked at that stuff in years and years... I wonder how feasible it would be to port those games to the modern web.
thrower123 7y ago
The web was a much more interesting place when Flash was around. Browser games, in particular, have never really recovered.
- darepublic 7y ago
  Two of my favourite flash games (late era flash) - Abobo's Big Adventure (abobosbigadventure.com) - Super mario bros crossover (http://supermariobroscrossover.com/ http://supermariobroscrossover.com/)
- kgwxd 7y ago
  There's plenty of new browser games being made, but both developer and user interest in mini-games has shifted to native mobile apps, which wasn't really a thing in Flash's heyday.
- trentlott 7y ago
  Many phone games are (or were) browser games at heart. Just an app that served a webpage. The fact that they weren't very imaginative or fun or free is what the hyperconnected mobile web brought us.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    To be fair, the absolute bulk of browser-based Flash games weren't imaginitive or fun either (and I can assure you, would probably not have been free if drop-in-and-use ad plugins for Flash had been around, if the ads that framed those apps can be taken as any indication ;) ).
dsego 7y ago
I guess "don't break the web" doesn't apply here.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  Flash was arguably never part of "The Web" in the first place. Not the open web anyway. It's a proprietary technology with a single implementation controlled and developed by a single company (Adobe) which is now ending support for it.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    The difference is that with Flash, you could write once and run it everywhere. This was huge at a time when cross-browser differences were major enough to require something like jQuery.
    - shadowgovt 7y ago
      everywhere *that looked like a desktop PC, which is why Flash floundered badly in the mobile era.
    - Ajedi32 7y ago
      Sure, that's the advantage of having a single implementation. The disadvantage is what we're experiencing right now: once that implementation is no longer maintained you're left with no alternative.
      - rchaud 7y ago
        That's true. My point was that even with Flash announcing several years ago that it would be sunset, nobody stepped up to build tools that worked with the open technologies of CSS, SVG and JS. Instead, what we have is a situation where pretty much only corporations with designers and devs on staff (Stripe and Spotify being the major examples) are building the types of sites that used to be doable by a single person using Flash.
  - deleted 7y ago
buboard 7y ago
I predict that they will need to create extensions or exceptions that will bring back flash for people that need it. Thanks largely to the difficulty and bad functionality of HTML5 equivalents, there is still important stuff in libraries / public orgs / museums / archives / university sites etc. that is not ready to die, and unless google/MS are willing to pay the redigitization process, they 'll have to bring back flash. > Goodbye, Flash - Fuck you, Google
- loufe 7y ago
  Keep in mind that Flash is only being disabled by default, not removed from browser.
  - Ajedi32 7y ago
    No, "disabled by default" happened months ago. This announcement is about it being removed from Googlebot. Next year it's being removed from all major browsers (even IE): https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-timeline/#M4RBwchHEuZgKFIF.97 https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-wind...
- tiborsaas 7y ago
  Flash desktop player is thing: https://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer.html https://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer.html Just like I can'd to anything with a PSD file with a browser natively, I can't with an SWF either now. Not that horrible situation.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  > - Fuck you, Google Harsh. I'm sorry they invested their own time and effort into building a search crawler atop a closed-source, proprietary data format (risking not just capital and engineering time, but possibly lawsuits if Adobe had gotten pissy like Oracle) and, having looked at the field of users and decided that there is insufficient interest in the data format to justify maintaining that crawler, they're decommissioning it? They made a product decision; they didn't shoot your dog. And it's not even like their product decision removes the ability of the orgs you've listed to keep using Flash. Those orgs just can't keep relying on a free-but-proprietary search engine provided at the largesse of a corporation they have no business deal with anymore to index their proprietary-format media, for free.
thebouv 7y ago
And yet, there's still no good replacement for building those types of Flash games. HTML5 game development isn't close.
- typon 7y ago
  We desperately need an HTML5 based game dev IDE with feature parity of Flash. Is such a thing even possible?
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    Shooting from the hip: Technically, yes. Commercially, no.
  - darepublic 7y ago
    Wouldn't unity qualify? Personally I think the decline in browser based games has more to do with a lack of interest in that gaming format, not the limitations of current web technology.
    - tiborsaas 7y ago
      Complaining for lack of tooling and doing some research require different efforts :) Unity is just one example that can export to web. There's https://playcanvas.com/ https://playcanvas.com/ too and a plethora of other stuff :) Unity demo: https://wasm.bootcss.com/demo/Tanks/ https://wasm.bootcss.com/demo/Tanks/
    - wutbrodo 7y ago
      This is what I figured, that today's equivalent of Flash gamers are just on mobile games instead. I do miss the anarchic quality that the Flash ecosystem had in the 2000s, but I think that's more a function of the type of people who spent time online back then.
  - _pmf_ 7y ago
    Construct 3 is pretty good, but it's just not as easy to deploy self contained applications, and browser variations are an issue.
rootusrootus 7y ago
Now if only ADP would update their timesheet software so it did not rely on Flash, that would be great. I'm going to have to install Flash manually once Google drops it from Chrome.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  I don't think installing it manually will work. Support for NPAPI plugins in Chrome was discontinued years ago: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/npapi-deprecation https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/npapi... Same for Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/npapi-plugins https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/npapi-plugins Not 100% sure about IE, but it doesn't seem like you'll be able to make Flash work there either: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-timeline/#hWGAooLdKZmfbmcE.97 https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-wind... I think Firefox ESR might still support Flash for a while, at least until the next release.
  - rootusrootus 7y ago
    Well, that will get momentarily interesting, then. Perhaps our company will finally abandon ADP for the last few services we still contract with them for.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
salqadri 7y ago
All credit for the demise of Flash belongs to Jobs: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
- buboard 7y ago
  OTOH, Apple could have bought flash and built their mobile platform on top of it. It was arguably better than Obj-C
  - scarface74 7y ago
    iPhone apps were fast and responsive on low end hardware precisely because apps were natively compiled and didn’t run in a VM. Did you ever try running Flash on early high end Android phones?
    - buboard 7y ago
      I 'm sure they were slow. but i m talking about the authoring tool and scripting language. I presume apple could optimize that to be fast natively. Judging from how HTML UI frameworks evolved over time, it's as if we ended up reinventing Actionscript
      - scarface74 7y ago
        So what was Apple going to do during the first 4 or 5 years? Every single mobile platform that tried using HTML frameworks for their apps failed and were slow. Blackberry, Palm, and Microsoft all tried it. Android itself was slow as molasses for years because of its dependence on a VM instead of a completely native stack. The last thing I want is Electron for mobile.
- slig 7y ago
  Adobe refused to make the flash player work reliable on OSX back in the day. It was Adobe's fault, and anyone that used the web on a Mac in the 2000's can confirm that.
- 7y ago
rvz 7y ago
The only websites that I know off the top of my head that still use Flash are Newgrounds and the BBC, for its iPlayer content. It seems that Google is already using WebAssembly in its products, Google Keep [0], so it is likely that they will continue to use this. [0] - https://webassembly-security.com/google-keep-webassembly-module-analysis/ https://webassembly-security.com/google-keep-webassembly-mod...
- MrOxiMoron 7y ago
  IKEA still uses it for (some of) their planners
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Google basically killed off Google Finance last year because it was Flash based. There's an HTML version of Google Finance but it doesn't have anything close to feature parity with the Flash version.
tabtab 7y ago
Designers loved Flash because it was WYSIWYG. It's also why PDF lives. You usually only had to test it on one computer, not different versions of different browser brands. The client-side "auto-flow" of HTML browser drives designers batty. I can relate: I make CRUD GUI's and different browser variations butcher their placement to hell and back, requiring me playing Whack-A-Mole to fix it. The online forums say, "Shut up and learn layout rocket science!" A few snotty Sheldons mastering auto-flow math doesn't scale well. The browser should have a WYSIWYG mode for when your application needs it. The server could re-scale as needed for different devices based on a layout engine of the designer's choosing. That way one is dealing with one layout engine instead of say 50 (browser brand/version combos). Seems more logical to me. We don't need auto-flow rocket science if we just partition layout engines logically. I believe Flash and Java Applets both made the same fatal mistake: tried to be an entire virtual OS. That made them too complicated, which invites hackers. If they had focused on just UI "serving", they could have been small enough to be manageable.
- jagged-chisel 7y ago
  I'm not a web front-end dev, so pardon my ignorance ... Would a canvas and/or SVG GUI be acceptable?
  - tabtab 7y ago
    I haven't seen it work well. Part of the problem is that JavaScript is needed emulate many common GUI idioms, and the emulation or rendering is sometimes buggy on different browsers. It's back the the brand/version combinatorial explosion. The industry really needs a dedicated GUI-friendly standard. Emulating GUI's keeps failing. If you fail 30 beauty contests, the blunt truth is you are ugly. Get a clue and change direction.
