6 ms·

If your business depends on Flash, have an exit plan ready

59 points by relix 13y ago

mcmillion 13y ago
Adobe cares about developers, they just know when a technology needs to die. Things like the new Generator framework for Photoshop and the entire Edge initiative show that they care more than they have in the past. They just don't care about the dated platform you're using.
- k__ 13y ago
  Flex was a nice developer centric Flash and they killed it.
  - gnaritas 13y ago
    That's what you do with failing products.
Scorponok 13y ago
I'm pretty sure that if your business depends on Flash, you should have started implementing an exit plan a couple of years ago by now.
- tieTYT 13y ago
  I would have thought so too but I just watched this talk that suggests flash is the best way to go if you want sound effects in your html5 game (click on the second to last slide to skip): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015669/A-Practical-Guide-to-Building http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015669/A-Practical-Guide-to-Bu... If there's a better solution I'd love to hear it, since this wouldn't work on iOS devices afaik.
  - lukifer 13y ago
    The technology is in transition. Flash is the least-worst option for now, but it won't be a year from today. Impressive new Web Audio APIs are already in the pre-release Chrome and Firefox, and I believe some just landed in iOS7 as well.
    - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
      Pre-release? they were in ios6, been in chrome since version 10, ios6, safari 6, and the whole idea of them CAME from firefox. What is coming out in firefox now is the standardised version of what's already there. http://caniuse.com/#search=web%20audio http://caniuse.com/#search=web%20audio If you want a nice abstraction library, check out howler http://goldfirestudios.com/blog/104/howler.js-Modern-Web-Audio-Javascript-Library http://goldfirestudios.com/blog/104/howler.js-Modern-Web-Aud... as for IE support, well, there's not really that much risk in using soundmanager/flash if you still need to support 7 and 8, is there? I even discovered that old MS even exposed some nice windows media activex controls that you can use to do simple sound playing stuff without loading up a flash plugin, if you're that serious about backwards compatibility. Forget a year from now. You can start using this stuff today, and by the time you release a year from now, things will be even better.
      - tieTYT 13y ago
        I'm glad I made my comment. Thanks a lot for the info.
  - tiagok 13y ago
    have you tried http://www.createjs.com/#!/SoundJS http://www.createjs.com/#!/SoundJS ?
BigBalli 13y ago
Seems like a rant from someone who's butthurt. Technologies evolve and there's no future for Flash. Adobe has been pushing a lot and investing on new stuff for developers.
- nilved 13y ago
  butthurt, really?
- coldtea 13y ago
  Are you 15 years old?
shmerl 13y ago
Either Adobe open sources Flash, or it's as good as dead. And one had to start worrying about Flash dying earlier. It's somewhat late for such concerns now. For example newer versions of Flash aren't even released for Linux anymore for a while. Isn't it a clear indication that it's time to move on?
- Jasper_ 13y ago
  Adobe actually wants to open-source Flash, but they're concerned about the security impact. The source would make it a lot easier to find a 0day and infect somebody's computer. They actually have trusted customers that they share the Flash source code with: Google and Mozilla both have it, for instance.
  - shmerl 13y ago
    Security by obscurity is not a real security anyway. So I don't think open sourcing would hurt it. If anything, it can even improve security, since more researchers would be able to review it.
    - CamperBob2 13y ago
      Patent trolls are also a big disincentive to open-sourcing one's commercial products.
      - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
        Is that something with any real evidence behind it or just Microsoft FUD? I have a hard time believing that patent trolls would even be interested in hiring engineers to read source code. Their business model is to send you a threatening letter with a settlement demand which is noticeably less than the cost of vindicating yourself in a courtroom. What do they care anything about what the code actually does, so long as they can maintain the charade sufficiently to make the threat credible?
    - Jasper_ 13y ago
      These are Adobe's concerns, not mine. I don't work for Adobe, but I'm familiar with Flash and have talked to Adobe engineers before. And it's not an easy call to make: keep in mind how many computers have Flash installed. If open sourcing the project would double the rate that vulnerabilities get found and exploited, that's a real problem for Adobe. Trusted partners already have the Flash code and report security issues.
nikatwork 13y ago
Adobe has never cared about developers. I'm not sure whether from greed or incompetence. One of my first gigs was as a Director developer (eww Lingo) - I managed to jump off that ship right before it sunk from neglect. It's frustrating, Adobe make really useful products that hover on the edge of greatness - Director, Flash, Coldfusion, Air - then somehow seem to lose interest right before they break through. I mean, if Adobe had of lifted even one finger to work with Apple, then Flash might have had a bright future in front of it. As it stands, Adobe stood stupidly chewing their cud in usual fashion until El Jobsy gave up. In some ways, I regret every one of the many hours I have put into learning Adobe dev platforms; on the brightside, their BS pushed me straight into the arms of OSS.
