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That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV). Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that

That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV). Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to do with flash, and there were many. Either flash in a browser or flash in a browser embedded in something else (ads embedded in 404 pages for broken help pages that were never even displayed, lol). At first I thought it had to be a mistake, a filter I had forgotten about or something, so I triggered a spin in Mail.app by asking it to reindex and sure enough that showed up as the first non-Flash entry in Spin Control. As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.

dimator 3y ago
Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.
- wsc981 3y ago
  Part of it sucked, part of it was great. On Mac-side the experience was worse than on Windows, that's for sure. But Flash also allowed many games to be easily developed and played in the browser. Lots of fun cartoons were made (the Metallica cartoons "fire bad" on Newgrounds come to my mind now). It's a shame Flash sucked so much on Mac, since the developer behind Flash [0] did create some nice games on the Mac early in his career, namely Airborne! and Dark Castle. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay
  - pmarreck 3y ago
    I had no idea! Those games were amazing.
    - irvinej00 3y ago
      [flagged]
i_am_jl 3y ago
I was mistaken, I found a copy of Jobs' letter re:Flash and he does cite the proprietary nature of Flash and Apple's lack of control over the content served on its platform as the most important reason Flash was kept off the iPhone. https://www.cnet.com/culture/steve-jobs-letter-explaining-apples-flash-distaste/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/steve-jobs-letter-explaining-ap... As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes. I used OSX and Flash in the late 2000s so I have no problem believing that.
- bootsmann 3y ago
  > This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor's platforms Funny how one could and maybe should point the same criticism towards electron.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
  Better than OS 9 and Flash when it would bring down the whole system!
  - Grazester 3y ago
    Pre OSX Macs I found to be more unstable than Win95 osr2. Apple really needed OSX!
    - wlesieutre 3y ago
      Mostly thanks to flash! Even in OS X it was still a bad plugin, one of Snow Leopard's headline features was that plugins were moved to separate processes so that Safari could keep running instead of bringing down the whole browser when a plugin had a problem.
hot_gril 3y ago
Yeah Flash was slow, but the common alternatives for in-browser animation/games were (and still are) far slower. H.264/5 maybe did video better than Flash, even then idk, Flash YouTube was always way faster on my old iMac than HTML5 YT. Google Hangouts/Meet will lag a high-end Intel MBP thanks to the unaccelerated VP8/9 video, but AIM Flash-based video calls ran fine on an iMac G4. On top of that, there was never a real replacement to the Flash creation software. All those Flash games that people made without really understanding how to code, no longer doable. I guess Flash had to die because of how outdated, insecure, and proprietary it was. It did seem like a nightmare to support well on mobile. Just wish someone made something strictly better.
- sheepscreek 3y ago
  Perhaps it was fast due to lack of tight security policies etc. These days, everything has to be containerized or be in a sandbox. That adds layers of overhead. Probably also why Google killed NaCl (Native Clients for Google Chrome). It was loosely in the same space as Flash and ActiveX - anyone remember that?
  - hot_gril 3y ago
    I've thought about that too. Can only guess about it myself. Old software tends to be faster just because it has to be, and there isn't always a compromise other than time-to-implement. Not sure how ActiveX's sandboxing worked, but I'll bet it was even less than Flash, since it was running actual x86 code.
    - londons_explore 3y ago
      ActiveX required that the ActiveX code you wanted to run be already installed on your computer. The security mechanism was that users obviously wouldn't install insecure stuff... Turns out nearly every extension had gaping security holes.
      - nvm0n2 3y ago
        Not quite. ActiveX would download and run unsandboxed native code direct from the web, even if it wasn't installed. The security mechanism was a popup dialog that contained the publisher name as verified by a code signing certificate.
brianpan 3y ago
Not hard to believe. Reliability was one of the points in Steve Jobs' _Thoughts on Flash_: > We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
zdw 3y ago
Back in the day there was even a Mac browser plugin called "Click to Flash" that would prevent Flash from loading in web pages and draining battery like crazy. Made the web livable and more secure throwing Flash garbage ads everywhere. Ah, the dev page for these: https://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/ https://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/ People also don't remember the huge number of CVEs that Flash had: https://www.cvedetails.com/version-list/53/6761/1/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/version-list/53/6761/1/Adobe-Flas...
- jwells89 3y ago
  There were also browser extensions that'd replace YouTube's terrible flash player with an HTML5 h.264 player which was a godsend on single-core PPC G4/G5 machines, where flash would happily keep the CPU pegged for no good reason.
phillco 3y ago
My fuzzy recollection was that the OS X version of Flash was much worse than the Windows version. Given "Thoughts on Flash" and the direction of the iPhone, this ended up being very expensive for Adobe :)
- newaccount74 3y ago
  I always thought Flash was unusably slow, until I tried it on Windows. On Windows Flash was fast and fluent, on the Mac it was choppy and unbearably slow. Since Flash was so ubiquitous on the web, this made Macs a lot slower for many tasks than Windows computers. No matter how much Steve Jobs touted the power of the G4, and boasted about the speed of Final Cut, nobody would believe it when their Mac couldn't even run a space invaders clone in IE4 fluently. Adobe ignored performance on Apple devices for years. There was no way in hell Apple would allow Adobe to do the same to iOS.
codedokode 3y ago
> Flash had been responsible Was it just Flash or low skilled web developers using Flash the wrong way, adding 10 Flash advertisements on a page and so on?
saagarjha 3y ago
Spin Control lives on as part of Instruments, which can be configured to collect a tailspin whenever an app hangs.

