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Flash died because Jobs wanted it to die. He was worried about AS3s extremely fast development rate (the vector art in fla was years ahead). If iphones supporte

Flash died because Jobs wanted it to die. He was worried about AS3s extremely fast development rate (the vector art in fla was years ahead). If iphones supported flash they could develop their own stores and push out games -- all going around apples gating. Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed.

kelnos 5y ago
> Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed. How many years did Adobe have to make those security fixes, though? And yet Flash was probably the #1 security threat for people using a web browser. I agree that Jobs' reasons for wanting to kill Flash were not particularly altruistic, but it either needed to die, or Adobe should have completely open-sourced it and/or documented everything so people could write compatible (and open) compilers and runtimes. Depending on proprietary software for things you want to keep runnable for years and years is just a bad idea. If Jobs hadn't been the catalyst, Flash would have died for some other reason, eventually. I can understand that OP perhaps didn't see that at the time (I'm sure I've made the same mistake myself long ago), but that would seem to be inevitable.
b112 5y ago
It took almost a decade for flash to even work in a 64bit userland for Linux. I recall the sole dev at the time, complaining that he codebase was a spaghetti mess of undocumented garbage. So I think Jobs was right here. Anyhow, Adobe is famous for dead end, junky stuff. Their early days were golden, but they rested on old IP, milking it. EG, flash, cold fusion, their licensing garbage. These days they do all sorts of weird stuff, and due to their name even banks are silly enough to trust their fraud detection business. First time I've ever pitied banks.
- throw_m239339 5y ago
  Unfortunately Adobe is deeply anchored in the design industry with tools like InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effect(no competition on PC),... so they have a solid foothold they are going to milk for a very long time. However, most of their newer UX products do not seem to beat the competition, which is a good thing at least.
waste_monk 5y ago
>Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed. I can't find it, but back when flash was being killed I recall seeing an analysis of Flash, the distilled conclusion of which was that the sandbox model was so fundamentally flawed that it would not be possible to fix it without breaking compatibility with basically all existing flash content. And also given the decline of Flash in favor of HTML5+CSS+JS it was unjustifiable to spend the effort doing so.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  Most of the single-SWF movies people think about when they think of Flash entirely fit within the current Web sandbox. Flash does have it's own bizzaro-world idea of CORS, though, which can cause issues with web services not aware of it. Adobe also went through a lot of work in AS3 to support "opaque" SWF content, i.e. being able to hotlink other domains' movies in the same way browsers can hotlink images. It is a concept that makes absolutely no sense in a post-Spectre world. But a lot of movies just outright don't need those features - it's definitely not a "rewrite all Flash Player content" situation.
kmeisthax 5y ago
I wrote an explanation of this earlier today on another forum, so I'm going to be lazy and link to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/t843ss/steve_jobs_to_valleywag_at_220_am_why_are_you_so/hzm4da8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/t843ss/steve_jobs_to... Jobs was mostly justified in not shipping Flash as a Safari plug-in on iOS. Adobe had terminal "not getting it" syndrome, and their attempts at shipping the plugin on Android were... actually pretty bad. The thing Jobs overstepped on was trying to ban all third party development tools; something he backed off on after a few months when it was clear the FTC was going to sue. Believe it or not you probably have played Flash games on your iPhone and not even known it. That's why I say Jobs didn't kill Flash; because the platform actually remained relevant in game development for a few years, up until Adobe pulled the whole "premium features" bullshit which really pushed people away from Flash and to Unity.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- andai 5y ago
  >Adobe pulled the whole "premium features" bullshit I had stopped being active in Flash development by then, what is this about?
  - kmeisthax 5y ago
    Do you remember back when Unity was preparing an "export to Flash" feature around 2012 or 2013? Yeah, well, that relied on two technologies in Flash Player that together let you port native apps to run inside Flash: - Domain Memory: WASM, but from the alternate branch of history where ECMAScript 4th Edition became a web standard. - Stage3D: WebGL, but inside Flash Player Adobe pooped their pants and decided that people cross-compiling to Flash Player should have to pay for it. So they decided that you couldn't use both features unless you agreed to pay a 10% revshare to Adobe; they would be "premium features" now. This would be enforced with DRM in the Player that checked for a digital signature in your SWF authorizing the use of premium features. This pissed off a lot of people who were still developing Flash games and, ironically, pushed them to Unity or HTML5 (or both). Adobe saw the writing on the wall and killed premium feature enforcement, but the damage was already done. Bonus points: apparently they planned to pay for ActionScript 4.0 with the revshare money they now weren't getting, and just decided to entirely shitcan AS4 out of spite.

