4 ms·
> I'm not sure what your references are, so let's discuss. Sure. I did not put a wall of text because I thought the context was still clear but apparently not,
by kergonath 3y ago
> I'm not sure what your references are, so let's discuss.
Sure. I did not put a wall of text because I thought the context was still clear but apparently not, fair enough.
* Adobe's CEO was far from compliant, fought as he could and pushed development up to the point where even he saw the writing on the wall:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/apr/29/adobe-chief-executive-flash-apple-reply https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/apr/29/adob...
Eventually they just cut their losses, without having put working versions for Android tablets or Windows Phone, and the implementations on Android and BlackberryOS having their own issues.
* Even by the end of its run on mobile, Flash had performance and stability issues:
https://www.wired.com/2011/11/adobe-mobile-flash-dead/ https://www.wired.com/2011/11/adobe-mobile-flash-dead/
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/134551-why-flash-failed-on-android-and-what-it-means-for-adobe https://www.extremetech.com/computing/134551-why-flash-faile...
It was also the leading cause of crashes on OS X at the time. That was a big point when process separation for plugins was added to Safari:
https://www.macworld.com/article/198369/keynote-48.html https://www.macworld.com/article/198369/keynote-48.html
* It was also disastrous effects on laptops' battery life:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/11/the-future-of-notebooks-ars-reviews-the-11-macbook-air/3/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/11/the-future-of-notebo...
* I am not going to link stories on security issues (there have been tons of those all the time when Flash was used, so it's difficult to find some from around 2010), but I hope you agree on that one.
* To this day, there has not been any convincing argument regarding the lack of accessibility and bad user experience with websites that included Flash elements, or the privacy issues related to Flash cookies that kept appearing.
* I don't have a link offhand because the instance I remember was in Walter Isaacson's book, but there were several people saying that Adobe engineers had been pitching Flash for iPhone to Jobs, with demonstrations, for quite a while and never managed to solve the technical issues. It is completely untrue to say that Jobs was dead set against Flash from the beginning.
Overall, there is a summary of technical arguments here: https://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash https://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash
> At the time I was a full time flash developer, doing flex and flash on AIR.
At the time I was a student and relied on Flash for several things (websites we had to use for lectures, games, even some development in CS courses, etc). This may be why we seem to have wildly different perspectives. But I can assure you, Flash had been rubbish for quite a long time in 2009. It was buggy, crashy, notorious for turning laptops' fans the moment it appeared on a web page and sucking batteries dry.
> One day, Steve Jobs made an announcement that Flash was crapware and had to die for standards (sic!)
Come on, Adobe is and has been many things, but certainly not a champion of open standards. Apple's track record of supporting standards is stellar in comparison.
> I fully expected a rebuttal, but instead, NOPE: he totally and literally threw his product under the bus, on the world stage.
He really did not. He complained that it was unfair, threw a lot of FUD around (there even was that Flash evangelist telling Apple to go screw itself, and look into any post by Kevin Lynch from that time if you want more vitriol). They lead an anti-Apple campaign for about 2 years at that time. What he could not do is contest the technical points, because they were founded. If it were not for the Android community trying to convince itself that Flash was great because was not on iPhones, there would be absolutely no discussion.
Then, Flash for Android stopped in late 2011 (more than 18 monts after Jobs' letter, at which point Apple and Adobe had been talking about what to do with Flash for years). This would make absolutely no sense if its only issues were politics and Apple (it was still on pretty much any device on the Internet except for iPhones and iPads), and development stopped for all platforms around 2015. None of that is the kind of capitulation you describe.
> Flash was dead. Its replacement was said to be coming, and yet nothing good came out.
That much is right Web apps took a long time to improve.
> Javascript at the time was pitiful. Typescript didn't exist yet, and MVVM in HTML wasn't a thing. We were back to web 1.0.
Come on. None of the popular websites stopped functioning. All the things we associated with Web 2.0 worked just fine on iPhones and iPads. What we lost was games, which should not have been in a browser in the first place.
- jadbox 3y ago> Come on, Adobe is and has been many things, but certainly not a champion of open standards. Apple's track record of supporting standards is stellar in comparison. I don't think this is fair to say Apple is better when it's specifically the open web. While Apple has been timid to expand web capabilities, Adobe has been an enormous aid in pushing the open web, and they have teams of researchers that work with TC39, khronos, and other partners. WebGL, WASM, WebGPU, and a huge part modern CSS today is due to years of R&D and spec work. While Apple had a native app platform to lock users into, Adobe (especially post-flash) had not much to gain other than growing the web to be a better export target for their creative tools. > Come on. None of the popular websites stopped functioning. Popular is pretty relative. What about Newgrounds, Zynga (209 million users), schools using Flash rich media for courses, and every website that used Flash for video content. Once Apple iOS decided to forever block flash, it caused these sites to become inaccessible for years on Apple until web alternatives arrived.
- inferiorhuman 3y ago> every website that used Flash for video content Ugh flash based video was a scourge on the web. It was bad on desktop where you're tethered to a power cord and the worst problem with excessive CPU usage was that your fans would spin up. That would never fly on mobile where you're way more constrained by battery life. Besides that flash video widgets always caused problems on desktop with focus stealing and whatnot. The benefits of standardizing video under the guise of HTML5 cannot be overstated. I can grok the benefits of using flash for "rich" content (ignoring that most of the rich content were popup ads), but video? No. Video was hands down one of the worst uses of flash.