- coldtea 13y ago
  >Adobe has never cared about developers. True. Another problem is, they now seem to not care about users either, with the possible exception of large design studios. The CC subscriptions are fucking over customers who used to skip a version or two (now they have to constantly pay up or they lose their CC programs), and they also fuck people that don't need all of CC but a few choice programs (you either fit with their pre-defined bundles or you're screwed if you need access to only a few programs: after 2 programs, it gets cheaper to buy the whole suite, even if you don't need it). I'd appreciate a full_suite_price/number_of_components base pricing for a single program (with a slightly larger weight for star programs like Photoshop and Premierre), instead of the current "need 3-4 programs? Sorry, you have to rent the whole thing"). Plus the non-US Creative Cloud pricing is a joke. The formula seems to be: take the US price, add any local taxes (legit) and hike it another 30-40% just because. >It's frustrating, Adobe make really useful products that hover on the edge of greatness - Director, Flash, Coldfusion Hmm, all of those were made my Macromedia (Cold Fusion by Allaire and then Macromedia).
  - nikatwork 13y ago
    > Hmm, all of those were made [by] Macromedia True, although they maintained a lot of momentum after the acquisition. But maybe that's the answer - perhaps Adobe slowly starved the dev platform teams to death whilst rolling in all the filthy lucre from the design products. What sucks is that for media creation apps, Adobe still has untouchable quality. Nothing even comes close (sorry Gimp, RIP Freehand), except maaaybe Final Cut or Vegas for simple editing.
kqr2 13y ago
The writing was on the wall when Adobe killed flash for mobile about two years ago. It's pretty clear that they wouldn't invest much resources into flash and instead focus on HTML5. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/nov/09/adobe-flash-mobile-dead http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/nov/09/adobe-flas...
- cpncrunch 13y ago
  Yes, they basically shot themselves in the foot. It would have been fine if html5 provided all the features of flash, but that isn't the case yet.
- dougk16 13y ago
  Just to clarify, they killed flash for mobile browsers. Adobe AIR for mobile, which packages the Flash runtime and user application together as a native app, is still alive and wellish. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air.html I used it myself for a small project a year ago and was well pleased. I find that Flash has such a PR stigma now that developers don't even admit to using it. I unbundled an app I use occasionally just the other day cause it smelled a little Flash-ey...what do you know, it was!
  - xerophtye 13y ago
    Adobe Air? isn't that what League of Legends is made on? (though they might have been moving away from it in recent updates... not sure about that)
aidos 13y ago
It's a shame because Adobe have done some really interesting work. I'm no expert in lower level tech but I used one of their tools to compile libjpeg to AS3 bytecode. I was able to write a file uploader half in AS3 and half in C. Faster than any other uploader I've ever used with the ability to reliably compress jpegs before sending from the client machine. Unfortunately, I don't think they ever completely open sourced the work they did and it was a lab project so they don't support it (though it's been a long time since I looked).
- dougk16 13y ago
  It was Adobe Alchemy, now http://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/ http://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/ but doesn't look very alive. I remember I used it to compile Box2D and Bullet...took some finagling, but was doable in a few days. They managed to compile the Citadel Demo at some point: http://www.unrealengine.com/flash/ http://www.unrealengine.com/flash/
unknownian 13y ago
Don't mean to get dramatic, but what went wrong with Adobe? Don't they still have some of the best engineers in the world?
- smtddr 13y ago
  Well, I would say Flash's inability to perform well on mobile was the killer-blow but even before that flash was the only thing that caused blue-screen on my Win7 box... and it's always the thing that makes may laptop's fan go into warp-drive... and on linux, Flash kept claiming the whole sound-system and I'd have to close the browser to get sound out of any other app(but that may have been a linux issue more than Flash. Just interesting that Flash was the only audio-enabled thing that would cause it.) Flash was great, certainly better than COM object that embedded WindowsMediaPlayer into your browser(IE only). I was a major[1] Flash lover at one time, but it's really past its expiration date at this point. We're just waiting for solid & frozen'ish HTML5,<video> and <audio> tag RFC specs and to agree on a non-patent-landmine-covered decoders for all significant browsers to support. Then maybe someway to "compile" javascript so websites that do flashgames(Nintendo's Japanese website is big on this) can keep doing it with HTML5+js without worrying that it's super-easy to have their content "borrowed" and re-hosted somewhere else. 1.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vP692sCbw4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vP692sCbw4 Note, there are ways to make a Flash game(swf) not work outside of a given domain that would be at least semi-difficult to remove since it generally follows the same-origin rules of XMLHttpRequest. If you test for that in your actionscript, export-to-swf with obfuscation enabled and make sure the string is obfuscated so it can't be found in a hex-editor even if the export-obfuscation was reversed, a flash game hosted at http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ will not run anywhere else and it'd be kinda difficult to alter that behavior.
sami36 13y ago
if as of September 2013, you still have your business depend on Flash, you have bigger problems than Adobe.