    - brians 7y ago
      This is called “forms”. The people who are failing to do better do care—they just also see the limits of the work.
    - 7y ago
ben0x539 7y ago
Oof. Organizing the world's information, except the information that's unfortunately stuck in a file format we don't like anymore (for good reasons), that knowledge clearly isn't worth anything. I get disabling Flash support in browsers by default, but actively pretending Flash content doesn't exist so no one can find it anymore seems unnecessarily destructive.
- skybrian 7y ago
  It's kind of odd for a web search to index information that your browser can't display. Although I suppose paywall sites and book search are similar.
  - ben0x539 7y ago
    Yeah, it's not great. I figure not being able to display specific things is something people who really need to can work around, but not even being able to find things means surrendering information to the void.
  - jsploit 7y ago
    Google indexes plenty of other binary filetypes.
  - karthikb 7y ago
    Just because one can't open the information by default doesn't mean the information doesn't exist - in this case, Flash content is exactly like your paywall and book examples. The searcher can decide if having access to the information is worth the added cost...regardless of it's buying the book, paying for the subscription to bypass the paywall, finding an old computer or setting up a VM to use flash.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  I hope they meant just parsing swf-files or extracting their meta-data. Purging anything related to the file itself would be quite counter productive for a search engine.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
droobles 7y ago
One of my favorite sites was Newgrounds. Haven't visited in a while, how will they fare after this?
- stefs 7y ago
  afaik there's an offline flash player
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  They have an offline player as mentioned but also a community member was working on a WebAssembly based player.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    Is that going to run afoul of IP ownership? To my knowledge, Flash was never open-sourced, and Oracle v. Google casts shadows on API-compatible reverse engineering.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      Oracle v. Google is still working it's way through the courts, and those decisions were openly in conflict with normal precedent.
    - giancarlostoro 7y ago
      Not sure but that is a good question. Although the VM bytecode spec is published by them. Not sure why really, they even release the file format spec. I would link but the links I knew changed recently and did not work for me.
droobles 7y ago
Also, would there not be a way to save Flash sites/games with WASM?
- macspoofing 7y ago
  Sure you could, but you need to build a swf runtime first ... There were a few projects (one from Mozilla - Shumway), but nothing really great. SWF is a complicated format.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    It's one of those specs where the standard is "Whatever the engine does," right? That runtime is likely to end up looking a lot more like a console hardware emulator than a data parser.
    - macspoofing 7y ago
      I'm not intimately familiar with the SWF standard but I think it's well defined, just complicated (because Flash did a lot) and with potential patent and licensing minefields.
      - monocasa 7y ago
        Oh, it's not. Adobe themselves were too scared to change anything, and just shipped multiple versions of their runtime under the hood to account for all the different versions.
        shadowgovt 7y ago
        Hah, that's amazing. So even Adobe was solving the problem by treating it like a console emulator. :-p
- ihuman 7y ago
  There already is https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/
NietTim 7y ago
And not a single mention of Apple, Safari or iOS <which were instrumental to the downfall of Flash>, funny Google.
- slig 7y ago
  The flash player was awful on Macs back in the day. Adobe refused to support OSX properly, and Steve rightfully did not trust them to make a decent job.
  - oscargrouch 7y ago
    Is up to the user to decide that, not the platform middle-man. Its funny how many people are willing to give up their freedom to decide what works best for them, and let others decide, in the name of "im doing all this for your own good". You should always have the right to decide what technology to use, what you install and download on your device. The whole app store deciding what they allow or not, not giving you any other alternative, should be deemed inconstitutional in a society who knows whats happening, when people have nowhere else to go because the digital dictatorship is in control of your digital life. This whole trend smells digital feudalism to me, and it was Jobs that started this whole dangerous trend to the bottom of our civil liberties. Why are you defending this new feudal lord who are mining your right to choose what you do with your own property? If after having bought a house, the guy(or company) who have selled to you, had made some demands of how you could use the kitchen, or the bedroom, would you think its within his right to do so?
    - slig 7y ago
      > Is up to the user to decide that, not the platform middle-man. Each and every time a costumer buys an iPhone they're deciding. Adobe decided to do a half-assed flash player for the Mac. That decision proved to be wrong. Or do you really expect that Adobe would do a decent job supporting an new platform when they couldn't even bother supporting the big cash cow Apple had at that time?
      - 7y ago
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
> Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files. Does Google no longer index .zip files and the like? Obviously they can't process any content in those formats, but if the file name contains the right keywords... shouldn't search be file type agnostic?
- samatman 7y ago
  I don't know that they do process content inside .zip files, but there's no reason they can't, the format is transparent enough.
- giancarlostoro 7y ago
  If the zip files not password protected I dont see why they cant crawl the filenames inside zip files. They probably keep all crawl info cause you are able to do Google searches for specific file extensions and I wouldnt be surprised if you could for specific file mime types too.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    Okay, poor example on my part. I've had .exe's show up in Google results. It was a long time ago—so maybe things don't work like that anymore—and it was never common, but I know I've seen it happen. I'm sure Google could look inside the binary for text strings, but I can't imagine they do. There is perhaps an argument that standalone exe's shouldn't turn up in results for security reasons (how can you possibly verify its safety without some context?), but I liked to think that search results could at least theoretically include any file type at all.
- kick 7y ago
  They process and index content inside of PDFs, even ones that haven't been OCR'd by the distributor. It's likely they did similar for Flash.
enriquto 7y ago
Google: > Flash was the answer to the boring static web so much is said and implied in those sad, sad words
macspoofing 7y ago
Is Silverlight also going to be removed from IE by Dec 2020?
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  2021: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4511036/silverlight-end-of-support https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4511036/silverlight...
rchaud 7y ago
10 years on after that Jobs letter, the market for WYSIWIG web animation is nearly non-existent. All I want is a tool that lets me draw animations, allow tweening controls and exports to HTML/JS, without needing to open a code editor. The only tool that does this to my knowledge is Tumult's Hype: https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/. I'm glad it's using an old-school pricing model of one-time payment and not the subscription model that Adobe and everyone else switched to. Adobe Animate used to be a thing, but that got sunset years ago. There is Adobe After Effects + Lottie, but that assumes you are a front-end developer and know how to integrate those tools together and use the resulting JSON. No wonder then that the only visually interactive websites out there these days are things like "Spotify Year in Music" stuff that probably takes an entire team multiple sprints to build.
- iicc 7y ago
  https://alternativeto.net/software/hype/ https://alternativeto.net/software/hype/ says the top alternative is Google Web Designer.
  - rchaud 7y ago
    It is not. Google Web Designer is a very limited product with a specific audience: marketers who are building those banner ads that everyone of HN blocks anyway. Hype is a desktop app that give you much more control and is targeted at Flash game devs, web designers and others.
    - b0ner_t0ner 7y ago
      Check out https://www.2dimensions.com/ https://www.2dimensions.com/ it's very promising.
    - watersb 7y ago
      Tumult Software makes Hype https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/
- CharlesW 7y ago
  > Adobe Animate used to be a thing, but that got sunset years ago. Adobe Animate received two feature updates last year and at least one bug fix update this year. So, it's not dead yet. Maybe wait until after Adobe MAX (which starts in a few days) to write its obit?
marban 7y ago
So Google is basically denying that the Web's '80s era ever existed.
- djsumdog 7y ago
  So little is really being preserved today. I'm glad we at least have archive.org.
- Xophmeister 7y ago
  The web wasn't invented until 1989 and not made public until 1991. The precursor of Flash wasn't until a few years later.
  - marban 7y ago
    Metaphor?
floki999 7y ago
Flash, ActionScript and the associated IDE were amazing web development tools at the time (in the era of Macromedia) - way ahead of any competitors. No one/nothing has really filled those shoes.
peferron 7y ago
Flash was incredible. Not just for the animation and games, but also for the audio and video streaming from a server to you, or from your mic/cam to a server, or between you and other users via P2P, all of that live and with the ability to embed arbitrary metadata as cue points at specific times in the stream. The feature set and creativity it unlocked were out of this world.
reaperducer 7y ago
