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I still don't forgive Steve Jobs for his greed in killing Flash because he wanted to get a piece of everything iphone.

kmeisthax 5y ago
In Steve Jobs' defense, he begged Adobe to make Flash work on iPhone like four times and they couldn't make it work. This isn't because Flash on phones would just never work[0]; but that Adobe was unresponsive to Apple's concerns. They viewed the iPhone as "just another thing to put Flash on" rather than something that absolutely needed special attention from the Player team. And it absolutely did need special attention. As an extra insult to injury, Adobe's CEO refused to take Steve Jobs' phone calls[1]. [0] It absolutely could; it would have required implementing hardware-accelerated video, composited animation rendering, and the conditional-tap-to-click behavior that Safari used to handle rollover menus. Instead, Adobe handed Flash developers StageVideo, Stage3D, separate touch events, and told the developers to sort it out themselves. [1] For context, every company involved with early iPhone software was on Steve Jobs' speed dial.
- fenomas 5y ago
  I worked at Adobe at the time, adjacent to Flash, and as far as I know nothing you've written here is true. To answer only technical points, Flash for iPhone (which existed, and worked) was built off FlashLite, which supported touch events and had hardware video (naturally, it's not like software decoding was an option). OTOH StageVideo and Stage3D play no role in this, as they came along ~5 years after FlashLite or potential iphone support was a thing.
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    I'm paraphrasing a ton here - remember, Adobe was pushing for mobile Flash for almost a decade[0]. The problem was ultimately that the user experience didn't meet Apple's high standards, not that Apple wanted to neuter the iPhone web browser. Remember: apps were never part of the plan until a year after launch, and Apple didn't have the market power to slow-roll the web[1] until way later. When Adobe partnered with Google and shipped Flash on Android, the experience was predictably terrible and support was pulled in a year or two. I mention Stage3D because it was emblematic of Adobe's approach to handling Flash Player performance issues: hand the developer the tools to make new content performant, and rely upon them to make their movies run fast. The most egregious example of this, to me, is Starling Framework; a complete and total drop-in replacement for the Flash display tree in AS3 that redirected everything to the GPU. Apple took the opposite approach: performance was built in to the most basic display primitives of the browser. Critically, this meant that even crusty old legacy content would run well in Mobile Safari. Instead of requiring, say, every website ship a virtual DOM just to get decent mobile performance, they implemented hardware layer compositing so that websites would work unchanged. The Flash equivalent to this would have been integrating hardware acceleration into the native display tree so that everything - even crufty old AS1 movies - would play efficiently. I don't have access to Flash Player internals, so obviously I don't know for certain if this was eventually done. However, the impression I got was that if you wanted GPU compositing, you had to use Stage3D; Flash Player didn't just give it to you. As for the non-technical points, my citation is this Twitter thread by a (former?) Apple engineer who was involved with much of the engineering on the original iPhone: https://twitter.com/bob_burrough/status/806098650094940160 https://twitter.com/bob_burrough/status/806098650094940160 "Adobe is a shitty partner" corroborates