10 ms·

I want to remind everyone what happened, here. By the beginning of 2010, it was clear that the App Store was likely to become a massive cash cow for Apple. Fla

I want to remind everyone what happened, here. By the beginning of 2010, it was clear that the App Store was likely to become a massive cash cow for Apple. Flash was direct competition, however. If one could play a game in a browser rather than buying it, Apple would lose out on that income. Everyone was clamoring for Apple to add Flash capability to its mobile iPhone browser. Adobe offered all help, yet Apple continued to drag its feet. It became obvious something was going on. In April, Steve Jobs wrote an open letter, "Thoughts on Flash", stating, among other things, that HTML5 could deliver a superior experience to Flash and that Flash had such inherent security and performance problems that they could never be rectified. These were lies, but Apple's henchmen in tech media, especially Wired and Gawker, repeated this lie endlessly, destroying a creative ecosystem and industry so that Apple could have its App Store. The web is still to this day unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to.

andai 5y ago
>The web is unable to deliver an experience like Flash could I think the browser has been on par with Flash Player for a while, but Flash-the-authoring-tool (to my knowledge) does not yet have an equal. (I'm told Adobe Animate, the rebranded Flash authoring tool, is somehow unsuitable for creating games, despite HTML5 export features.) To put it another way, I think we've more or less replaced the Flash Player, but we haven't replaced Flash Professional. (As others have mentioned, Unity kind of covers the same ground, but not really.)
- rendall 5y ago
  You cannot find Flash experiences on the web, nor even Flash-like experiences on the web. There has been no replacement. This post seems to confuse capability with actuality. Sure, we have the technical capability for a Flash-like player and authoring tool, but it does not exist.
  - nicholsonpk 5y ago
    Maybe I misunderstand what experiences you are looking for, but if you go to itch.io and choose HTML5 do you not see the things that used to be made in Flash?
    - perryizgr8 5y ago
      I don't know if it's just a case of nostalgia but itch.io looks like a wasteland compared to newgrounds.
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        The market is smaller and there are fewer experiences (mostly due to native mobile gaming) but those experiences do rival (and exceed) what was done with flash back in the day.
    - andai 5y ago
      On that note, Flash games were basically web games (back in the day Java filled the same role to some degree, eg with SodaPlay (RIP)), and web games as a whole seem to have gone away to some degree, I'm wondering why that is. I guess they don't work very well on mobile (relative to mobile games that run fullscreen), and most (~50%) web traffic is mobile now?
      - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
        There has been a bit of a resurgence of browser games with Friday Night Funken. I feel as the app stores continue to stagnate, the open and creative nature of the web platform will foster a new market for easily distributable games.
    - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
      There are more specialised tools that can export games for HTML5, but Flash was extremely general purpose. In my time as a Flash developer, I worked on web animations, games, websites (not a great use-case), digital signage, touch screen kiosks, eLearning products, tutorial animations, and I didn’t even touch any of the more enterprisey flex stuff. You can do all that now with various tools but the ecosystem is so fragmented that you often need specialists for each of them. The Flash tools had so much reach that you could bounce between such wildly different projects with very little friction. As a consultant it was amazing, you just did it in Flash. Nowadays there are so many competing and fragmented solutions that you need to evaluate then glue together.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    You are the one confusing "player" and "authoring tool" as there absolutely are players with all the functionality of the flash player and more, they are just called browsers. What's more there absolutely are "html5" experiences that rival the old flash experiences. In most ways these experiences are much better. Perhaps as an old commerical flash developer youbhave a rosy memory of flash in the naughts. Back in the day, the only time I wasn't pissed to see flash loading was when I played flash games, every other use of flash was generally awful and I would usually immediately close a page if it started loading flash. As much as I hate the bloat and SPAification of the web, it is still far better than what most sites did with flash. The demise of flash is complicated and has a lot to do with the rise of mobile. Android did support flash but even on that platform, native games simply outperformed flash games and the market demand shifted. If Apple had supported flash on iOS, this shift would probably have been slower but flash would still have lost out.
    - somehnacct3757 5y ago
      Adobe Air could target mobile platforms with negligible degradation and generated swfs for web, too. I and most other serious flash devs in this era had a toolchain where you built once in AS3 and published to web and mobile using frameworks like Starling. Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile. Thinking this is part of the hit job orchestrated by Apple. Flash died because browser games can't be taxed by Apple. The same thing is happening today with progressive web apps. Ask yourself what Apple could have against those, and now look backwards at their stance on Flash.
      - shkkmo 5y ago
        > Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile. I never said it couldn't do mobile. I said it couldn't do mobile as well as native. Flash died faster because of apple, but was always going to die due to the combination of the rise of app stores, mobile battery issues, and the advancement of web standards. Apple did the work to integrate flash into the iPhone before they rejected it. I think it is interesting that Apple gets all the blame here since the decline of flash also coincides pretty directly with it's acquisition by Adobe. Youtube's early moves to offer non-flash video also had significant effects. While I am a big critic to Apple's approach to called gardens, the decision against flash was as much prescient as it was causative of the decline of flash.
- hansworst 5y ago
  I recently came across https://rive.app/ https://rive.app/ which seems to make some steps in the right direction as a replacement for Flash-the-authoring-tool.
  - andai 5y ago
    Interesting, thanks for sharing! I spent a few minutes playing around with it and it, it seems to target a different niche from Flash. You can't make games with it, only animations for games you'd make in something else. There's no brush or pencil tool, only a very bezier-oriented Pen tool. You're supposed to take the results and integrate them into your game/app using one of their various cross-platform integration libraries. So you'd still have to use something else to make the game, this would just help you make animations (and maybe art, if you like bezier curves). Still, in an era of "render your vector art to bitmaps and dump them in Unity" it's nice to see a tool that does realtime rendering of vector-art animation :) It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to use this to make a HTML5 game (they provide a wasm module for playback of assets) but it's definitely a ways off from a fully integrated solution (and they don't currently seem interested in that aspect).
- JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
  I still use Animate CC as an animation tool for web. I don’t like the HTML5 export feature. The “export texture atlas” feature is much more useful. I have built a runtime for this feature, designed to integrate into whatever renderer you use (Canvas2d, WebGl, DOM, Three.js). It’s kinda like Lottie I suppose, but allows for more dynamic behaviour. https://github.com/jackwlee01/animate_cc_runtime https://github.com/jackwlee01/animate_cc_runtime
- andai 5y ago
  Re: the player exists, but the creator is lacking: in that sense the Web, even today, is a "Turing tarpit, where everything is possible, but nothing of interest is easy."
dan1234 5y ago
If this is true, why didn’t flash takeoff on android devices?
- oblio 5y ago
  Because developing for less than half the mobile market (back in the day) was a bad idea.
- rendall 5y ago
  I don't understand the question. What does takeoff mean in this context? What didn't happen that you would have expected?
  - bydo 5y ago