I hate Flash as much as the next guy who remembers web pages slowing to a crawl or crashing because of Flash. But I also think this is a bad idea, just from an information retention scenario. What ever happened to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful?" What will Google decide the world doesn't need to know about next? HTML2? JPEGs? non-Google-hosted javascript? This is what we get for allowing a private company to be the gatekeeper of our culture.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  The gatekeeper here is Adobe, not Google. This is what you get when you store information in a proprietary format with a single implementation controlled and developed by a single private company. There's always the risk they'll kill the product (like they're doing here) and your information will become inaccessible. Also, it's not just Google doing this. Pretty much every major browser vendor is dropping support for Flash in 2020.
  - agildehaus 7y ago
    Adobe didn't kill Flash, Apple killed Flash with Mobile Safari. Adobe is just accepting Flash not having a future.
sk84life 7y ago
After all.. I did like more flash than html5 .. browser APIs for videos and audios are really ruined. It's like chrome wanted build fast something to kill flash.. but now we have Totally ruined webrtc left. Thanks Google. Just what we want :)
sireat 7y ago
I remember using Actionscript to build some UI widgets for embedded devices and ... not hating it. The devices used proprietary level 7 protocol sitting on top of regular TCP/IP (could easily debug using netcat). Actionscript made it easy to work with this proprietary protocol. How would one do this with Javascript these days? You probably couldn't do it with WebSockets since WebSockets are at the same level 7 as the proprietary protocol, so you'd need to run some server to translate. Maybe, this https://www.w3.org/TR/raw-sockets/ https://www.w3.org/TR/raw-sockets/ ?
rkachowski 7y ago
Is there any kind of effort to create a non crappy plugin that would support the huge archive of flash content out there? I understand the reasons behind this but it seems like over 15 years of flash content is about to be rendered unaccessible.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  In theory I see no reason someone couldn't create a WASM implementation of Flash. Flash is closed-source though so I imagine that would be rather difficult to do without Adobe's cooperation.
tobr 7y ago
What is the preservation status of the decade+ of Shockwave/Flash games and websites? Can they run emulated?
tus88 7y ago
> It's time to go to bed, son. Hey Flash, it's your turn to go to bed. This is a rather creepy equivalence.
- copperx 7y ago
  That is a terrible line indeed. Juxtaposing the picture of a child going to bed with death is extremely jarring. Is the writer is a psychopath?
  - kwijibob 7y ago
    I thought it was a poetic and fun line!
typpo 7y ago
Some folks are blowing this out of proportion: 1. Adobe announced Flash's EOL by the end of 2020. Google isn't killing Flash, it's already dead. 2. Indexing Flash means parsing site structure embedded within SWF files. When was the last time you saw a website with Flash navigation? Your SWF web games are embedded in normal webpages that will still be searchable via H1 tags, backlinks, and so on. Surprising number of Flash lovers coming out of the woodwork after nearly a decade of Flash hate on HN (proprietary, security holes, etc).
irrational 7y ago
I don't miss the vulnerabilities that came with Flash, but I do miss the ease of creating animations, training, games, etc. that came with Flash. Back in the day I worked with a team that created training modules for products. We had a team of animators that was creating beautiful stuff. We had a cast of characters, voice talent, the whole shebang. It was very popular, especially in Asia where they loved the animated training. Then the iPad came out. Our customers informed us that they were going to adopt the iPad for their on the floor training. Well, the iPad didn't support Flash so we had to rebuild everything to be HTML/CSS/JS only. It has been nearly 10 years and we are still using plain text, images, and the occasional video. We tried bringing back the interactive animations over the years, but nothing has come out that comes anywhere close to working as well as Flash did. It really sucks that despite nearly a decade no Flash replacement has emerged. I really feel like we lost something when Flash died. Interactive animations have been replaced with youtube videos and boring text and image web pages.
- tracker1 7y ago
  On the vulnerabilities... working with flash made me abandon it at home years before the iPhone. Flash, Java and PDF are some of the biggest sources for browser security flaws historically... and that doesn't even touch the complexity of some nearer term flaws that would have been found eventually.
  - repolfx 7y ago
    One of the biggest sources of browser security flaws was browsers during that era, also. Moreover browser makers had access to the Flash source code, and Flash was an open spec anyone could implement. I don't think it's as simple as "web secure, everything else bad". For the very longest time only Chrome and Safari had working sandboxes, and there wasn't a huge difference in the exploit stream between WebKit, Flash, Java and Adobe Reader. They all had somewhat similar feature sets.
- rtpg 7y ago
  For games, game maker studio is a pretty good replacement I’ve found. The interface is pretty idiosyncratic (so was flash’s!), but I have a similar experience coding in that.
monocasa 7y ago
Isn't HBO Go still flash? It broke with a "we need adobe flash" screen maybe six months ago.
leowoo91 7y ago
Hello OpenFL.
finchisko 7y ago
Considering it appeared on google webmaster blog, the argument about "Flash going to bed" is very childish and juvenile. When your son is not willing to go bed, you probably insists, because he will have problems with focus in school next day, but that doesn't really apply to Flash. Article should clearly state why Flash should be gone.
imroot 7y ago
Kronos (the timeclock company) still uses flash in the enterprise timeclock application that my company uses for its hourly employees. They've told us that replacing it is "on their roadmap," but haven't told us when they plan on replacing it. (I also think that Verifone's vault for credit cards was flash based until earlier this year!)
- greggturkington 7y ago
  Same. They recommend opening the app in IE :( They also told us that replacing it is "on their roadmap," so we replaced Kronos.
Causality1 7y ago
I can't say I understand the decision to stop indexing SWF files. Does Google stop indexing every obsolete file format? Do they not index .doc files, tiff files, rtf files?
lucb1e 7y ago
Last night I backed up some old swf games that I enjoy(ed) playing but wasn't able to answer the question how to be able to run the files in the future. Should I install a VM and never run updates, similar to my Windows XP VM for games, or does anyone know of some (preferably open source) flash implementation that I can run standalone? Edit: I just found this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388405 Quite a few alternative implementations are mentioned. Doesn't sound like anything will be perfect, but this looks more future proof than I was afraid it might be!
gowld 7y ago
What are the options for playing old Flash apps - on desktop and on mobile?
PhasmaFelis 7y ago
I know there were a lot of good reasons to deprecate Flash, especially as a web design tool. I've never understood why it was necessary to ban it from browsers and practically kill nearly 20 years of games and animations.
wooptoo 7y ago
Flash tried to be everything to everyone. While it did some things very well (like those amazing little games), it did other things very poorly (like information websites and accessibility). - Every page had its own navigation style. - Every page had its own font which you could not change. Remember the trend with 8px bitmap-like fonts where you used a special setting so they would render very sharp? - Every page had its own scrolling style. Want to use the mouse wheel? Nope. - Caret navigation for the impaired or people who prefer keyboard navigation? Forget about it. - Stop sound? Only if we give you a button for that. - Here's our looping video intro, you must watch it before accessing this website. - Deep hyperlink to the next "page"? That came very very late. A bit too late for Flash. - View on mobile? Even if you had the plugin somehow installed (some people did back in the day on Android) pages would still be unusable. - An error has occurred within this SWF blob, good luck debugging. - Later came the exploits. I was a fan for a while and used it since Macromedia Flash 4, but I'm glad it's dead and buried. It was poor tech which subverted progress in the HTML/CSS/JS space for many years.
- realusername 7y ago
  I would also add to that list the awful CPU usage of Flash, every time you had a page with Flash opening, the fan would start to spin and your computer just became very slow...
rado 7y ago
Angular is the new Flash.
baby 7y ago
> Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to continue your legacy. Let’s be honest. It is not going to replace flash. It’s a real shame that flash couldn’t make it. Perhaps for good reasons. But it’s a real shame.
ganitarashid 7y ago
Great, now google just has to re-enable adblockers and chrome will be usable again
j45 7y ago
Can 2019 HTML/JS run identical on all browsers and platforms yet to replace 2013 flash in every use case? Here’s to hoping the future comes back a little sooner, rather than later.
mooman219 7y ago
One part of flash that's definitely appreciated in the artist/animator community is the editor. It's surprisingly simple and intuitive, while still being powerful for power users. Some of the features made it into after effects, but at least currently nothing really compares. Lots of YT/NG animators are still using flash. Newgrounds has an open source utility that can convert flash animations into HTML5 for the sake of preservation iirc.
cookingrobot 7y ago
My favorite new feature (by far) that Google has released recently is the ability to insert images in cell of Google Sheets. It's a fantastic way to keep track of anything visual: screenshots, bug notes, app walkthroughs, etc. They even have a shortcut to create a snapshot and insert it directly in a cell. Sadly, it requires Flash.
musicale 7y ago
If people love flash so much, I'm surprised that it hasn't been reborn in a javascript/webasm form. Same thing with hypercard and other cool-but-abandoned platforms.
100-xyz 7y ago
I am a techie and love working with graphics. Any other techies interested in cooperating and creating a Flash substitute? My linkedin here https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridhar-ramasami-76a226117/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridhar-ramasami-76a226117/ Please write to leisenming AT protonmail DOT com
shultays 7y ago
Flash also came with a pretty good documentation, which was how I learned programming. Thanks flash!

