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One of the things that killed Macromedia Director Schockwave (remember that?) which was in many respects superior to Flash (SWF stands for "shockwave flash" --

One of the things that killed Macromedia Director Schockwave (remember that?) which was in many respects superior to Flash (SWF stands for "shockwave flash" -- Flash originally rode on Director's coat-tails) was too-frequent releases. As a Director coder you never knew what platform you needed to target and the end-user experience usually comprised being pestered to update their plugin before seeing your content. Flash forward to 2010-11 and Google is doing the same thing with Android and Chrome (and Firefox is following suit). This is actually a BAD thing, even though we all have broadband, etc. now. There's some kind of happy medium between significant, reasonably well-paced releases and shoving stuff out the door constantly. "Real artists ship," but they don't spam you with incremental releases.

jdub 16y ago
I think that might be true in cases where you're not building on such a widely distributed and incredibly backwards-compatible / gracefully-degrading platform such as the web.
- nlogn 16y ago
  And Android for that matter. I really don't see podperson's point; what Android builds have broken backwards compatibility?
  - qeorge 16y ago
    IIRC, carriers not updating their customers to the most recent Android build has been a big problem. Not really Google's fault, but perhaps Android isn't a great example.
    - jokermatt999 16y ago
      That causes issues for being able to use the latest features, which is somewhat of a problem, but should not affect backwards compatibility. It means you have to possibly be aware of the OS features you use in your apps, but you don't have to worry about updating them due to some API being deprecated.
  - podperson 16y ago
    It's not necessarily a question of backwards compatibility. Just being forced/pestered to update constantly is an anti-feature.
davej 16y ago
The paradigm changes when browser vendors can auto-update with releases that are a few hundred KBs in sizes (i.e. Google Chrome).
tremendo 16y ago
My impression was always that Macromedia acquired FutureSplash (shortened to Flash) when it became clear it could kill Shockwave, which was much slower (14Kbps connections then). Flash also had a rapid release cycle, which did not have any negative impact in its adoption and success, releases were backwards compatible. Chrome's adoption is certainly more significant now, also not affected by many releases. For Android, I'll wait and see.
rbanffy 16y ago
> This is actually a BAD thing I am not aware newer browsers break backwards compatibility. Newer browsers usually work better at the things they were already good at. If you want to target a larger audience, pull your analytics and draw your line at the set you want to serve. Usually any reasonable line will cover mostly everybody. This is the kind of excuse Microsoft uses - when you can't improve your software, you call it "stable" and "mature".
- Elepsis 16y ago
  It's really not that hard to find examples of this. Chrome recently broke rounded corners, and they're about to break h.264 video. But it's certainly more fun to attack Microsoft in every post.
  - daleharvey 16y ago
    Chrome did not "break" rounded corners, they are various cases in which they arent perfect, but every time someone makes this argument they just point to "search the chrome bug tracker" as opposed to giving a specific breakage They have decided not to support h.264 at a time when every developer had to already have implemented a fallback anyway, again its not broken.
    - Silhouette 16y ago
      > Chrome did not "break" rounded corners, they are various cases in which they arent perfect, but every time someone makes this argument they just point to "search the chrome bug tracker" as opposed to giving a specific breakage Here's an example bug where the antialiasing was screwed up: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20064 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20064 And here's one demonstrating the (much worse) problem that you could get completely different colours showing through, although the screenshot isn't great because it only shows a small issue, not the much more offensive result if you had a larger corner radius: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128 Spending literally one minute with Google would find you numerous related problems with screenshots attached. Pretending this wasn't a problem with Chrome and related browsers is like an IE fan pretending that no-one ever really needed CSS hacks because (insert excuse here). There were numerous complaints about this for several months from practising web developers. > They have decided not to support h.264 at a time when every developer had to already have implemented a fallback anyway, again its not broken. If we all have to implement fallbacks anyway, why bother supporting any modern browser features at all? They had H.264 support. They took it away. That means stuff that used to work in Chrome won't any more. It doesn't matter what words you use to describe that situation, the result is still the same.
palish 16y ago
I've never once been pestered by Chrome. Updates are automatic and invisible.
- Groxx 16y ago
  I was just about to say this. Shockwave / Flash / nearly every other application in the world tells you your software is old, and asks if you want to update it, and it will keep telling you this until you check the "don't tell me again" box. Which few people do. So instead they get irritated that it always pops up, and get used to clicking "no" because they didn't want to deal with it then, and don't want to deal with it now. A year passes, they get a virus through an old exploit, and they blame the software instead of their habits / their IT department's dogma (which is not always incorrect, but frequently problematic). Chrome, on the other hand, keeps itself up-to-date in the background, at all times, and doesn't ask you to deal with it. It doesn't even inform you it's doing so, aside from a minuscule little up-arrow on the wrench that disappears on the next launch - no progress bars, no delay, no "restart now", no alerts, nothing. There's no question if someone's using version X or Y; they have the latest of their branch. Period. Or they'll get it in a day or two, and problem solved. Transparent updates, especially when they're nigh-totally transparent, are in an entirely different world than "do you want to update yes/no/cancel". It's apples and granite, or oranges and wolverines - there's no comparison ("apples are sweeter than wolverines").
  - T-hawk 16y ago
    > Transparent updates, especially when they're nigh-totally transparent, are in an entirely different world than "do you want to update yes/no/cancel" Transparent updates are great, until something goes wrong. What happens if someone manages to hijack the DNS entry to make 50 million Chrome installations download an update from a poisoned well? Or Google's quality control misses something and pushes out a buggy update that breaks Chrome's ability to reconnect and obtain a fix for that update? (This has already happened to companies the size of Skype and McAfee.) Or an update simply introduces a behavior that users don't want, like Microsoft using Windows Update to inflict WGA everywhere. The net benefit of transparent updates is still probably greater than explicit updates, but both ways have costs and we shouldn't pretend that either is zero.