    Flash existed for Android. Ignoring the fact that it was slow, buggy, and power-hungry—the same arguments against it everywhere else—why didn't it thrive? Why couldn't it compete with the Google Play store, if it would have been such a keen competitor to the Apple App Store? You're way too hung up on this idea that everyone loved Flash until Steve Jobs commanded them not to. My understanding was that it was pretty easy to create animations and rudimentary games in it, so, sure, maybe creators were pretty fond of it? Maybe even too easy, which is why we saw "look what I can do!" Flash websites in places where it was entirely unnecessary and unhelpful (restaurants were notorious for this). But end users never liked it. Or Java applets, for the record.
slig 5y ago
Another reminder: The Flash Player sucked pretty hard on macOS. It was slow, buggy, the fans would go nuts and Adobe didn't care. If they didn't care about Apple users, why would they care about a new thing?
- rendall 5y ago
  > The Flash Player sucked pretty hard on macOS. It was slow, buggy, the fans would go nuts and Adobe didn't care. This is a thing that literally never happened. No one said anything like this until after "Thoughts on Flash"
  - slig 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that it happened. I had a white macbook in 2007, and I used to run a pretty popular flash game website back in the day. It sucked.
    - rendall 5y ago
      You used to run a Flash game website from your macbook? You loved Flash games so much, you built/ran a website where people could play Flash games, but it just sucked so bad that you remember it as sucking all these years later? Not sure what you're saying, here.
      - slig 5y ago
        I meant that I was, back in the day, a mac user, I tested a lot of Flash content and that it was very, very shitty.
MaxBarraclough 5y ago
The point about security doesn't strike me as a lie. Flash had an atrocious security track-record, and it was a proprietary black-box, so no one else was able to build a stronger implementation. > The web is unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. Plenty of Flash content can be converted over to HTML5. As an example, this old website: https://www.homestarrunner.com/ https://www.homestarrunner.com/
- rendall 5y ago
  > The point about security doesn't strike me as a lie Which part? The lie was that these were inherent. "Thoughts on Flash" could have said "We have specific, actionable requirements, and if Adobe can meet them, Apple would be delighted to welcome Flash onto the iPhone". But, welcoming Flash was not the goal. Destroying a competitor was the goal.
  - yonixw 5y ago
    I always understood the "inherit" part as "Who can find and patch the security vulnerabilities that affect his clients?". And since Flash was a closed source 3rd party plugin, it meant that the Safari team is dependent on them. Both for discovery and fixing bugs. Meanwhile, HTML5 and each Browser's Core (Webkit, Chromium etc.) is open source. This kind of closed-source vs open-source+open-spec is indeed inherit to the product. I liked Flash too.. but the reason we don't have "HTML5 Flash" is only due to business decisions from Adobe headquarters. Since Steve Jobs prediction was correct (even if by chance) that power-wise, HTML5+JS=FLASH.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      FYI, "inherit" is not the right word, you want "inherent"
    - rendall 5y ago
      > "I always understood the "inherent" part as ..." This comes off as a just-so story to explain Apple's actions. That Apple would criticize Flash for being closed-source is absurd, but that people would repeat that as a valid criticism is baffling. By the way, only the run-time was closed source. Build tools, language, was all open-source. You didn't even need Flash to compile a swf. > power-wise, HTML5+JS=FLASH I'm not sure what you're saying here. "power-wise"? What does that mean? HTML5 has in over 12 years never been able to deliver the experience that Flash does. They are completely different things. Jobs' successfully conflating them in everyone's mind is a testament to his power as an influencer. Awesome, really.
M4v3R 5y ago
I strongly disagree that the only reason Flash died was Steve Jobs/Apple's personal vendetta against it. Sure, it might've played a part, but as other commenters already pointed out Flash was riddled with problems - it was a resource hog, the macOS implementation was buggy and slow and Adobe seemed to not care about fixing these problems, and it had a very bad record of security holes. Plus it was closed source and the format itself was undocumented. I can see how all the aforementioned problems made it so Apple didn't want to include it on its mobile devices. And even if politics played some part in it, these problems made it easy for Apple to convince everyone else that retiring Flash is the right thing to do.
- rendall 5y ago
  > Flash was riddled with problems - it was a resource hog, the macOS implementation was buggy and slow and Adobe seemed to not care about fixing these problems, and it had a very bad record of security holes Yeah, see this? This "riddled" word? That's how I know you're just repeating what you read. It's a tell. Jobs + Wired + Gawker + Apple made an incredibly strong conceptual gravity well that makes conversation about this difficult. They all use this "riddled with security holes" phrasing. It's like you just repeated "No, you don't understand. Brawndo is what plants crave." What security holes? Specifically? Were they more serious than any browser?
  - andrewxdiamond 5y ago
    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...
    - pverghese 5y ago
      https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-49/product_id-2935/Apple-Safari.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-49/p...
    - rendall 5y ago
      During this conversation, someone inevitably posts this without comment, as if it is a rhetorical slam-dunk. Could you expand on this? Your point is the Flash had vulnerabilities? What software doesn't? https://www.cvedetails.com/product-list/vendor_id-1224/Google.html https://www.cvedetails.com/product-list/vendor_id-1224/Googl... Remember, Jobs' contention was that Flash's problems were inherent. Can you support that?
lopis 5y ago
> Adobe offered all help Perhaps too little too late and with a terrible track record.
- rendall 5y ago
  Adobe. The successful software company behind Photoshop and After Effects among many others, did not have a terrible track record for fixing Flash bugs. This is another lie.
  - srvmshr 5y ago
    Hate to differ in opinion but looking at Adobe products and they way they are memory hogs & spawn thousands of files on Mac/Windows, this does constitute poor quality SWE. They have a successful product and became market leaders - but the engineering quality isn't on par with several other cash cow products
    - cromulent 5y ago
      Yeah and Adobe weren't behind the creation of either Photoshop or After Effects - both were acquired.
  - lopis 5y ago
    At the time Flash player was deprecated, it was full of vulnerabilities. Adobe had every chance to improve its proprietary plugin, but never did in a timely fashion.
dig1 5y ago
I'm not sure this is precisely the case. Any platform, except Windows, was pretty much alien for Adobe and Flash - I recall all the pains of running Flash on Linux, even when support on Firefox/Mozilla side was decent. IMHO, Flash distribution and compatibility versioning was a mess. When you got a new version, you could not access the previous releases on the Adobe site, at least for Linux builds. Overall, I think Flash's demise was more up to how Adobe managed it.
- rendall 5y ago
  > was pretty much alien for Adobe and Flash This is another weird collective retconn that is not true. Apple was not alien to Adobe the creator of Photoshop and Premiere and After Effects. If anything, Adobe is less comfortable with Windows, which usually lagged a bit behind with versioning.
  - throwmeariver1 5y ago
    It was a PITA on linux in every way possible take of your rose tinted glasses.
Mashimo 5y ago
For me as a 64bit linux user the experience was horrible. The worst where flash only websites that did not have a HTML fallback. I'm glad that both browser based flash and java applet died.
- rendall 5y ago
  I do think a valid criticism of web development at the time is that it was waaay too dependent on Flash, and I think the state of HTML/CSS/Javascript is a lot better for not having the Flash crutch. Still, the reason that websites had Flash at all is that it was easy to create a beautiful experience - admittedly, only for those on macOS and Windows.
Angostura 5y ago
> These were lies It would be helpful if you could point out specifically which of these two elements were lies. Because they look like truths.
nicoburns 5y ago