331 points by tech234a 7y ago

At this point, the only thing I think about is Homestar Runner! Not sure I've come across a Flash site in a long time otherwise.

dano 7y ago
https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/ had some fun little games written in flash.
moltensodium 7y ago
The adtech industry embraced flash in a big way, youtube was defaulting to the flash player until four years ago. Plus the dozens of flash ads and trackers that were (and still are) placed into many ad networks. Now that the adtech firms switched to building the browser and the cluster of html5 technologies have matured it's easier to track people natively. That's really the only reason flash went away.
- eddieh 7y ago
  There was no Flash on the most popular smartphone (before Android took over). When ad tech went mobile they couldn't use Flash. So, ad tech shifted to web tech.
wgerard 7y ago
There's quite a few flash games/etc. that will be lost to the ages. Quite interesting if you think about it! A bit of an antithesis to the idea that what's on the web is preserved forever.
- asdfman123 7y ago
  Isn't there some way to preserve them, kind of like what people did with DOS boxes?
  - entropicdrifter 7y ago
    There are frameworks that let you compile flash games/apps/videos into native executables with pretty good compatibility (so minimal porting effort). That's probably the best we've got besides using an out-of-date insecure browser.
  - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    I'm sure there will be, there are a few implementations/emulators out there. Gnash, Shumway, Lightspark, and Ruffle. Ruffle seems to be pretty promising, it's being worked on by Newgrounds people and it's written in Rust to target the desktop and WASM. It looks like they can do animations and audio now, and they're working on the various versions of ActionScript.
    - azakai 7y ago
      Sadly Flash is incredibly hard to write a 100% implementation for. That's why there are so many attempts; they've all failed (but they can work well for specific Flash games/apps).
      - skissane 7y ago
        It would be great if Adobe could open source their existing Flash Player at some point. I struggle to see how doing so would harm them commercially. Even if an open source player is available, browser vendors have no interest in supporting it, so it won't be supported with browsers. It isn't going to take away interest in their newer pure HTML5 authoring tools.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  There's nothing to run Flash media outside a browser? Obviously that wouldn't help anything dependent on proprietary server functionality, but that's true of any software.
  - EamonnMR 7y ago
    There's this: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ https://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/ Looks like it got dropped from Ubuntu though.
  - alisonatwork 7y ago
    I went through this a few weeks ago and found a site that explains how to run Flash games standalone: https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-flash-swf-files-outside-your-web-browser/ https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-flash-swf... Basically there is a program you can download from Adobe called Flash Player Projector Content Debugger, then you just point that at the .swf and go. An open source emulator would be better in the long term, but for now this is easier than trying to find a browser that still supports Flash natively.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      You really don't need a tutorial to use Flash Projector. :) • Windows: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flashplayer_32_sa.exe https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3... • Mac: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flashplayer_32_sa.dmg https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3... • Linux: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flash_player_sa_linux.x86_64.tar.gz https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3... Download the version for your platform and open the swf file you want to run. That's it. Linux users can also use the community-packaged Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-Projector https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-Proj... All other links come from https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...
  - Kaiyou 7y ago
- michaelbrave 7y ago
  There is an emulation project trying to save as much as possible https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

robertoandred 7y ago

Steve was right.

