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I hate Adobe with the passion of 100 suns for killing flash like they did… yea it had problems, most software does, but it was like 20 years ahead of its time

I hate Adobe with the passion of 100 suns for killing flash like they did… yea it had problems, most software does, but it was like 20 years ahead of its time ffs, and the web has been ridiculously bland since they killed it. My conspiracy theory is that apple and google paid them to kill it to force sites to support mobile.

netcraft 3y ago
Adobe capitulated, but apple killed it when it didnt support it on ios.
- neverdied 3y ago
  apple killed it after Jobs had a hissy fit
- liquidpele 3y ago
  Android did support it for a time though, it was a pretty good selling point in fact... but then google dropped it too :(
  - kergonath 3y ago
    Google never dropped it. Adobe did, when they realised that they could make money from HTML5 instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.ado... .
- keepamovin 3y ago
  I'm working on bringing Flash to iOS via browser proxy^0. Basically, what we do is run the browser on the server and stream the viewport to your regular mobile browser (ie, Safari). Then we use Ruffle injected into the remote page. Basically it's a "monkey patch" to give you extensions-like capabilities but on mobile devices! 0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424 https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424
  - circuit10 3y ago
    I remember using a browser called Puffin that worked like this to use Flash on iOS
- sundarurfriend 3y ago
  I'm no Apple fan, but Apple killed it because Adobe was letting Flash be an awful, unreliable piece of software for years, and seemed fine with letting that be the status quo for a decade more. If Adobe did a better job of improving the stability and resource management of the Flash clients, they wouldn't have had to "capitulate".
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    Citation needed. Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were. I think that flash got a bad rap because browser vendors didn't like it's monopoly on content and they wanted a slice.
    - justinclift 3y ago
      > Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were. Citation needed. Saying that because Flash was widely touted as a significant contributor to browser crashes. Though, looking for a citation for that myself just now... all of the search results I'm getting back are just an endless sea of "Flash crashed my browser" type of things instead. :/
      - phendrenad2 3y ago
        Yeah, exactly. Just because everyone says it doesn't make it so, and the general public are often wildly wrong about basic computer facts.
        justinclift 3y ago
        Well, neither of us seem to have supporting evidence so far... ;) --- Using some different search parameters is turning up some results: * http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-analysis.mozilla.com/bsmedberg/flash-summary.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-anal... * https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash * https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data There is some talking around the problem on the old Mozilla Blog: * https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash-protection-now-available/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash... Things being about a decade old is adding further difficulty. :/
- kergonath 3y ago
  Adobe worked on it, and even they could not show anything convincing. This was the time when Flash was causing the vast majority of crashes on OS X. Even on Android they could not make it work reliably and it was plagued with security, performance, and overheating issues. Adobe had stopped trying years before Apple officially stopped caring.
bobajeff 3y ago
If they hadn't EOLed Flash then projects like Ruffle would have the difficult job of playing catch up with a proprietary runtime that would still be in wide use.
- orhmeh09 3y ago
  Flash died so Ruffle can live. <3
inferiorhuman 3y ago
Who needs a conspiracy when your product creates such a terrible user experience? I've never written a lick of flash, and I don't care to. I still have awful memories of just how broken Flash sites were. They'd stick out like a sore thumb since none of the widgets ever worked like native ones, there were constantly keyboard focus issues in Firefox, video never seemed to be accelerated and would decimate battery life, the privacy nightmare of the persistent cookies you'd need to load a flash app from Adobe to clear (permissions as with everything else gave the finger to the host system/browser). Who could forget the near constant security and stability issues? I, for one, am glad flash died. Flash died because while it sucked on desktop systems, it was somehow way worse on mobile just as mobile was becoming more important.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  If only Web development 10 years later was half of the developer experience of using Flash.
  - inferiorhuman 3y ago
    Is it though? Folks using the current tech stack du jour have still managed to recreate the user hostility that Flash pioneered.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Just because I can cook in the middle of the forest, doesn't mean the tooling is the same as on a Michelan restaurant.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  Well, we've now gone from "none of the widgets ever worked like native ones" to "there is nothing even remotely in the same category as OS widgets available to the developer". Not sure if it's an improvement.
prmoustache 3y ago
Flash sucked. It was bad for accessibility, it was closed, it was slow, it was a way to force ads on us. Sure you could do animations, but that was not what most of use needed/wished at the time. The only population that liked flash were: - marketing departments - wanna be game devs and the teenagers that played their games
- ComplexSystems 3y ago
  Pretty important population.
- bryceneal 3y ago
  If you make games that millions of people play are you still considered a "wanna be game dev"?
- zare_st 3y ago
  Man, don't be so critical. I for one won't shed a tear for developers and their users that have been screwed over by their garden master. You go for closed proprietary technology because it has certain benefits, so have the consequences too. Same thing also goes to classic ASP, Silverlight, etc. You have one master. But I can't say I did not enjoy flash games. They had a mini boom around mid to late 2000s with "tower defense" type of games which was excellent. For me it felt a bit back in earlier 90s DOS, you had a lot of well made and unique minigames heavily concentrated on gameplay as opposed to "assets"
zelly 3y ago
I remember celebrating when it died but looking back it wasn’t so bad. At least from a dev perspective, working with a batteries-included sdk from a single vendor is a lot nicer than this node_modules cancer.