My understanding is that Apple were actually working with Adobe to develop Flash for the iPhone during the iPhone's development, but that Adobe were unable to meet Apple's quality (bugginess, crashing, etc) and power budget (A major restriction on the first iPhone - competitors didn't even think it was possible with current technology) targets. It was only at that point that Apple cut ties and went a different route.
- rendall 5y ago
  No. This is a misunderstanding. Adobe was trying to work with Apple, and Apple rebuffed them. Your tale doesn't realistically explain why Apple would permanently close the door on Flash, and do it in such a public, reputation-damaging way. They didn't just want Flash to improve, but they wanted to destroy Flash. And did! That Flash was a competitor to the App Store does explain their actions.
  - darrenf 5y ago
    > Adobe was trying to work with Apple, and Apple rebuffed them. The opposite was stated in a legal deposition by Scott Forstall (ex-SVP of iOS) just last year[0]. We did not ship Flash. We tried to make Flash work. We helped Adobe. We definitely were interested. Again, this is one where I thought if we could help make it work, this could be great. Flash has been such a problem because the way that it hooks into systems, it’s been a virus nightmare on Windows, even on the Mac. And when we got it running on iOS, the performance was just abysmal and embarrassing and it could never get to something which would be consumer value add. [0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bring-flash-to-ios-but-the-results-were-embarrassing/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri... and many other places which reported it
    - FireBeyond 5y ago
      Apropos of anything else, there's pretty much zero substance to this. "We tried". "We helped". "We were interested". It's entirely possible to say each of those things, under oath, be accurate, and still absolutely undercut things. I wouldn't expect an SVP of Apple, in a lawsuit to say, "Yeah, we really didn't give a shit, and weren't sad that it failed."
jasode 5y ago
>I want to remind everyone what happened, here. [...] These were lies, but Apple's henchmen in tech media, especially Wired and Gawker, repeated this lie endlessly, [...] >I was a professional Flash developer at the time, I think your personal financial investment into the Flash development platform biases your history. In contrast, I wasn't a Flash programmer and only a user and I disagree with your claim that it was an Apple-orchestrated conspiracy. Even before 2009, I (and many others) dreaded the Flash plugin. Yes, the early Youtube used Flash but when a website like a restaurant displayed their menu using Flash, it was a terrible experience. Each time a website displayed the "Flash plugin required" , it was a hassle. And even after downloading the plugin and then visiting the same website a week later, you'd inevitably get "We're Sorry -- You need to update your Flash Player". Adobe Flash was also one of the top reasons in early 2000s for desktop browsers to crash. Misbehaving plugins like FLash was one of the motivating reasons for Chrome to make a bold architectural decision to isolate each tab into its own process so Flash would not crash the entire browser. The Chrome release was 2008 which was before the 2010 Steve Jobs "Thoughts on Flash" Based on countless developer testimonies (such as yours), I'm convinced that Flash was wonderful for the programmers & content creators -- but as a consumer of computers since the 1980s, it was one of the most user-hostile technologies. A lot of us didn't need Steve Jobs to tell us that Flash was suboptimal; we experienced it firsthand. >The web is unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. Again, as a user, I see no website today and think to myself, "I wish this was using Flash because it would be so much better." Can you give a compelling example?
- int_19h 5y ago
  My personal pet peeve with Flash websites was that all the text was usually non-selectable (and thus non-copyable) except for widgets such as text boxes. So e.g. in case of the menu, you couldn't copy the name of the dish to look it up. In other contexts, it could be a much bigger annoyance.
Aeolun 5y ago
I remember that. I also remember agreeing 100%.
TomSwirly 5y ago
I upvoted, I agree that Jobs was lying, but I disagree with your conclusions. The browser's language is a natural monopoly. Flash did one thing - animation - really well, and everything else badly. Simply the inability to bookmark a location inside a Flash presentation meant that you could never use Flash to write your whole site - it was always going to be blobs of Flash on top of a fundamentally HTML structure. Once we, the programming world at large, saw with Gmail what could be done with HTML/JS/CSS, the writing was on the wall for Flash. (And also Flash was insecure; and there was no way to throttle poorly-written Flash applications running in the background on some random page, so very quickly the smart kids would only enable Flash on-click.) Logically, there was no need for Flash to exist. Everyone saw pretty soon that all the facilities Flash had should be put into JS, which has the additional huge advantage of being able to manipulate the DOM. Adobe didn't help it particularly with some fumbling, but they weren't ever going to win that battle, and they got out of it quite gracefully when it comes down to it.
rock_artist 5y ago
While I'm pretty sure business decisions was involved. But, I had a Nexus One with all its glory of running flash. Mobile experience with flash was horrible. Maybe, if Apple did add Flash it was adjusted similar to adjusting website for "mobile". but still, it's much closed standard than HTML. Part of the reason it's so important to have WebKit, Gecko and Chromium is to avoid a lock-in similar to IE where in the past, many websites performed horribly on macOS (and Linux of course). So I wouldn't say it all lies.
partido3619463 5y ago
Others have commented similarly, but as a user - Flash sucked. It meant you had to use a confusing “novel” UI, that the page would be slow or possibly not work. You might not be able to copy/paste text. Almost certainly not accessible.
gruturo 5y ago
I have always had this terrible habit of opening oodles of tabs, and my (windows) pc used to become really sluggish after a while, usually leading up to an actual crash within a matter of days (never closing my browser, and suspending/hibernating the laptop but not rebooting or shutting it down). I then noticed that restarting the browser (which was, back then, just one of many open apps) instantly removed this sluggishness, and no more crashes - unless I forgot to restart the browser (I say "the browser" here because this happened regardless of which one I was using, out of IE, Chrome or Firefox). Some time later, I set up a really underpowered Atom netbook for a friend, and, horrified at the slowdown when visiting some heavier pages, I tried to help with noScript (which didn't really work for my non-tech friend) and a "Click-to-play Flash" extension, and I marvelled at the difference it made. I soon started using it on my own laptop and immediately noticed that slowdowns and crashes had stopped occurring even if I didn't restart the browser for weeks. I decided to completely uninstall Flash from Firefox, and for the few sites which absolutely required it I'd use Chrome which shipped with it - and recommended the same to most people I know, receiving the same feedback. Years later, the "thoughts on Flash" memo came out, and I though "hey, cool, I got there faster than Steve". I have hated Flash ever since my realization, irrespective of the security issues it was riddled (sorry if the word triggers you) with, and ditto with Acrobat Reader. I've come to consider Adobe a producer of awful, bloated, insecure and shitty software, and my computers are better off without any of it. I do love the PDF standard, just not Adobe's software for producing/consuming PDF documents.
- josephg 5y ago
  Yeah I remember that. At the time, the web browsers were starting to aggressively throttle javascript on background tabs so badly behaved tabs wouldn't impact performance. But the throttling behaviour didn't work for flash. And flash banner ads were popular for some ridiculous reason. I watch CPU usage closely, and for awhile there most of the time my CPU got pegged was because some random flash banner ("Click the monkey" crap) went out of control and started busy-looping in a background tab. I'd often came back to my computer to discover some random tab I had open was melting my computer. I hated flash for that. But there was an easy solution. Pretty soon after that I installed a click-to-play flash extension; and the problem went away overnight. About 90% of the flash content my browser ever loaded was advertising, so it was like a lightweight ad blocker for the worst ads. Pretty soon Chrome built that behaviour into their web browser. And that was the beginning of the end for flash. Steve Jobs did finish flash off when he blocked it on the iphone. But that didn't come out of nowhere. He first challenged Adobe to make Flash perform well on mobile devices. But Adobe couldn't meet his challenge. Flash never worked well enough on the low power smartphones of the day. People can blame Steve Jobs all they like, but flash would still be alive and well if Adobe had been able to ship a performant browser extension when it counted. But they didn't. And now their product is dead. I pity the creators who made flash professionally, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for Adobe.