kelnos 5y ago

> Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed. How many years did Adobe have to make those security fixes, though? And yet Flash was probably the #1 security threat for people using a web browser. I agree that Jobs' reasons for wanting to kill Flash were not particularly altruistic, but it either needed to die, or Adobe should have completely open-sourced it and/or documented everything so people could write compatible (and open) compilers and runtimes. Depending on proprietary software for things you want to keep runnable for years and years is just a bad idea. If Jobs hadn't been the catalyst, Flash would have died for some other reason, eventually. I can understand that OP perhaps didn't see that at the time (I'm sure I've made the same mistake myself long ago), but that would seem to be inevitable.

b112 5y ago

It took almost a decade for flash to even work in a 64bit userland for Linux. I recall the sole dev at the time, complaining that he codebase was a spaghetti mess of undocumented garbage. So I think Jobs was right here. Anyhow, Adobe is famous for dead end, junky stuff. Their early days were golden, but they rested on old IP, milking it. EG, flash, cold fusion, their licensing garbage. These days they do all sorts of weird stuff, and due to their name even banks are silly enough to trust their fraud detection business. First time I've ever pitied banks.

throw_m239339 5y ago
Unfortunately Adobe is deeply anchored in the design industry with tools like InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effect(no competition on PC),... so they have a solid foothold they are going to milk for a very long time. However, most of their newer UX products do not seem to beat the competition, which is a good thing at least.

waste_monk 5y ago

>Security! Glitches! those are all lies - that could have been fixed. I can't find it, but back when flash was being killed I recall seeing an analysis of Flash, the distilled conclusion of which was that the sandbox model was so fundamentally flawed that it would not be possible to fix it without breaking compatibility with basically all existing flash content. And also given the decline of Flash in favor of HTML5+CSS+JS it was unjustifiable to spend the effort doing so.

kmeisthax 5y ago
Most of the single-SWF movies people think about when they think of Flash entirely fit within the current Web sandbox. Flash does have it's own bizzaro-world idea of CORS, though, which can cause issues with web services not aware of it. Adobe also went through a lot of work in AS3 to support "opaque" SWF content, i.e. being able to hotlink other domains' movies in the same way browsers can hotlink images. It is a concept that makes absolutely no sense in a post-Spectre world. But a lot of movies just outright don't need those features - it's definitely not a "rewrite all Flash Player content" situation.

kmeisthax 5y ago

I wrote an explanation of this earlier today on another forum, so I'm going to be lazy and link to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/t843ss/steve_jobs_to_valleywag_at_220_am_why_are_you_so/hzm4da8/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/t843ss/steve_jobs_to... Jobs was mostly justified in not shipping Flash as a Safari plug-in on iOS. Adobe had terminal "not getting it" syndrome, and their attempts at shipping the plugin on Android were... actually pretty bad. The thing Jobs overstepped on was trying to ban all third party development tools; something he backed off on after a few months when it was clear the FTC was going to sue. Believe it or not you probably have played Flash games on your iPhone and not even known it. That's why I say Jobs didn't kill Flash; because the platform actually remained relevant in game development for a few years, up until Adobe pulled the whole "premium features" bullshit which really pushed people away from Flash and to Unity.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andai 5y ago
>Adobe pulled the whole "premium features" bullshit I had stopped being active in Flash development by then, what is this about?
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  Do you remember back when Unity was preparing an "export to Flash" feature around 2012 or 2013? Yeah, well, that relied on two technologies in Flash Player that together let you port native apps to run inside Flash: - Domain Memory: WASM, but from the alternate branch of history where ECMAScript 4th Edition became a web standard. - Stage3D: WebGL, but inside Flash Player Adobe pooped their pants and decided that people cross-compiling to Flash Player should have to pay for it. So they decided that you couldn't use both features unless you agreed to pay a 10% revshare to Adobe; they would be "premium features" now. This would be enforced with DRM in the Player that checked for a digital signature in your SWF authorizing the use of premium features. This pissed off a lot of people who were still developing Flash games and, ironically, pushed them to Unity or HTML5 (or both). Adobe saw the writing on the wall and killed premium feature enforcement, but the damage was already done. Bonus points: apparently they planned to pay for ActionScript 4.0 with the revshare money they now weren't getting, and just decided to entirely shitcan AS4 out of spite.