well with their later behavior with regards to Flash developers, such as... 1. Attempting to charge a 10% revshare for using Stage3D from cross-compiled code 2. Removing the ability to install old versions of Flash/Animate from Creative Cloud, to try and dodge legal liability from the Adobe/Dolby lawsuit 3. Providing a substandard Flash Player exit strategy for developers that wanted to embrace HTML5 4. General lack of polish and maintenance in subsequent versions of Adobe Animate All of the technical points I mentioned (which, again, are paraphrasing almost a decade's worth of history) are downstream of this. Adobe makes strategic blunders in the name of cost control. [0] If you count early versions of Flash Lite that only ran on Japanese smartphones next to a bunch of really solid console game spinoffs that westerners never got [1] From personal experience working on Ruffle, the limiting factor with turning on new features is almost invariably MobileSafari. Also, web push notifications have been a thing for years by now, but Apple still does not support them on iOS.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Wonder if Adobe has any regrets.
  - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
    So much progress was made with Flash by Macromedia, then Adobe bought it and dropped the ball literally after a single version. The software quality degraded almost instantly and new features took way too long to release and came buggy, or conflicted with existing features. Animate CC is by far the buggiest software I use, so much so that it continually saves annoying recovery versions of your documents because crashing happens so frequently. I don’t think Adobe was at all capable of making Flash a success on mobile.
    - lostgame 5y ago
      Couldn’t agree more. Flash with Macromedia felt like a real piece of software that passion and care went into. It was a joy to use. As soon as Adobe grabbed it, it just became a shell of what it had been. Honestly sad to see. :(
      - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
        I’ve got my whole career to thank Flash for. I discovered it when I was 14 and it absolutely blew my mind. I didn’t know what variables, loops, or functions were, but still somehow figured out how to “program” games. Animate CC is still extremely capable animation software for games purposes. I wish Adobe would just sell it to some other company who could actually leverage its authoring capabilities.
    - mejutoco 5y ago
      Definitely. And Director, which extended to 3d! At the time it was more for interactive cds, but the potential for a Unity-like experience was there.
      - kmeisthax 5y ago
        The problem with Director was that most of it's market had switched to Flash at this point. Early on, Flash was a competitor[0] to Director that outcompeted it to the point that Macromedia just bought it out. The way Macromedia differentiated two very similar products was that Director was for bigger projects Flash couldn't handle. Which meant that as Flash got more features, Director made less and less sense to use. There's a good few years where Flash basically was "Unity before Unity" in terms of what you could do with it easily. Later on, right after Adobe released the last version of Director; they tried to market Flash itself as a platform for cross-compiling games to. Except they wanted to charge money for it, in a way that severely pissed off Flash developers and drove even people who did not care about mobile off the platform. [0] Formerly known as FutureWave Splash
MichaelMoser123 5y ago
he had a point though, flash was full of security holes. The list looks scary: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...