gspr 5y ago
I dislike most things about the modern web – but seeing Flash gone is not one of them. Good riddance!
schnebbau 5y ago
Lots of flash hate in this thread for some reason. As a heavy consumer of flash games (and dabbler in production, but mostly just HTML and PHP around this time), I never experienced "riddled with holes". I understand it had security problems, but I never encountered any myself or by extension.
- pixl97 5y ago
  How could you not encounter flash security problems? There was a time the flash extension for the OS/browser was being updated a few times a month due to security holes.
npteljes 5y ago
One of the large beasts killed the other large beast. Flash was actively hostile to anything open, it undid any advancements of the internet that empowered people and put the control back in the content publishers' hands, so I'm not shedding tears. (Neither would I if Apple got bankrupt)
- rendall 5y ago
  I can really get behind this sentiment, even as the upstream commenter. Personally, I find the loss of Flash less interesting than the kind of consensus-reality-warp that happened. An article like [1] raised no cranky, contrarian alarms in anyone. Just, repeating "riddled with security holes" at everyone. [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/adobe-flash-player-die/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/adobe-flash-player-die/
  - npteljes 5y ago
    Yeah I remember these, like with Internet Explorer, the popular sentiment was to cheer for Flash dying. At most some people were afraid that the creative treasure trove will fade into inaccessibility. Public opinion really is played as a fiddle, by interests with deep pockets.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      The popular sentiment was shaped by gratuitous use of Flash for websites that weren't games or even apps, but that were done entirely in Flash just so they could have cute animated menus and whatnot. A typical website like that would be slow to load, have fixed-size layout, broken URL bar navigation, most text wouldn't be selectable, and accessibility tools would often be broken. And yet that was the "Flash experience" for the majority of web users who were not into browser games... Well, that, and animated ads.
ksec 5y ago
I sort of disagree Steve was acting in bad faith. Flash was slow, security was a problem in the context of iPhone, and what Steve was saying, may be Web Site shouldn't have been done in Flash in the first place. And this is absolutely true, so many web site should not have been a flash site. And Video should be delivered as HTML5. Remember HTML5 Web Apps was suppose to be the second source of Apps for iOS. And Facebook even went all-in on HTML5 apps. I still remember how hard I cringe at their video when they said it was as good as Native Apps. ( Now come to think of it I think my hatred against Web Front End evangelist may have started then ) To this day, not a single Web App, including VSCode is as good as a well made native app. And iPhone doesn't have the horsepower in 2010. Today's iPhone 13 is faster than 80% of the PC in single core performance. So I dont think it was a wrong decision at the time. May have been worth revisiting in 2015 or 2016, but Steve was gone. Adobe gave up. Despite Apple later changed the VM rules so you could ( correct me if I am wrong ) package Flash Games as App. By that time Adobe has stopped all development on Flash. And it is sort of strange, because those flash website was essentially what we have for apps today. So may be it wasn't all wrong. It was the wrong place at the wrong time. Sigh. >The web is still to this day unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. That is the sad part, but partly because no one wants it to. Google for the past 10 years wanted to make Web Apps and Javascript or whatever they deemed good and nearly completely ignore Web Page ( until fairly recently ). WebKit was moving very slowly for the first 5 years before pickup up some pace in the last 3-4. But both of them never intended to have Web Browser to deliver something Flash could. And frankly speaking they couldn’t care less.
IshKebab 5y ago
> These were lies This is not "what happened here". It's your weird anti-Apple take on what happened. Ask anyone that actually used Flash on Android. It was terrible. Far worse than the HTML5 video experience that iPhone users got (when it was supported anyway). I agree the web is still catching up to where Flash was for game. But games weren't the issue. It was all about video.
pier25 5y ago
> The web is still to this day unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. Not only that but the DX was so much better than anything today in the JS world. We had a TS like language 15 years ago. IMO TC39 where really stupid to trash the ES4 spec (based on AS3). The Flash standard library was really awesome. The only third party dependency I used regularly was a tween engine (Zigo first and then TweenLite) and a Signals implementation. From what I've read the perf and security issues could have been improved but I'm not sure Adobe had that much interest in it. Honestly I think Adobe was more than happy to let Flash go. I don't think it brought that much revenue.
- rendall 5y ago
  > Honestly I think Adobe was more than happy to let Flash go. I don't think it brought that much revenue. This explains a lot, too. Adobe did kinda just roll over, rather than address the fundamental concerns of the web community at large. Patches here and there, yes, but no deep restructuring.
  - pier25 5y ago
    > Patches here and there, yes, but no deep restructuring. Exactly. I was heavily into Flash/Air dev from 2007 to 2014 and I always got the impression the team was heavily understaffed. Specially in the later years. Adobe abandoned AS4 (ActionScript/Flash Player Next) which IIRC would have solved the perf issues.
mattl 5y ago
Flash wasn't a web standard and relied on a proprietary plugin. That's why I was against it at the time. Adobe could have fixed that part.
isitmadeofglass 5y ago
> The web is still to this day unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. I think thats very far from true. You can do amazing things in the browser these days. But we don’t have the same ecosystem we had during the flash days. And the reason for that is certainly the App Store, well partly along with steam, but not because Apple or Valve were some evil actors trying to destroy creativity. The reason is simply that these store provided an avenue for all the people on new grounds to monetize their games, so they stopped releasing them for free. Then the monetization became competitive and everyone started optimizing for engagement and adoption instead of optimizing for “the crowd online will get a kick out of this”.
solarmist 5y ago
I can only guess why your experience was so different from most people's. Still, I was a windows user up until around 2010, and it was an objectively terrible experience for me on the whole. While there WERE flash and Silverlight websites that weren't terrible (in fact, I seem to remember a few that were great, was Strong Bad flash?), the majority of things people think of when they think "flash" is stuff that would show up on newgrounds.com or a random video stuffed into a flash container. So, I think both can be true, but most users' primary exposure to flash was low-quality software created as people's first game or similar. If I were to diagnose the issue retroactively, it would be that adobe flash had way too many foot guns (around memory management, I'd guess) for non-professional software engineers, which also happened to be the most significant users of flash on the WWW at least on the sites I frequented.
foxyv 5y ago
To be honest, I was really happy when Flash died. I hated it so much. Proprietary, nonsensical, junk ware that had to be installed on every computer and updated regularly. It was a source of endless viruses and didn't support Linux very well at all. At the same time I hated Apple too because after the iPad-2 came out I couldn't make Skype calls on my iPad-1 because it didn't have a freaking camera. There are still zany web browser games out there as well as crazy video sites. Although I will probably miss Homestar Runner.