benologist 7y ago
Steve was right very briefly but in hindsight it's pretty irrational to expect a piece of software to not run on a powerful CPU without contrived restrictions like being "banned". We'd have the full Adobe Flash IDE on the iPad next year if Jobs had no grudge and we just waited for the software and hardware to improve. Photoshop's halfway there and SQL Server made it to Linux and Windows made it to ARM.
- slig 7y ago
  Flash did not run properly on powerful desktop Macs back in the day, how could he expect that Adobe would sort it out for the iPhone?
  - benologist 7y ago
    The solution was to wait for the software to get better, the hardware to get better, the batteries to get better - today the Flash IDE could run on Windows tablets not much bigger than the iPad Mini, authoring content where before it couldn't even play it back.
    - slig 7y ago
      Why should Apple wait for some other company when they were perfectly capable of shipping something way better? Adobe had the opportunity, and they missed.
      - benologist 7y ago
        I think a better question is why should Apple persecute anybody's software? Especially just because it's not yet performing well on a new, power-sipping processor and architecture. It will be years before anything complex runs well on their watches, that's a stupid reason to sabotage anyone's efforts.

totaldude87 7y ago

>>Flash, you inspired the web. Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to continue your legacy. remember that time when Steve jobs kept out flash from iPhone /iPad vs Google's stance to go full on support for flash on mobile :)

willis936 7y ago
Remember when it was possible to have interactive animated vector graphics on the internet?
- jjtheblunt 7y ago
  I know you're making a joke, but thought SVG has been there and working since before Apple outlawed Flash for its battery draining behaviour.
  - willis936 7y ago
    On paper you’re right. The most interactive svg content I’ve seen are small demos and even those have to be hunted for. You don’t have to (or at least you didn’t in the past) have to look very hard to find large amounts of quality flash content. Good tools were ripped out of artists’ hands and the internet is worse for it. Where’s the replacement?
  - why-oh-why 7y ago
    Yeah have you tried authoring and animating SVG in 2008? Full of (browser support) holes and extremely poor performance, even on the "powerful" iPad in 2011. Flash by comparison would have been a breeze even on mobile.
  - irrational 7y ago
    It has been 10 years yet nobody has created a true replacement for Flash using SVG, Canvas, JS, etc. I wonder why?
    - jjtheblunt 7y ago

windsurfer 7y ago

One of the first "commercial" games I worked on was a Flash (Flex) game that I licensed to a few of the big Flash games sites at the time. I haven't looked at that stuff in years and years... I wonder how feasible it would be to port those games to the modern web.

thrower123 7y ago

The web was a much more interesting place when Flash was around. Browser games, in particular, have never really recovered.

darepublic 7y ago
Two of my favourite flash games (late era flash) - Abobo's Big Adventure (abobosbigadventure.com) - Super mario bros crossover (http://supermariobroscrossover.com/ http://supermariobroscrossover.com/)
kgwxd 7y ago
There's plenty of new browser games being made, but both developer and user interest in mini-games has shifted to native mobile apps, which wasn't really a thing in Flash's heyday.
trentlott 7y ago
Many phone games are (or were) browser games at heart. Just an app that served a webpage. The fact that they weren't very imaginative or fun or free is what the hyperconnected mobile web brought us.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  To be fair, the absolute bulk of browser-based Flash games weren't imaginitive or fun either (and I can assure you, would probably not have been free if drop-in-and-use ad plugins for Flash had been around, if the ads that framed those apps can be taken as any indication ;) ).

dsego 7y ago

I guess "don't break the web" doesn't apply here.

Ajedi32 7y ago
Flash was arguably never part of "The Web" in the first place. Not the open web anyway. It's a proprietary technology with a single implementation controlled and developed by a single company (Adobe) which is now ending support for it.
- rchaud 7y ago
  The difference is that with Flash, you could write once and run it everywhere. This was huge at a time when cross-browser differences were major enough to require something like jQuery.
  - shadowgovt 7y ago
    everywhere *that looked like a desktop PC, which is why Flash floundered badly in the mobile era.
  - Ajedi32 7y ago
    Sure, that's the advantage of having a single implementation. The disadvantage is what we're experiencing right now: once that implementation is no longer maintained you're left with no alternative.
    - rchaud 7y ago
      That's true. My point was that even with Flash announcing several years ago that it would be sunset, nobody stepped up to build tools that worked with the open technologies of CSS, SVG and JS. Instead, what we have is a situation where pretty much only corporations with designers and devs on staff (Stripe and Spotify being the major examples) are building the types of sites that used to be doable by a single person using Flash.
- deleted 7y ago

buboard 7y ago

I predict that they will need to create extensions or exceptions that will bring back flash for people that need it. Thanks largely to the difficulty and bad functionality of HTML5 equivalents, there is still important stuff in libraries / public orgs / museums / archives / university sites etc. that is not ready to die, and unless google/MS are willing to pay the redigitization process, they 'll have to bring back flash. > Goodbye, Flash - Fuck you, Google

loufe 7y ago
Keep in mind that Flash is only being disabled by default, not removed from browser.
- Ajedi32 7y ago
  No, "disabled by default" happened months ago. This announcement is about it being removed from Googlebot. Next year it's being removed from all major browsers (even IE): https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-timeline/#M4RBwchHEuZgKFIF.97 https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-wind...
tiborsaas 7y ago
Flash desktop player is thing: https://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer.html https://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer.html Just like I can'd to anything with a PSD file with a browser natively, I can't with an SWF either now. Not that horrible situation.
shadowgovt 7y ago
> - Fuck you, Google Harsh. I'm sorry they invested their own time and effort into building a search crawler atop a closed-source, proprietary data format (risking not just capital and engineering time, but possibly lawsuits if Adobe had gotten pissy like Oracle) and, having looked at the field of users and decided that there is insufficient interest in the data format to justify maintaining that crawler, they're decommissioning it? They made a product decision; they didn't shoot your dog. And it's not even like their product decision removes the ability of the orgs you've listed to keep using Flash. Those orgs just can't keep relying on a free-but-proprietary search engine provided at the largesse of a corporation they have no business deal with anymore to index their proprietary-format media, for free.

thebouv 7y ago

And yet, there's still no good replacement for building those types of Flash games. HTML5 game development isn't close.

typon 7y ago
We desperately need an HTML5 based game dev IDE with feature parity of Flash. Is such a thing even possible?
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  Shooting from the hip: Technically, yes. Commercially, no.
- darepublic 7y ago
  Wouldn't unity qualify? Personally I think the decline in browser based games has more to do with a lack of interest in that gaming format, not the limitations of current web technology.
  - tiborsaas 7y ago
    Complaining for lack of tooling and doing some research require different efforts :) Unity is just one example that can export to web. There's https://playcanvas.com/ https://playcanvas.com/ too and a plethora of other stuff :) Unity demo: https://wasm.bootcss.com/demo/Tanks/ https://wasm.bootcss.com/demo/Tanks/
  - wutbrodo 7y ago
    This is what I figured, that today's equivalent of Flash gamers are just on mobile games instead. I do miss the anarchic quality that the Flash ecosystem had in the 2000s, but I think that's more a function of the type of people who spent time online back then.
- _pmf_ 7y ago
  Construct 3 is pretty good, but it's just not as easy to deploy self contained applications, and browser variations are an issue.

rootusrootus 7y ago

Now if only ADP would update their timesheet software so it did not rely on Flash, that would be great. I'm going to have to install Flash manually once Google drops it from Chrome.