netcraft 3y ago

Adobe capitulated, but apple killed it when it didnt support it on ios.

neverdied 3y ago
apple killed it after Jobs had a hissy fit
liquidpele 3y ago
Android did support it for a time though, it was a pretty good selling point in fact... but then google dropped it too :(
- kergonath 3y ago
  Google never dropped it. Adobe did, when they realised that they could make money from HTML5 instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.ado... .
keepamovin 3y ago
I'm working on bringing Flash to iOS via browser proxy^0. Basically, what we do is run the browser on the server and stream the viewport to your regular mobile browser (ie, Safari). Then we use Ruffle injected into the remote page. Basically it's a "monkey patch" to give you extensions-like capabilities but on mobile devices! 0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424 https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424
- circuit10 3y ago
  I remember using a browser called Puffin that worked like this to use Flash on iOS
sundarurfriend 3y ago
I'm no Apple fan, but Apple killed it because Adobe was letting Flash be an awful, unreliable piece of software for years, and seemed fine with letting that be the status quo for a decade more. If Adobe did a better job of improving the stability and resource management of the Flash clients, they wouldn't have had to "capitulate".
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  Citation needed. Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were. I think that flash got a bad rap because browser vendors didn't like it's monopoly on content and they wanted a slice.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were. Citation needed. Saying that because Flash was widely touted as a significant contributor to browser crashes. Though, looking for a citation for that myself just now... all of the search results I'm getting back are just an endless sea of "Flash crashed my browser" type of things instead. :/
    - phendrenad2 3y ago
      Yeah, exactly. Just because everyone says it doesn't make it so, and the general public are often wildly wrong about basic computer facts.
      - justinclift 3y ago
        Well, neither of us seem to have supporting evidence so far... ;) --- Using some different search parameters is turning up some results: * http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-analysis.mozilla.com/bsmedberg/flash-summary.html http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-anal... * https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash * https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data There is some talking around the problem on the old Mozilla Blog: * https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash-protection-now-available/ https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash... Things being about a decade old is adding further difficulty. :/
kergonath 3y ago
Adobe worked on it, and even they could not show anything convincing. This was the time when Flash was causing the vast majority of crashes on OS X. Even on Android they could not make it work reliably and it was plagued with security, performance, and overheating issues. Adobe had stopped trying years before Apple officially stopped caring.

bobajeff 3y ago

If they hadn't EOLed Flash then projects like Ruffle would have the difficult job of playing catch up with a proprietary runtime that would still be in wide use.

orhmeh09 3y ago
Flash died so Ruffle can live. <3

inferiorhuman 3y ago

Who needs a conspiracy when your product creates such a terrible user experience? I've never written a lick of flash, and I don't care to. I still have awful memories of just how broken Flash sites were. They'd stick out like a sore thumb since none of the widgets ever worked like native ones, there were constantly keyboard focus issues in Firefox, video never seemed to be accelerated and would decimate battery life, the privacy nightmare of the persistent cookies you'd need to load a flash app from Adobe to clear (permissions as with everything else gave the finger to the host system/browser). Who could forget the near constant security and stability issues? I, for one, am glad flash died. Flash died because while it sucked on desktop systems, it was somehow way worse on mobile just as mobile was becoming more important.

pjmlp 3y ago
If only Web development 10 years later was half of the developer experience of using Flash.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago
  Is it though? Folks using the current tech stack du jour have still managed to recreate the user hostility that Flash pioneered.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Just because I can cook in the middle of the forest, doesn't mean the tooling is the same as on a Michelan restaurant.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Well, we've now gone from "none of the widgets ever worked like native ones" to "there is nothing even remotely in the same category as OS widgets available to the developer". Not sure if it's an improvement.

prmoustache 3y ago

Flash sucked. It was bad for accessibility, it was closed, it was slow, it was a way to force ads on us. Sure you could do animations, but that was not what most of use needed/wished at the time. The only population that liked flash were: - marketing departments - wanna be game devs and the teenagers that played their games

ComplexSystems 3y ago
Pretty important population.
bryceneal 3y ago
If you make games that millions of people play are you still considered a "wanna be game dev"?
zare_st 3y ago
Man, don't be so critical. I for one won't shed a tear for developers and their users that have been screwed over by their garden master. You go for closed proprietary technology because it has certain benefits, so have the consequences too. Same thing also goes to classic ASP, Silverlight, etc. You have one master. But I can't say I did not enjoy flash games. They had a mini boom around mid to late 2000s with "tower defense" type of games which was excellent. For me it felt a bit back in earlier 90s DOS, you had a lot of well made and unique minigames heavily concentrated on gameplay as opposed to "assets"

zelly 3y ago

I remember celebrating when it died but looking back it wasn’t so bad. At least from a dev perspective, working with a batteries-included sdk from a single vendor is a lot nicer than this node_modules cancer.