andai 5y ago

>The web is unable to deliver an experience like Flash could I think the browser has been on par with Flash Player for a while, but Flash-the-authoring-tool (to my knowledge) does not yet have an equal. (I'm told Adobe Animate, the rebranded Flash authoring tool, is somehow unsuitable for creating games, despite HTML5 export features.) To put it another way, I think we've more or less replaced the Flash Player, but we haven't replaced Flash Professional. (As others have mentioned, Unity kind of covers the same ground, but not really.)

rendall 5y ago
You cannot find Flash experiences on the web, nor even Flash-like experiences on the web. There has been no replacement. This post seems to confuse capability with actuality. Sure, we have the technical capability for a Flash-like player and authoring tool, but it does not exist.
- nicholsonpk 5y ago
  Maybe I misunderstand what experiences you are looking for, but if you go to itch.io and choose HTML5 do you not see the things that used to be made in Flash?
  - perryizgr8 5y ago
    I don't know if it's just a case of nostalgia but itch.io looks like a wasteland compared to newgrounds.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      The market is smaller and there are fewer experiences (mostly due to native mobile gaming) but those experiences do rival (and exceed) what was done with flash back in the day.
  - andai 5y ago
    On that note, Flash games were basically web games (back in the day Java filled the same role to some degree, eg with SodaPlay (RIP)), and web games as a whole seem to have gone away to some degree, I'm wondering why that is. I guess they don't work very well on mobile (relative to mobile games that run fullscreen), and most (~50%) web traffic is mobile now?
    - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
      There has been a bit of a resurgence of browser games with Friday Night Funken. I feel as the app stores continue to stagnate, the open and creative nature of the web platform will foster a new market for easily distributable games.
  - JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
    There are more specialised tools that can export games for HTML5, but Flash was extremely general purpose. In my time as a Flash developer, I worked on web animations, games, websites (not a great use-case), digital signage, touch screen kiosks, eLearning products, tutorial animations, and I didn’t even touch any of the more enterprisey flex stuff. You can do all that now with various tools but the ecosystem is so fragmented that you often need specialists for each of them. The Flash tools had so much reach that you could bounce between such wildly different projects with very little friction. As a consultant it was amazing, you just did it in Flash. Nowadays there are so many competing and fragmented solutions that you need to evaluate then glue together.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  You are the one confusing "player" and "authoring tool" as there absolutely are players with all the functionality of the flash player and more, they are just called browsers. What's more there absolutely are "html5" experiences that rival the old flash experiences. In most ways these experiences are much better. Perhaps as an old commerical flash developer youbhave a rosy memory of flash in the naughts. Back in the day, the only time I wasn't pissed to see flash loading was when I played flash games, every other use of flash was generally awful and I would usually immediately close a page if it started loading flash. As much as I hate the bloat and SPAification of the web, it is still far better than what most sites did with flash. The demise of flash is complicated and has a lot to do with the rise of mobile. Android did support flash but even on that platform, native games simply outperformed flash games and the market demand shifted. If Apple had supported flash on iOS, this shift would probably have been slower but flash would still have lost out.
  - somehnacct3757 5y ago
    Adobe Air could target mobile platforms with negligible degradation and generated swfs for web, too. I and most other serious flash devs in this era had a toolchain where you built once in AS3 and published to web and mobile using frameworks like Starling. Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile. Thinking this is part of the hit job orchestrated by Apple. Flash died because browser games can't be taxed by Apple. The same thing is happening today with progressive web apps. Ask yourself what Apple could have against those, and now look backwards at their stance on Flash.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      > Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile. I never said it couldn't do mobile. I said it couldn't do mobile as well as native. Flash died faster because of apple, but was always going to die due to the combination of the rise of app stores, mobile battery issues, and the advancement of web standards. Apple did the work to integrate flash into the iPhone before they rejected it. I think it is interesting that Apple gets all the blame here since the decline of flash also coincides pretty directly with it's acquisition by Adobe. Youtube's early moves to offer non-flash video also had significant effects. While I am a big critic to Apple's approach to called gardens, the decision against flash was as much prescient as it was causative of the decline of flash.
hansworst 5y ago
I recently came across https://rive.app/ https://rive.app/ which seems to make some steps in the right direction as a replacement for Flash-the-authoring-tool.
- andai 5y ago
  Interesting, thanks for sharing! I spent a few minutes playing around with it and it, it seems to target a different niche from Flash. You can't make games with it, only animations for games you'd make in something else. There's no brush or pencil tool, only a very bezier-oriented Pen tool. You're supposed to take the results and integrate them into your game/app using one of their various cross-platform integration libraries. So you'd still have to use something else to make the game, this would just help you make animations (and maybe art, if you like bezier curves). Still, in an era of "render your vector art to bitmaps and dump them in Unity" it's nice to see a tool that does realtime rendering of vector-art animation :) It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to use this to make a HTML5 game (they provide a wasm module for playback of assets) but it's definitely a ways off from a fully integrated solution (and they don't currently seem interested in that aspect).
JoeyJoJoJr 5y ago
I still use Animate CC as an animation tool for web. I don’t like the HTML5 export feature. The “export texture atlas” feature is much more useful. I have built a runtime for this feature, designed to integrate into whatever renderer you use (Canvas2d, WebGl, DOM, Three.js). It’s kinda like Lottie I suppose, but allows for more dynamic behaviour. https://github.com/jackwlee01/animate_cc_runtime https://github.com/jackwlee01/animate_cc_runtime
andai 5y ago
Re: the player exists, but the creator is lacking: in that sense the Web, even today, is a "Turing tarpit, where everything is possible, but nothing of interest is easy."

dan1234 5y ago

If this is true, why didn’t flash takeoff on android devices?

oblio 5y ago
Because developing for less than half the mobile market (back in the day) was a bad idea.
rendall 5y ago
I don't understand the question. What does takeoff mean in this context? What didn't happen that you would have expected?
- bydo 5y ago
  Flash existed for Android. Ignoring the fact that it was slow, buggy, and power-hungry—the same arguments against it everywhere else—why didn't it thrive? Why couldn't it compete with the Google Play store, if it would have been such a keen competitor to the Apple App Store? You're way too hung up on this idea that everyone loved Flash until Steve Jobs commanded them not to. My understanding was that it was pretty easy to create animations and rudimentary games in it, so, sure, maybe creators were pretty fond of it? Maybe even too easy, which is why we saw "look what I can do!" Flash websites in places where it was entirely unnecessary and unhelpful (restaurants were notorious for this). But end users never liked it. Or Java applets, for the record.