Ajedi32 7y ago
I don't think installing it manually will work. Support for NPAPI plugins in Chrome was discontinued years ago: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/npapi-deprecation https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/npapi... Same for Firefox: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/npapi-plugins https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/npapi-plugins Not 100% sure about IE, but it doesn't seem like you'll be able to make Flash work there either: https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-timeline/#hWGAooLdKZmfbmcE.97 https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-wind... I think Firefox ESR might still support Flash for a while, at least until the next release.
- rootusrootus 7y ago
  Well, that will get momentarily interesting, then. Perhaps our company will finally abandon ADP for the last few services we still contract with them for.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

salqadri 7y ago

All credit for the demise of Flash belongs to Jobs: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

buboard 7y ago
OTOH, Apple could have bought flash and built their mobile platform on top of it. It was arguably better than Obj-C
- scarface74 7y ago
  iPhone apps were fast and responsive on low end hardware precisely because apps were natively compiled and didn’t run in a VM. Did you ever try running Flash on early high end Android phones?
  - buboard 7y ago
    I 'm sure they were slow. but i m talking about the authoring tool and scripting language. I presume apple could optimize that to be fast natively. Judging from how HTML UI frameworks evolved over time, it's as if we ended up reinventing Actionscript
    - scarface74 7y ago
      So what was Apple going to do during the first 4 or 5 years? Every single mobile platform that tried using HTML frameworks for their apps failed and were slow. Blackberry, Palm, and Microsoft all tried it. Android itself was slow as molasses for years because of its dependence on a VM instead of a completely native stack. The last thing I want is Electron for mobile.
slig 7y ago
Adobe refused to make the flash player work reliable on OSX back in the day. It was Adobe's fault, and anyone that used the web on a Mac in the 2000's can confirm that.
7y ago

rvz 7y ago

The only websites that I know off the top of my head that still use Flash are Newgrounds and the BBC, for its iPlayer content. It seems that Google is already using WebAssembly in its products, Google Keep [0], so it is likely that they will continue to use this. [0] - https://webassembly-security.com/google-keep-webassembly-module-analysis/ https://webassembly-security.com/google-keep-webassembly-mod...

MrOxiMoron 7y ago
IKEA still uses it for (some of) their planners
Rebelgecko 7y ago
Google basically killed off Google Finance last year because it was Flash based. There's an HTML version of Google Finance but it doesn't have anything close to feature parity with the Flash version.

tabtab 7y ago

Designers loved Flash because it was WYSIWYG. It's also why PDF lives. You usually only had to test it on one computer, not different versions of different browser brands. The client-side "auto-flow" of HTML browser drives designers batty. I can relate: I make CRUD GUI's and different browser variations butcher their placement to hell and back, requiring me playing Whack-A-Mole to fix it. The online forums say, "Shut up and learn layout rocket science!" A few snotty Sheldons mastering auto-flow math doesn't scale well. The browser should have a WYSIWYG mode for when your application needs it. The server could re-scale as needed for different devices based on a layout engine of the designer's choosing. That way one is dealing with one layout engine instead of say 50 (browser brand/version combos). Seems more logical to me. We don't need auto-flow rocket science if we just partition layout engines logically. I believe Flash and Java Applets both made the same fatal mistake: tried to be an entire virtual OS. That made them too complicated, which invites hackers. If they had focused on just UI "serving", they could have been small enough to be manageable.

jagged-chisel 7y ago
I'm not a web front-end dev, so pardon my ignorance ... Would a canvas and/or SVG GUI be acceptable?
- tabtab 7y ago
  I haven't seen it work well. Part of the problem is that JavaScript is needed emulate many common GUI idioms, and the emulation or rendering is sometimes buggy on different browsers. It's back the the brand/version combinatorial explosion. The industry really needs a dedicated GUI-friendly standard. Emulating GUI's keeps failing. If you fail 30 beauty contests, the blunt truth is you are ugly. Get a clue and change direction.
  - brians 7y ago
    This is called “forms”. The people who are failing to do better do care—they just also see the limits of the work.
  - 7y ago

ben0x539 7y ago

Oof. Organizing the world's information, except the information that's unfortunately stuck in a file format we don't like anymore (for good reasons), that knowledge clearly isn't worth anything. I get disabling Flash support in browsers by default, but actively pretending Flash content doesn't exist so no one can find it anymore seems unnecessarily destructive.

skybrian 7y ago
It's kind of odd for a web search to index information that your browser can't display. Although I suppose paywall sites and book search are similar.
- ben0x539 7y ago
  Yeah, it's not great. I figure not being able to display specific things is something people who really need to can work around, but not even being able to find things means surrendering information to the void.
- jsploit 7y ago
  Google indexes plenty of other binary filetypes.
- karthikb 7y ago
  Just because one can't open the information by default doesn't mean the information doesn't exist - in this case, Flash content is exactly like your paywall and book examples. The searcher can decide if having access to the information is worth the added cost...regardless of it's buying the book, paying for the subscription to bypass the paywall, finding an old computer or setting up a VM to use flash.
raxxorrax 7y ago
I hope they meant just parsing swf-files or extracting their meta-data. Purging anything related to the file itself would be quite counter productive for a search engine.
shadowgovt 7y ago

droobles 7y ago

One of my favorite sites was Newgrounds. Haven't visited in a while, how will they fare after this?

stefs 7y ago
afaik there's an offline flash player
giancarlostoro 7y ago
They have an offline player as mentioned but also a community member was working on a WebAssembly based player.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  Is that going to run afoul of IP ownership? To my knowledge, Flash was never open-sourced, and Oracle v. Google casts shadows on API-compatible reverse engineering.
  - monocasa 7y ago
    Oracle v. Google is still working it's way through the courts, and those decisions were openly in conflict with normal precedent.
  - giancarlostoro 7y ago
    Not sure but that is a good question. Although the VM bytecode spec is published by them. Not sure why really, they even release the file format spec. I would link but the links I knew changed recently and did not work for me.

droobles 7y ago

Also, would there not be a way to save Flash sites/games with WASM?

macspoofing 7y ago
Sure you could, but you need to build a swf runtime first ... There were a few projects (one from Mozilla - Shumway), but nothing really great. SWF is a complicated format.
- shadowgovt 7y ago
  It's one of those specs where the standard is "Whatever the engine does," right? That runtime is likely to end up looking a lot more like a console hardware emulator than a data parser.
  - macspoofing 7y ago
    I'm not intimately familiar with the SWF standard but I think it's well defined, just complicated (because Flash did a lot) and with potential patent and licensing minefields.
    - monocasa 7y ago
      Oh, it's not. Adobe themselves were too scared to change anything, and just shipped multiple versions of their runtime under the hood to account for all the different versions.
      - shadowgovt 7y ago
        Hah, that's amazing. So even Adobe was solving the problem by treating it like a console emulator. :-p
ihuman 7y ago
There already is https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/ https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