In Steve Jobs' defense, he begged Adobe to make Flash work on iPhone like four times and they couldn't make it work. This isn't because Flash on phones would just never work[0]; but that Adobe was unresponsive to Apple's concerns. They viewed the iPhone as "just another thing to put Flash on" rather than something that absolutely needed special attention from the Player team. And it absolutely did need special attention. As an extra insult to injury, Adobe's CEO refused to take Steve Jobs' phone calls[1]. [0] It absolutely could; it would have required implementing hardware-accelerated video, composited animation rendering, and the conditional-tap-to-click behavior that Safari used to handle rollover menus. Instead, Adobe handed Flash developers StageVideo, Stage3D, separate touch events, and told the developers to sort it out themselves. [1] For context, every company involved with early iPhone software was on Steve Jobs' speed dial.

fenomas 5y ago
I worked at Adobe at the time, adjacent to Flash, and as far as I know nothing you've written here is true. To answer only technical points, Flash for iPhone (which existed, and worked) was built off FlashLite, which supported touch events and had hardware video (naturally, it's not like software decoding was an option). OTOH StageVideo and Stage3D play no role in this, as they came along ~5 years after FlashLite or potential iphone support was a thing.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  I'm paraphrasing a ton here - remember, Adobe was pushing for mobile Flash for almost a decade[0]. The problem was ultimately that the user experience didn't meet Apple's high standards, not that Apple wanted to neuter the iPhone web browser. Remember: apps were never part of the plan until a year after launch, and Apple didn't have the market power to slow-roll the web[1] until way later. When Adobe partnered with Google and shipped Flash on Android, the experience was predictably terrible and support was pulled in a year or two. I mention Stage3D because it was emblematic of Adobe's approach to handling Flash Player performance issues: hand the developer the tools to make new content performant, and rely upon them to make their movies run fast. The most egregious example of this, to me, is Starling Framework; a complete and total drop-in replacement for the Flash display tree in AS3 that redirected everything to the GPU. Apple took the opposite approach: performance was built in to the most basic display primitives of the browser. Critically, this meant that even crusty old legacy content would run well in Mobile Safari. Instead of requiring, say, every website ship a virtual DOM just to get decent mobile performance, they implemented hardware layer compositing so that websites would work unchanged. The Flash equivalent to this would have been integrating hardware acceleration into the native display tree so that everything - even crufty old AS1 movies - would play efficiently. I don't have access to Flash Player internals, so obviously I don't know for certain if this was eventually done. However, the impression I got was that if you wanted GPU compositing, you had to use Stage3D; Flash Player didn't just give it to you. As for the non-technical points, my citation is this Twitter thread by a (former?) Apple engineer who was involved with much of the engineering on the original iPhone: https://twitter.com/bob_burrough/status/806098650094940160 https://twitter.com/bob_burrough/status/806098650094940160 "Adobe is a shitty partner" corroborates well with their later behavior with regards to Flash developers, such as... 1. Attempting to charge a 10% revshare for using Stage3D from cross-compiled code 2. Removing the ability to install old versions of Flash/Animate from Creative Cloud, to try and dodge legal liability from the Adobe/Dolby lawsuit 3. Providing a substandard Flash Player exit strategy for developers that wanted to embrace HTML5 4. General lack of polish and maintenance in subsequent versions of Adobe Animate All of the technical points I mentioned (which, again, are paraphrasing almost a decade's worth of history) are downstream of this. Adobe makes strategic blunders in the name of cost control. [0] If you count early versions of Flash Lite that only ran on Japanese smartphones next to a bunch of really solid console game spinoffs that westerners never got [1] From personal experience working on Ruffle, the limiting factor with turning on new features is almost invariably MobileSafari. Also, web push notifications have been a thing for years by now, but Apple still does not support them on iOS.
philliphaydon 5y ago
Wonder if Adobe has any regrets.
- JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
  So much progress was made with Flash by Macromedia, then Adobe bought it and dropped the ball literally after a single version. The software quality degraded almost instantly and new features took way too long to release and came buggy, or conflicted with existing features. Animate CC is by far the buggiest software I use, so much so that it continually saves annoying recovery versions of your documents because crashing happens so frequently. I don’t think Adobe was at all capable of making Flash a success on mobile.
  - lostgame 5y ago
    Couldn’t agree more. Flash with Macromedia felt like a real piece of software that passion and care went into. It was a joy to use. As soon as Adobe grabbed it, it just became a shell of what it had been. Honestly sad to see. :(
    - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
      I’ve got my whole career to thank Flash for. I discovered it when I was 14 and it absolutely blew my mind. I didn’t know what variables, loops, or functions were, but still somehow figured out how to “program” games. Animate CC is still extremely capable animation software for games purposes. I wish Adobe would just sell it to some other company who could actually leverage its authoring capabilities.
  - mejutoco 5y ago
    Definitely. And Director, which extended to 3d! At the time it was more for interactive cds, but the potential for a Unity-like experience was there.
    - kmeisthax 5y ago
      The problem with Director was that most of it's market had switched to Flash at this point. Early on, Flash was a competitor[0] to Director that outcompeted it to the point that Macromedia just bought it out. The way Macromedia differentiated two very similar products was that Director was for bigger projects Flash couldn't handle. Which meant that as Flash got more features, Director made less and less sense to use. There's a good few years where Flash basically was "Unity before Unity" in terms of what you could do with it easily. Later on, right after Adobe released the last version of Director; they tried to market Flash itself as a platform for cross-compiling games to. Except they wanted to charge money for it, in a way that severely pissed off Flash developers and drove even people who did not care about mobile off the platform. [0] Formerly known as FutureWave Splash

MichaelMoser123 5y ago

he had a point though, flash was full of security holes. The list looks scary: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...