slig 5y ago

Another reminder: The Flash Player sucked pretty hard on macOS. It was slow, buggy, the fans would go nuts and Adobe didn't care. If they didn't care about Apple users, why would they care about a new thing?

rendall 5y ago
> The Flash Player sucked pretty hard on macOS. It was slow, buggy, the fans would go nuts and Adobe didn't care. This is a thing that literally never happened. No one said anything like this until after "Thoughts on Flash"
- slig 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure that it happened. I had a white macbook in 2007, and I used to run a pretty popular flash game website back in the day. It sucked.
  - rendall 5y ago
    You used to run a Flash game website from your macbook? You loved Flash games so much, you built/ran a website where people could play Flash games, but it just sucked so bad that you remember it as sucking all these years later? Not sure what you're saying, here.
    - slig 5y ago
      I meant that I was, back in the day, a mac user, I tested a lot of Flash content and that it was very, very shitty.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago

The point about security doesn't strike me as a lie. Flash had an atrocious security track-record, and it was a proprietary black-box, so no one else was able to build a stronger implementation. > The web is unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. Plenty of Flash content can be converted over to HTML5. As an example, this old website: https://www.homestarrunner.com/ https://www.homestarrunner.com/

rendall 5y ago
> The point about security doesn't strike me as a lie Which part? The lie was that these were inherent. "Thoughts on Flash" could have said "We have specific, actionable requirements, and if Adobe can meet them, Apple would be delighted to welcome Flash onto the iPhone". But, welcoming Flash was not the goal. Destroying a competitor was the goal.
- yonixw 5y ago
  I always understood the "inherit" part as "Who can find and patch the security vulnerabilities that affect his clients?". And since Flash was a closed source 3rd party plugin, it meant that the Safari team is dependent on them. Both for discovery and fixing bugs. Meanwhile, HTML5 and each Browser's Core (Webkit, Chromium etc.) is open source. This kind of closed-source vs open-source+open-spec is indeed inherit to the product. I liked Flash too.. but the reason we don't have "HTML5 Flash" is only due to business decisions from Adobe headquarters. Since Steve Jobs prediction was correct (even if by chance) that power-wise, HTML5+JS=FLASH.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    FYI, "inherit" is not the right word, you want "inherent"
  - rendall 5y ago
    > "I always understood the "inherent" part as ..." This comes off as a just-so story to explain Apple's actions. That Apple would criticize Flash for being closed-source is absurd, but that people would repeat that as a valid criticism is baffling. By the way, only the run-time was closed source. Build tools, language, was all open-source. You didn't even need Flash to compile a swf. > power-wise, HTML5+JS=FLASH I'm not sure what you're saying here. "power-wise"? What does that mean? HTML5 has in over 12 years never been able to deliver the experience that Flash does. They are completely different things. Jobs' successfully conflating them in everyone's mind is a testament to his power as an influencer. Awesome, really.

M4v3R 5y ago

I strongly disagree that the only reason Flash died was Steve Jobs/Apple's personal vendetta against it. Sure, it might've played a part, but as other commenters already pointed out Flash was riddled with problems - it was a resource hog, the macOS implementation was buggy and slow and Adobe seemed to not care about fixing these problems, and it had a very bad record of security holes. Plus it was closed source and the format itself was undocumented. I can see how all the aforementioned problems made it so Apple didn't want to include it on its mobile devices. And even if politics played some part in it, these problems made it easy for Apple to convince everyone else that retiring Flash is the right thing to do.

rendall 5y ago
> Flash was riddled with problems - it was a resource hog, the macOS implementation was buggy and slow and Adobe seemed to not care about fixing these problems, and it had a very bad record of security holes Yeah, see this? This "riddled" word? That's how I know you're just repeating what you read. It's a tell. Jobs + Wired + Gawker + Apple made an incredibly strong conceptual gravity well that makes conversation about this difficult. They all use this "riddled with security holes" phrasing. It's like you just repeated "No, you don't understand. Brawndo is what plants crave." What security holes? Specifically? Were they more serious than any browser?
- andrewxdiamond 5y ago
  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...
  - pverghese 5y ago
    https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-49/product_id-2935/Apple-Safari.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-49/p...
  - rendall 5y ago
    During this conversation, someone inevitably posts this without comment, as if it is a rhetorical slam-dunk. Could you expand on this? Your point is the Flash had vulnerabilities? What software doesn't? https://www.cvedetails.com/product-list/vendor_id-1224/Google.html https://www.cvedetails.com/product-list/vendor_id-1224/Googl... Remember, Jobs' contention was that Flash's problems were inherent. Can you support that?

lopis 5y ago

> Adobe offered all help Perhaps too little too late and with a terrible track record.

rendall 5y ago
Adobe. The successful software company behind Photoshop and After Effects among many others, did not have a terrible track record for fixing Flash bugs. This is another lie.
- srvmshr 5y ago
  Hate to differ in opinion but looking at Adobe products and they way they are memory hogs & spawn thousands of files on Mac/Windows, this does constitute poor quality SWE. They have a successful product and became market leaders - but the engineering quality isn't on par with several other cash cow products
  - cromulent 5y ago
    Yeah and Adobe weren't behind the creation of either Photoshop or After Effects - both were acquired.
- lopis 5y ago
  At the time Flash player was deprecated, it was full of vulnerabilities. Adobe had every chance to improve its proprietary plugin, but never did in a timely fashion.

dig1 5y ago

I'm not sure this is precisely the case. Any platform, except Windows, was pretty much alien for Adobe and Flash - I recall all the pains of running Flash on Linux, even when support on Firefox/Mozilla side was decent. IMHO, Flash distribution and compatibility versioning was a mess. When you got a new version, you could not access the previous releases on the Adobe site, at least for Linux builds. Overall, I think Flash's demise was more up to how Adobe managed it.

rendall 5y ago
> was pretty much alien for Adobe and Flash This is another weird collective retconn that is not true. Apple was not alien to Adobe the creator of Photoshop and Premiere and After Effects. If anything, Adobe is less comfortable with Windows, which usually lagged a bit behind with versioning.
- throwmeariver1 5y ago
  It was a PITA on linux in every way possible take of your rose tinted glasses.

Mashimo 5y ago

For me as a 64bit linux user the experience was horrible. The worst where flash only websites that did not have a HTML fallback. I'm glad that both browser based flash and java applet died.

rendall 5y ago
I do think a valid criticism of web development at the time is that it was waaay too dependent on Flash, and I think the state of HTML/CSS/Javascript is a lot better for not having the Flash crutch. Still, the reason that websites had Flash at all is that it was easy to create a beautiful experience - admittedly, only for those on macOS and Windows.