NietTim 7y ago

And not a single mention of Apple, Safari or iOS <which were instrumental to the downfall of Flash>, funny Google.

slig 7y ago
The flash player was awful on Macs back in the day. Adobe refused to support OSX properly, and Steve rightfully did not trust them to make a decent job.
- oscargrouch 7y ago
  Is up to the user to decide that, not the platform middle-man. Its funny how many people are willing to give up their freedom to decide what works best for them, and let others decide, in the name of "im doing all this for your own good". You should always have the right to decide what technology to use, what you install and download on your device. The whole app store deciding what they allow or not, not giving you any other alternative, should be deemed inconstitutional in a society who knows whats happening, when people have nowhere else to go because the digital dictatorship is in control of your digital life. This whole trend smells digital feudalism to me, and it was Jobs that started this whole dangerous trend to the bottom of our civil liberties. Why are you defending this new feudal lord who are mining your right to choose what you do with your own property? If after having bought a house, the guy(or company) who have selled to you, had made some demands of how you could use the kitchen, or the bedroom, would you think its within his right to do so?
  - slig 7y ago
    > Is up to the user to decide that, not the platform middle-man. Each and every time a costumer buys an iPhone they're deciding. Adobe decided to do a half-assed flash player for the Mac. That decision proved to be wrong. Or do you really expect that Adobe would do a decent job supporting an new platform when they couldn't even bother supporting the big cash cow Apple had at that time?
    - 7y ago

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

> Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files. Does Google no longer index .zip files and the like? Obviously they can't process any content in those formats, but if the file name contains the right keywords... shouldn't search be file type agnostic?

samatman 7y ago
I don't know that they do process content inside .zip files, but there's no reason they can't, the format is transparent enough.
giancarlostoro 7y ago
If the zip files not password protected I dont see why they cant crawl the filenames inside zip files. They probably keep all crawl info cause you are able to do Google searches for specific file extensions and I wouldnt be surprised if you could for specific file mime types too.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Okay, poor example on my part. I've had .exe's show up in Google results. It was a long time ago—so maybe things don't work like that anymore—and it was never common, but I know I've seen it happen. I'm sure Google could look inside the binary for text strings, but I can't imagine they do. There is perhaps an argument that standalone exe's shouldn't turn up in results for security reasons (how can you possibly verify its safety without some context?), but I liked to think that search results could at least theoretically include any file type at all.
kick 7y ago
They process and index content inside of PDFs, even ones that haven't been OCR'd by the distributor. It's likely they did similar for Flash.

enriquto 7y ago

Google: > Flash was the answer to the boring static web so much is said and implied in those sad, sad words

macspoofing 7y ago

Is Silverlight also going to be removed from IE by Dec 2020?

Ajedi32 7y ago
2021: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4511036/silverlight-end-of-support https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4511036/silverlight...

rchaud 7y ago

10 years on after that Jobs letter, the market for WYSIWIG web animation is nearly non-existent. All I want is a tool that lets me draw animations, allow tweening controls and exports to HTML/JS, without needing to open a code editor. The only tool that does this to my knowledge is Tumult's Hype: https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/. I'm glad it's using an old-school pricing model of one-time payment and not the subscription model that Adobe and everyone else switched to. Adobe Animate used to be a thing, but that got sunset years ago. There is Adobe After Effects + Lottie, but that assumes you are a front-end developer and know how to integrate those tools together and use the resulting JSON. No wonder then that the only visually interactive websites out there these days are things like "Spotify Year in Music" stuff that probably takes an entire team multiple sprints to build.

iicc 7y ago
https://alternativeto.net/software/hype/ https://alternativeto.net/software/hype/ says the top alternative is Google Web Designer.
- rchaud 7y ago
  It is not. Google Web Designer is a very limited product with a specific audience: marketers who are building those banner ads that everyone of HN blocks anyway. Hype is a desktop app that give you much more control and is targeted at Flash game devs, web designers and others.
  - b0ner_t0ner 7y ago
    Check out https://www.2dimensions.com/ https://www.2dimensions.com/ it's very promising.
  - watersb 7y ago
    Tumult Software makes Hype https://tumult.com/hype/ https://tumult.com/hype/
CharlesW 7y ago
> Adobe Animate used to be a thing, but that got sunset years ago. Adobe Animate received two feature updates last year and at least one bug fix update this year. So, it's not dead yet. Maybe wait until after Adobe MAX (which starts in a few days) to write its obit?

marban 7y ago

So Google is basically denying that the Web's '80s era ever existed.

djsumdog 7y ago
So little is really being preserved today. I'm glad we at least have archive.org.
Xophmeister 7y ago
The web wasn't invented until 1989 and not made public until 1991. The precursor of Flash wasn't until a few years later.
- marban 7y ago
  Metaphor?

floki999 7y ago

Flash, ActionScript and the associated IDE were amazing web development tools at the time (in the era of Macromedia) - way ahead of any competitors. No one/nothing has really filled those shoes.

peferron 7y ago

Flash was incredible. Not just for the animation and games, but also for the audio and video streaming from a server to you, or from your mic/cam to a server, or between you and other users via P2P, all of that live and with the ability to embed arbitrary metadata as cue points at specific times in the stream. The feature set and creativity it unlocked were out of this world.

reaperducer 7y ago

I hate Flash as much as the next guy who remembers web pages slowing to a crawl or crashing because of Flash. But I also think this is a bad idea, just from an information retention scenario. What ever happened to "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful?" What will Google decide the world doesn't need to know about next? HTML2? JPEGs? non-Google-hosted javascript? This is what we get for allowing a private company to be the gatekeeper of our culture.

Ajedi32 7y ago
The gatekeeper here is Adobe, not Google. This is what you get when you store information in a proprietary format with a single implementation controlled and developed by a single private company. There's always the risk they'll kill the product (like they're doing here) and your information will become inaccessible. Also, it's not just Google doing this. Pretty much every major browser vendor is dropping support for Flash in 2020.
- agildehaus 7y ago
  Adobe didn't kill Flash, Apple killed Flash with Mobile Safari. Adobe is just accepting Flash not having a future.

sk84life 7y ago

After all.. I did like more flash than html5 .. browser APIs for videos and audios are really ruined. It's like chrome wanted build fast something to kill flash.. but now we have Totally ruined webrtc left. Thanks Google. Just what we want :)

sireat 7y ago

I remember using Actionscript to build some UI widgets for embedded devices and ... not hating it. The devices used proprietary level 7 protocol sitting on top of regular TCP/IP (could easily debug using netcat). Actionscript made it easy to work with this proprietary protocol. How would one do this with Javascript these days? You probably couldn't do it with WebSockets since WebSockets are at the same level 7 as the proprietary protocol, so you'd need to run some server to translate. Maybe, this https://www.w3.org/TR/raw-sockets/ https://www.w3.org/TR/raw-sockets/ ?

rkachowski 7y ago

Is there any kind of effort to create a non crappy plugin that would support the huge archive of flash content out there? I understand the reasons behind this but it seems like over 15 years of flash content is about to be rendered unaccessible.