jdub 16y ago

I think that might be true in cases where you're not building on such a widely distributed and incredibly backwards-compatible / gracefully-degrading platform such as the web.

nlogn 16y ago
And Android for that matter. I really don't see podperson's point; what Android builds have broken backwards compatibility?
- qeorge 16y ago
  IIRC, carriers not updating their customers to the most recent Android build has been a big problem. Not really Google's fault, but perhaps Android isn't a great example.
  - jokermatt999 16y ago
    That causes issues for being able to use the latest features, which is somewhat of a problem, but should not affect backwards compatibility. It means you have to possibly be aware of the OS features you use in your apps, but you don't have to worry about updating them due to some API being deprecated.
- podperson 16y ago
  It's not necessarily a question of backwards compatibility. Just being forced/pestered to update constantly is an anti-feature.

davej 16y ago

The paradigm changes when browser vendors can auto-update with releases that are a few hundred KBs in sizes (i.e. Google Chrome).

tremendo 16y ago

My impression was always that Macromedia acquired FutureSplash (shortened to Flash) when it became clear it could kill Shockwave, which was much slower (14Kbps connections then). Flash also had a rapid release cycle, which did not have any negative impact in its adoption and success, releases were backwards compatible. Chrome's adoption is certainly more significant now, also not affected by many releases. For Android, I'll wait and see.

rbanffy 16y ago

> This is actually a BAD thing I am not aware newer browsers break backwards compatibility. Newer browsers usually work better at the things they were already good at. If you want to target a larger audience, pull your analytics and draw your line at the set you want to serve. Usually any reasonable line will cover mostly everybody. This is the kind of excuse Microsoft uses - when you can't improve your software, you call it "stable" and "mature".

Elepsis 16y ago
It's really not that hard to find examples of this. Chrome recently broke rounded corners, and they're about to break h.264 video. But it's certainly more fun to attack Microsoft in every post.
- daleharvey 16y ago
  Chrome did not "break" rounded corners, they are various cases in which they arent perfect, but every time someone makes this argument they just point to "search the chrome bug tracker" as opposed to giving a specific breakage They have decided not to support h.264 at a time when every developer had to already have implemented a fallback anyway, again its not broken.
  - Silhouette 16y ago
    > Chrome did not "break" rounded corners, they are various cases in which they arent perfect, but every time someone makes this argument they just point to "search the chrome bug tracker" as opposed to giving a specific breakage Here's an example bug where the antialiasing was screwed up: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20064 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=20064 And here's one demonstrating the (much worse) problem that you could get completely different colours showing through, although the screenshot isn't great because it only shows a small issue, not the much more offensive result if you had a larger corner radius: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128 http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=128 Spending literally one minute with Google would find you numerous related problems with screenshots attached. Pretending this wasn't a problem with Chrome and related browsers is like an IE fan pretending that no-one ever really needed CSS hacks because (insert excuse here). There were numerous complaints about this for several months from practising web developers. > They have decided not to support h.264 at a time when every developer had to already have implemented a fallback anyway, again its not broken. If we all have to implement fallbacks anyway, why bother supporting any modern browser features at all? They had H.264 support. They took it away. That means stuff that used to work in Chrome won't any more. It doesn't matter what words you use to describe that situation, the result is still the same.

palish 16y ago

I've never once been pestered by Chrome. Updates are automatic and invisible.

Groxx 16y ago
I was just about to say this. Shockwave / Flash / nearly every other application in the world tells you your software is old, and asks if you want to update it, and it will keep telling you this until you check the "don't tell me again" box. Which few people do. So instead they get irritated that it always pops up, and get used to clicking "no" because they didn't want to deal with it then, and don't want to deal with it now. A year passes, they get a virus through an old exploit, and they blame the software instead of their habits / their IT department's dogma (which is not always incorrect, but frequently problematic). Chrome, on the other hand, keeps itself up-to-date in the background, at all times, and doesn't ask you to deal with it. It doesn't even inform you it's doing so, aside from a minuscule little up-arrow on the wrench that disappears on the next launch - no progress bars, no delay, no "restart now", no alerts, nothing. There's no question if someone's using version X or Y; they have the latest of their branch. Period. Or they'll get it in a day or two, and problem solved. Transparent updates, especially when they're nigh-totally transparent, are in an entirely different world than "do you want to update yes/no/cancel". It's apples and granite, or oranges and wolverines - there's no comparison ("apples are sweeter than wolverines").
- T-hawk 16y ago
  > Transparent updates, especially when they're nigh-totally transparent, are in an entirely different world than "do you want to update yes/no/cancel" Transparent updates are great, until something goes wrong. What happens if someone manages to hijack the DNS entry to make 50 million Chrome installations download an update from a poisoned well? Or Google's quality control misses something and pushes out a buggy update that breaks Chrome's ability to reconnect and obtain a fix for that update? (This has already happened to companies the size of Skype and McAfee.) Or an update simply introduces a behavior that users don't want, like Microsoft using Windows Update to inflict WGA everywhere. The net benefit of transparent updates is still probably greater than explicit updates, but both ways have costs and we shouldn't pretend that either is zero.