Angostura 5y ago

> These were lies It would be helpful if you could point out specifically which of these two elements were lies. Because they look like truths.

nicoburns 5y ago

My understanding is that Apple were actually working with Adobe to develop Flash for the iPhone during the iPhone's development, but that Adobe were unable to meet Apple's quality (bugginess, crashing, etc) and power budget (A major restriction on the first iPhone - competitors didn't even think it was possible with current technology) targets. It was only at that point that Apple cut ties and went a different route.

rendall 5y ago
No. This is a misunderstanding. Adobe was trying to work with Apple, and Apple rebuffed them. Your tale doesn't realistically explain why Apple would permanently close the door on Flash, and do it in such a public, reputation-damaging way. They didn't just want Flash to improve, but they wanted to destroy Flash. And did! That Flash was a competitor to the App Store does explain their actions.
- darrenf 5y ago
  > Adobe was trying to work with Apple, and Apple rebuffed them. The opposite was stated in a legal deposition by Scott Forstall (ex-SVP of iOS) just last year[0]. We did not ship Flash. We tried to make Flash work. We helped Adobe. We definitely were interested. Again, this is one where I thought if we could help make it work, this could be great. Flash has been such a problem because the way that it hooks into systems, it’s been a virus nightmare on Windows, even on the Mac. And when we got it running on iOS, the performance was just abysmal and embarrassing and it could never get to something which would be consumer value add. [0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bring-flash-to-ios-but-the-results-were-embarrassing/ https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri... and many other places which reported it
  - FireBeyond 5y ago
    Apropos of anything else, there's pretty much zero substance to this. "We tried". "We helped". "We were interested". It's entirely possible to say each of those things, under oath, be accurate, and still absolutely undercut things. I wouldn't expect an SVP of Apple, in a lawsuit to say, "Yeah, we really didn't give a shit, and weren't sad that it failed."

jasode 5y ago

>I want to remind everyone what happened, here. [...] These were lies, but Apple's henchmen in tech media, especially Wired and Gawker, repeated this lie endlessly, [...] >I was a professional Flash developer at the time, I think your personal financial investment into the Flash development platform biases your history. In contrast, I wasn't a Flash programmer and only a user and I disagree with your claim that it was an Apple-orchestrated conspiracy. Even before 2009, I (and many others) dreaded the Flash plugin. Yes, the early Youtube used Flash but when a website like a restaurant displayed their menu using Flash, it was a terrible experience. Each time a website displayed the "Flash plugin required" , it was a hassle. And even after downloading the plugin and then visiting the same website a week later, you'd inevitably get "We're Sorry -- You need to update your Flash Player". Adobe Flash was also one of the top reasons in early 2000s for desktop browsers to crash. Misbehaving plugins like FLash was one of the motivating reasons for Chrome to make a bold architectural decision to isolate each tab into its own process so Flash would not crash the entire browser. The Chrome release was 2008 which was before the 2010 Steve Jobs "Thoughts on Flash" Based on countless developer testimonies (such as yours), I'm convinced that Flash was wonderful for the programmers & content creators -- but as a consumer of computers since the 1980s, it was one of the most user-hostile technologies. A lot of us didn't need Steve Jobs to tell us that Flash was suboptimal; we experienced it firsthand. >The web is unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. Again, as a user, I see no website today and think to myself, "I wish this was using Flash because it would be so much better." Can you give a compelling example?

int_19h 5y ago
My personal pet peeve with Flash websites was that all the text was usually non-selectable (and thus non-copyable) except for widgets such as text boxes. So e.g. in case of the menu, you couldn't copy the name of the dish to look it up. In other contexts, it could be a much bigger annoyance.

Aeolun 5y ago

I remember that. I also remember agreeing 100%.

TomSwirly 5y ago

I upvoted, I agree that Jobs was lying, but I disagree with your conclusions. The browser's language is a natural monopoly. Flash did one thing - animation - really well, and everything else badly. Simply the inability to bookmark a location inside a Flash presentation meant that you could never use Flash to write your whole site - it was always going to be blobs of Flash on top of a fundamentally HTML structure. Once we, the programming world at large, saw with Gmail what could be done with HTML/JS/CSS, the writing was on the wall for Flash. (And also Flash was insecure; and there was no way to throttle poorly-written Flash applications running in the background on some random page, so very quickly the smart kids would only enable Flash on-click.) Logically, there was no need for Flash to exist. Everyone saw pretty soon that all the facilities Flash had should be put into JS, which has the additional huge advantage of being able to manipulate the DOM. Adobe didn't help it particularly with some fumbling, but they weren't ever going to win that battle, and they got out of it quite gracefully when it comes down to it.

rock_artist 5y ago

While I'm pretty sure business decisions was involved. But, I had a Nexus One with all its glory of running flash. Mobile experience with flash was horrible. Maybe, if Apple did add Flash it was adjusted similar to adjusting website for "mobile". but still, it's much closed standard than HTML. Part of the reason it's so important to have WebKit, Gecko and Chromium is to avoid a lock-in similar to IE where in the past, many websites performed horribly on macOS (and Linux of course). So I wouldn't say it all lies.

partido3619463 5y ago

Others have commented similarly, but as a user - Flash sucked. It meant you had to use a confusing “novel” UI, that the page would be slow or possibly not work. You might not be able to copy/paste text. Almost certainly not accessible.

gruturo 5y ago

I have always had this terrible habit of opening oodles of tabs, and my (windows) pc used to become really sluggish after a while, usually leading up to an actual crash within a matter of days (never closing my browser, and suspending/hibernating the laptop but not rebooting or shutting it down). I then noticed that restarting the browser (which was, back then, just one of many open apps) instantly removed this sluggishness, and no more crashes - unless I forgot to restart the browser (I say "the browser" here because this happened regardless of which one I was using, out of IE, Chrome or Firefox). Some time later, I set up a really underpowered Atom netbook for a friend, and, horrified at the slowdown when visiting some heavier pages, I tried to help with noScript (which didn't really work for my non-tech friend) and a "Click-to-play Flash" extension, and I marvelled at the difference it made. I soon started using it on my own laptop and immediately noticed that slowdowns and crashes had stopped occurring even if I didn't restart the browser for weeks. I decided to completely uninstall Flash from Firefox, and for the few sites which absolutely required it I'd use Chrome which shipped with it - and recommended the same to most people I know, receiving the same feedback. Years later, the "thoughts on Flash" memo came out, and I though "hey, cool, I got there faster than Steve". I have hated Flash ever since my realization, irrespective of the security issues it was riddled (sorry if the word triggers you) with, and ditto with Acrobat Reader. I've come to consider Adobe a producer of awful, bloated, insecure and shitty software, and my computers are better off without any of it. I do love the PDF standard, just not Adobe's software for producing/consuming PDF documents.

josephg 5y ago
Yeah I remember that. At the time, the web browsers were starting to aggressively throttle javascript on background tabs so badly behaved tabs wouldn't impact performance. But the throttling behaviour didn't work for flash. And flash banner ads were popular for some ridiculous reason. I watch CPU usage closely, and for awhile there most of the time my CPU got pegged was because some random flash banner ("Click the monkey" crap) went out of control and started busy-looping in a background tab. I'd often came back to my computer to discover some random tab I had open was melting my computer. I hated flash for that. But there was an easy solution. Pretty soon after that I installed a click-to-play flash extension; and the problem went away overnight. About 90% of the flash content my browser ever loaded was advertising, so it was like a lightweight ad blocker for the worst ads. Pretty soon Chrome built that behaviour into their web browser. And that was the beginning of the end for flash. Steve Jobs did finish flash off when he blocked it on the iphone. But that didn't come out of nowhere. He first challenged Adobe to make Flash perform well on mobile devices. But Adobe couldn't meet his challenge. Flash never worked well enough on the low power smartphones of the day. People can blame Steve Jobs all they like, but flash would still be alive and well if Adobe had been able to ship a performant browser extension when it counted. But they didn't. And now their product is dead. I pity the creators who made flash professionally, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for Adobe.