Ajedi32 7y ago
In theory I see no reason someone couldn't create a WASM implementation of Flash. Flash is closed-source though so I imagine that would be rather difficult to do without Adobe's cooperation.

tobr 7y ago

What is the preservation status of the decade+ of Shockwave/Flash games and websites? Can they run emulated?

tus88 7y ago

> It's time to go to bed, son. Hey Flash, it's your turn to go to bed. This is a rather creepy equivalence.

copperx 7y ago
That is a terrible line indeed. Juxtaposing the picture of a child going to bed with death is extremely jarring. Is the writer is a psychopath?
- kwijibob 7y ago
  I thought it was a poetic and fun line!

typpo 7y ago

Some folks are blowing this out of proportion: 1. Adobe announced Flash's EOL by the end of 2020. Google isn't killing Flash, it's already dead. 2. Indexing Flash means parsing site structure embedded within SWF files. When was the last time you saw a website with Flash navigation? Your SWF web games are embedded in normal webpages that will still be searchable via H1 tags, backlinks, and so on. Surprising number of Flash lovers coming out of the woodwork after nearly a decade of Flash hate on HN (proprietary, security holes, etc).

irrational 7y ago

I don't miss the vulnerabilities that came with Flash, but I do miss the ease of creating animations, training, games, etc. that came with Flash. Back in the day I worked with a team that created training modules for products. We had a team of animators that was creating beautiful stuff. We had a cast of characters, voice talent, the whole shebang. It was very popular, especially in Asia where they loved the animated training. Then the iPad came out. Our customers informed us that they were going to adopt the iPad for their on the floor training. Well, the iPad didn't support Flash so we had to rebuild everything to be HTML/CSS/JS only. It has been nearly 10 years and we are still using plain text, images, and the occasional video. We tried bringing back the interactive animations over the years, but nothing has come out that comes anywhere close to working as well as Flash did. It really sucks that despite nearly a decade no Flash replacement has emerged. I really feel like we lost something when Flash died. Interactive animations have been replaced with youtube videos and boring text and image web pages.

tracker1 7y ago
On the vulnerabilities... working with flash made me abandon it at home years before the iPhone. Flash, Java and PDF are some of the biggest sources for browser security flaws historically... and that doesn't even touch the complexity of some nearer term flaws that would have been found eventually.
- repolfx 7y ago
  One of the biggest sources of browser security flaws was browsers during that era, also. Moreover browser makers had access to the Flash source code, and Flash was an open spec anyone could implement. I don't think it's as simple as "web secure, everything else bad". For the very longest time only Chrome and Safari had working sandboxes, and there wasn't a huge difference in the exploit stream between WebKit, Flash, Java and Adobe Reader. They all had somewhat similar feature sets.
rtpg 7y ago
For games, game maker studio is a pretty good replacement I’ve found. The interface is pretty idiosyncratic (so was flash’s!), but I have a similar experience coding in that.

monocasa 7y ago

Isn't HBO Go still flash? It broke with a "we need adobe flash" screen maybe six months ago.

leowoo91 7y ago

Hello OpenFL.

finchisko 7y ago

Considering it appeared on google webmaster blog, the argument about "Flash going to bed" is very childish and juvenile. When your son is not willing to go bed, you probably insists, because he will have problems with focus in school next day, but that doesn't really apply to Flash. Article should clearly state why Flash should be gone.

imroot 7y ago

Kronos (the timeclock company) still uses flash in the enterprise timeclock application that my company uses for its hourly employees. They've told us that replacing it is "on their roadmap," but haven't told us when they plan on replacing it. (I also think that Verifone's vault for credit cards was flash based until earlier this year!)

greggturkington 7y ago
Same. They recommend opening the app in IE :( They also told us that replacing it is "on their roadmap," so we replaced Kronos.

Causality1 7y ago

I can't say I understand the decision to stop indexing SWF files. Does Google stop indexing every obsolete file format? Do they not index .doc files, tiff files, rtf files?

lucb1e 7y ago

Last night I backed up some old swf games that I enjoy(ed) playing but wasn't able to answer the question how to be able to run the files in the future. Should I install a VM and never run updates, similar to my Windows XP VM for games, or does anyone know of some (preferably open source) flash implementation that I can run standalone? Edit: I just found this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388405 Quite a few alternative implementations are mentioned. Doesn't sound like anything will be perfect, but this looks more future proof than I was afraid it might be!

gowld 7y ago

What are the options for playing old Flash apps - on desktop and on mobile?

PhasmaFelis 7y ago

I know there were a lot of good reasons to deprecate Flash, especially as a web design tool. I've never understood why it was necessary to ban it from browsers and practically kill nearly 20 years of games and animations.

wooptoo 7y ago

Flash tried to be everything to everyone. While it did some things very well (like those amazing little games), it did other things very poorly (like information websites and accessibility). - Every page had its own navigation style. - Every page had its own font which you could not change. Remember the trend with 8px bitmap-like fonts where you used a special setting so they would render very sharp? - Every page had its own scrolling style. Want to use the mouse wheel? Nope. - Caret navigation for the impaired or people who prefer keyboard navigation? Forget about it. - Stop sound? Only if we give you a button for that. - Here's our looping video intro, you must watch it before accessing this website. - Deep hyperlink to the next "page"? That came very very late. A bit too late for Flash. - View on mobile? Even if you had the plugin somehow installed (some people did back in the day on Android) pages would still be unusable. - An error has occurred within this SWF blob, good luck debugging. - Later came the exploits. I was a fan for a while and used it since Macromedia Flash 4, but I'm glad it's dead and buried. It was poor tech which subverted progress in the HTML/CSS/JS space for many years.

realusername 7y ago
I would also add to that list the awful CPU usage of Flash, every time you had a page with Flash opening, the fan would start to spin and your computer just became very slow...

rado 7y ago

Angular is the new Flash.

baby 7y ago

> Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to continue your legacy. Let’s be honest. It is not going to replace flash. It’s a real shame that flash couldn’t make it. Perhaps for good reasons. But it’s a real shame.

ganitarashid 7y ago

Great, now google just has to re-enable adblockers and chrome will be usable again

j45 7y ago

Can 2019 HTML/JS run identical on all browsers and platforms yet to replace 2013 flash in every use case? Here’s to hoping the future comes back a little sooner, rather than later.

mooman219 7y ago

One part of flash that's definitely appreciated in the artist/animator community is the editor. It's surprisingly simple and intuitive, while still being powerful for power users. Some of the features made it into after effects, but at least currently nothing really compares. Lots of YT/NG animators are still using flash. Newgrounds has an open source utility that can convert flash animations into HTML5 for the sake of preservation iirc.

cookingrobot 7y ago

My favorite new feature (by far) that Google has released recently is the ability to insert images in cell of Google Sheets. It's a fantastic way to keep track of anything visual: screenshots, bug notes, app walkthroughs, etc. They even have a shortcut to create a snapshot and insert it directly in a cell. Sadly, it requires Flash.

musicale 7y ago

If people love flash so much, I'm surprised that it hasn't been reborn in a javascript/webasm form. Same thing with hypercard and other cool-but-abandoned platforms.

100-xyz 7y ago

I am a techie and love working with graphics. Any other techies interested in cooperating and creating a Flash substitute? My linkedin here https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridhar-ramasami-76a226117/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridhar-ramasami-76a226117/ Please write to leisenming AT protonmail DOT com

shultays 7y ago

Flash also came with a pretty good documentation, which was how I learned programming. Thanks flash!