dimator 3y ago

Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.

wsc981 3y ago
Part of it sucked, part of it was great. On Mac-side the experience was worse than on Windows, that's for sure. But Flash also allowed many games to be easily developed and played in the browser. Lots of fun cartoons were made (the Metallica cartoons "fire bad" on Newgrounds come to my mind now). It's a shame Flash sucked so much on Mac, since the developer behind Flash [0] did create some nice games on the Mac early in his career, namely Airborne! and Dark Castle. --- [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay
- pmarreck 3y ago
  I had no idea! Those games were amazing.
  - irvinej00 3y ago
    [flagged]

i_am_jl 3y ago

I was mistaken, I found a copy of Jobs' letter re:Flash and he does cite the proprietary nature of Flash and Apple's lack of control over the content served on its platform as the most important reason Flash was kept off the iPhone. https://www.cnet.com/culture/steve-jobs-letter-explaining-apples-flash-distaste/ https://www.cnet.com/culture/steve-jobs-letter-explaining-ap... As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes. I used OSX and Flash in the late 2000s so I have no problem believing that.

bootsmann 3y ago
> This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor's platforms Funny how one could and maybe should point the same criticism towards electron.
wlesieutre 3y ago
Better than OS 9 and Flash when it would bring down the whole system!
- Grazester 3y ago
  Pre OSX Macs I found to be more unstable than Win95 osr2. Apple really needed OSX!
  - wlesieutre 3y ago
    Mostly thanks to flash! Even in OS X it was still a bad plugin, one of Snow Leopard's headline features was that plugins were moved to separate processes so that Safari could keep running instead of bringing down the whole browser when a plugin had a problem.

hot_gril 3y ago

Yeah Flash was slow, but the common alternatives for in-browser animation/games were (and still are) far slower. H.264/5 maybe did video better than Flash, even then idk, Flash YouTube was always way faster on my old iMac than HTML5 YT. Google Hangouts/Meet will lag a high-end Intel MBP thanks to the unaccelerated VP8/9 video, but AIM Flash-based video calls ran fine on an iMac G4. On top of that, there was never a real replacement to the Flash creation software. All those Flash games that people made without really understanding how to code, no longer doable. I guess Flash had to die because of how outdated, insecure, and proprietary it was. It did seem like a nightmare to support well on mobile. Just wish someone made something strictly better.

sheepscreek 3y ago
Perhaps it was fast due to lack of tight security policies etc. These days, everything has to be containerized or be in a sandbox. That adds layers of overhead. Probably also why Google killed NaCl (Native Clients for Google Chrome). It was loosely in the same space as Flash and ActiveX - anyone remember that?
- hot_gril 3y ago
  I've thought about that too. Can only guess about it myself. Old software tends to be faster just because it has to be, and there isn't always a compromise other than time-to-implement. Not sure how ActiveX's sandboxing worked, but I'll bet it was even less than Flash, since it was running actual x86 code.
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    ActiveX required that the ActiveX code you wanted to run be already installed on your computer. The security mechanism was that users obviously wouldn't install insecure stuff... Turns out nearly every extension had gaping security holes.
    - nvm0n2 3y ago
      Not quite. ActiveX would download and run unsandboxed native code direct from the web, even if it wasn't installed. The security mechanism was a popup dialog that contained the publisher name as verified by a code signing certificate.

brianpan 3y ago

Not hard to believe. Reliability was one of the points in Steve Jobs' _Thoughts on Flash_: > We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

zdw 3y ago

Back in the day there was even a Mac browser plugin called "Click to Flash" that would prevent Flash from loading in web pages and draining battery like crazy. Made the web livable and more secure throwing Flash garbage ads everywhere. Ah, the dev page for these: https://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/ https://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/ People also don't remember the huge number of CVEs that Flash had: https://www.cvedetails.com/version-list/53/6761/1/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/version-list/53/6761/1/Adobe-Flas...

jwells89 3y ago
There were also browser extensions that'd replace YouTube's terrible flash player with an HTML5 h.264 player which was a godsend on single-core PPC G4/G5 machines, where flash would happily keep the CPU pegged for no good reason.

phillco 3y ago

My fuzzy recollection was that the OS X version of Flash was much worse than the Windows version. Given "Thoughts on Flash" and the direction of the iPhone, this ended up being very expensive for Adobe :)

newaccount74 3y ago
I always thought Flash was unusably slow, until I tried it on Windows. On Windows Flash was fast and fluent, on the Mac it was choppy and unbearably slow. Since Flash was so ubiquitous on the web, this made Macs a lot slower for many tasks than Windows computers. No matter how much Steve Jobs touted the power of the G4, and boasted about the speed of Final Cut, nobody would believe it when their Mac couldn't even run a space invaders clone in IE4 fluently. Adobe ignored performance on Apple devices for years. There was no way in hell Apple would allow Adobe to do the same to iOS.

codedokode 3y ago

> Flash had been responsible Was it just Flash or low skilled web developers using Flash the wrong way, adding 10 Flash advertisements on a page and so on?

saagarjha 3y ago

Spin Control lives on as part of Instruments, which can be configured to collect a tailspin whenever an app hangs.