gspr 5y ago

I dislike most things about the modern web – but seeing Flash gone is not one of them. Good riddance!

schnebbau 5y ago

Lots of flash hate in this thread for some reason. As a heavy consumer of flash games (and dabbler in production, but mostly just HTML and PHP around this time), I never experienced "riddled with holes". I understand it had security problems, but I never encountered any myself or by extension.

pixl97 5y ago
How could you not encounter flash security problems? There was a time the flash extension for the OS/browser was being updated a few times a month due to security holes.

npteljes 5y ago

One of the large beasts killed the other large beast. Flash was actively hostile to anything open, it undid any advancements of the internet that empowered people and put the control back in the content publishers' hands, so I'm not shedding tears. (Neither would I if Apple got bankrupt)

rendall 5y ago
I can really get behind this sentiment, even as the upstream commenter. Personally, I find the loss of Flash less interesting than the kind of consensus-reality-warp that happened. An article like [1] raised no cranky, contrarian alarms in anyone. Just, repeating "riddled with security holes" at everyone. [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/adobe-flash-player-die/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/adobe-flash-player-die/
- npteljes 5y ago
  Yeah I remember these, like with Internet Explorer, the popular sentiment was to cheer for Flash dying. At most some people were afraid that the creative treasure trove will fade into inaccessibility. Public opinion really is played as a fiddle, by interests with deep pockets.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    The popular sentiment was shaped by gratuitous use of Flash for websites that weren't games or even apps, but that were done entirely in Flash just so they could have cute animated menus and whatnot. A typical website like that would be slow to load, have fixed-size layout, broken URL bar navigation, most text wouldn't be selectable, and accessibility tools would often be broken. And yet that was the "Flash experience" for the majority of web users who were not into browser games... Well, that, and animated ads.

ksec 5y ago

I sort of disagree Steve was acting in bad faith. Flash was slow, security was a problem in the context of iPhone, and what Steve was saying, may be Web Site shouldn't have been done in Flash in the first place. And this is absolutely true, so many web site should not have been a flash site. And Video should be delivered as HTML5. Remember HTML5 Web Apps was suppose to be the second source of Apps for iOS. And Facebook even went all-in on HTML5 apps. I still remember how hard I cringe at their video when they said it was as good as Native Apps. ( Now come to think of it I think my hatred against Web Front End evangelist may have started then ) To this day, not a single Web App, including VSCode is as good as a well made native app. And iPhone doesn't have the horsepower in 2010. Today's iPhone 13 is faster than 80% of the PC in single core performance. So I dont think it was a wrong decision at the time. May have been worth revisiting in 2015 or 2016, but Steve was gone. Adobe gave up. Despite Apple later changed the VM rules so you could ( correct me if I am wrong ) package Flash Games as App. By that time Adobe has stopped all development on Flash. And it is sort of strange, because those flash website was essentially what we have for apps today. So may be it wasn't all wrong. It was the wrong place at the wrong time. Sigh. >The web is still to this day unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. That is the sad part, but partly because no one wants it to. Google for the past 10 years wanted to make Web Apps and Javascript or whatever they deemed good and nearly completely ignore Web Page ( until fairly recently ). WebKit was moving very slowly for the first 5 years before pickup up some pace in the last 3-4. But both of them never intended to have Web Browser to deliver something Flash could. And frankly speaking they couldn’t care less.

IshKebab 5y ago

> These were lies This is not "what happened here". It's your weird anti-Apple take on what happened. Ask anyone that actually used Flash on Android. It was terrible. Far worse than the HTML5 video experience that iPhone users got (when it was supported anyway). I agree the web is still catching up to where Flash was for game. But games weren't the issue. It was all about video.

pier25 5y ago

> The web is still to this day unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. Not only that but the DX was so much better than anything today in the JS world. We had a TS like language 15 years ago. IMO TC39 where really stupid to trash the ES4 spec (based on AS3). The Flash standard library was really awesome. The only third party dependency I used regularly was a tween engine (Zigo first and then TweenLite) and a Signals implementation. From what I've read the perf and security issues could have been improved but I'm not sure Adobe had that much interest in it. Honestly I think Adobe was more than happy to let Flash go. I don't think it brought that much revenue.

rendall 5y ago
> Honestly I think Adobe was more than happy to let Flash go. I don't think it brought that much revenue. This explains a lot, too. Adobe did kinda just roll over, rather than address the fundamental concerns of the web community at large. Patches here and there, yes, but no deep restructuring.
- pier25 5y ago
  > Patches here and there, yes, but no deep restructuring. Exactly. I was heavily into Flash/Air dev from 2007 to 2014 and I always got the impression the team was heavily understaffed. Specially in the later years. Adobe abandoned AS4 (ActionScript/Flash Player Next) which IIRC would have solved the perf issues.

mattl 5y ago

Flash wasn't a web standard and relied on a proprietary plugin. That's why I was against it at the time. Adobe could have fixed that part.

isitmadeofglass 5y ago

> The web is still to this day unable to deliver an experience like Flash could, and likely will never be able to. I think thats very far from true. You can do amazing things in the browser these days. But we don’t have the same ecosystem we had during the flash days. And the reason for that is certainly the App Store, well partly along with steam, but not because Apple or Valve were some evil actors trying to destroy creativity. The reason is simply that these store provided an avenue for all the people on new grounds to monetize their games, so they stopped releasing them for free. Then the monetization became competitive and everyone started optimizing for engagement and adoption instead of optimizing for “the crowd online will get a kick out of this”.

solarmist 5y ago

I can only guess why your experience was so different from most people's. Still, I was a windows user up until around 2010, and it was an objectively terrible experience for me on the whole. While there WERE flash and Silverlight websites that weren't terrible (in fact, I seem to remember a few that were great, was Strong Bad flash?), the majority of things people think of when they think "flash" is stuff that would show up on newgrounds.com or a random video stuffed into a flash container. So, I think both can be true, but most users' primary exposure to flash was low-quality software created as people's first game or similar. If I were to diagnose the issue retroactively, it would be that adobe flash had way too many foot guns (around memory management, I'd guess) for non-professional software engineers, which also happened to be the most significant users of flash on the WWW at least on the sites I frequented.

foxyv 5y ago

To be honest, I was really happy when Flash died. I hated it so much. Proprietary, nonsensical, junk ware that had to be installed on every computer and updated regularly. It was a source of endless viruses and didn't support Linux very well at all. At the same time I hated Apple too because after the iPad-2 came out I couldn't make Skype calls on my iPad-1 because it didn't have a freaking camera. There are still zany web browser games out there as well as crazy video sites. Although I will probably miss Homestar Runner.