AaronFriel 13y ago
Adobe just patched several remote code execution vulnerabilities in the latest update in the past month, don't you think it's a little premature to state that them patching shader compilation to prevent exploit is something that will literally never be solved ever? More than likely, Adobe determined that it was much easier to secure a known slow path for shaders on the CPU than a fast GPU path. As a security-conscious user, I think I prefer that they adopted a quick fix that might have incurred a performance cost rather than put everyone else at continued risk for an indeterminate amount of time.
- dietrichepp 13y ago
  What really shows how much they care is the fact that it didn't even go in the changelog, apparently.
  - AaronFriel 13y ago
    Are you assuming ignorance or malice? Here are a few options: * They were trying to intentionally hide this change to spite you * They were avoiding unintentional disclosure of the attack vector for this vulnerability (indeed, none of the CVEs that I could find for this month's Adobe Flash update describe the attack) * The security hand didn't talk to the changelog hand * The security team worked independently of the perf team, and perhaps this case wasn't thoroughly tested or the regression not detected And so on, and so forth. Let's be honest, there are lots of reasons we can imagine why Adobe did this, but imagining things doesn't make them true.
    - dietrichepp 13y ago
      It doesn't matter whether it's ignorance or malice. I don't have to imagine anything, because what I care about is whether changes that affect me are in the changelogs.
- frenger 13y ago
  It was marked as "never fix", though.
cpncrunch 13y ago
I wonder if that explains why the flash ads on sites like techcrunch have been so slow recently. For the most part flash is a pain in the ass. I've never programmed it myself, but my wife tells me it is horribly buggy.
kclay 13y ago
I did flash/flex/air development for 5 years.. it was fun for sure but when you had problems you were at the mercy of adobe. Don't get me started on the many hacks I had to do to be able to use the core flash, hacks that fixed problems that adobe knew of but didn't care to fix for multiple version releases(they still break webcams every few releases). Needless to say I was sad when adobe stop pushing flash and I quickly had to switch gears ,but looking back I'm glad adobe did this. Flash is pretty pointless unless you are doing video. It hurts to see the company and tech you spent so many years/hours in just died without even fighting. R.I.P Adobe and Flash
mschuster91 13y ago
Can anyone read that Adobe bug report mentioned in the article? All I get is "We're sorry but we weren't able to process this request due to an unforeseen error.".
columbo 13y ago
Flex... I thought flex was great. I really did. The funny thing is I used to do a bunch of cold fusion work back in the day so I already had firsthand experience with Adobe's complete lack of interest in supporting a developer platform. All I have to say is "allaire homesite", most CFdevs should remember. Nevertheless I got involved a handful of huge flex applications. This was back when it was Apollo, so 07/08. Firefox was gaining traction but not much, Jquery didn't really exist and google was for searching, not web browsing. These apps looked beautiful, every pixel was accounted for, they were responsive(ish) and, the best part, when they were done they were DONE (mostly). No more trying to support IE5.5 or IE6. Flex was something you could sell to an enterprise shop. Then native technologies finally caught up. The IPhone, perhaps rightly so, gave a huge middle finger to Adobe. Then JQuery, then Bootstrap comes into the picture and... amazingly... the shit actually works. Seriously, this is not expected behavior when dealing with html/css/js libraries. Flex was really just a means to an end. For devs like me it meant I didn't have to code another $#@! table layout or drop-down-select or menu-navigation or accordion. On one hand I feel the industry caught up to Flex and the better player (native support) won. I feel that I shouldn't personally blame Adobe on this one. On the other hand I know that Adobe has killed off so much through their process of atrophy-driven-development that I can't help but want to point a (very specific) finger at them. Eh, yeah, at this point when I hear Adobe I walk away, I can't blame them for everything, but I've lost all faith in their ability to deliver.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  the shit actually works. Seriously, this is not expected behavior when dealing with html/css/js libraries. People learning html/js/css today have no idea how incredible they have it. They don't even have to think about IE compatibility! I used a lazy evaluation strategy for my life: in 2007 after it became clear to me how ... well, awful ... the webdev technologies were, I switched fields for a few years. And hey, presto, now in 2013 everything works. And works well! I can be a web developer with about 1/3rd of the effort it would've taken me in '07. EDIT: Actually, after spending a few minutes remembering what those times were like, I'd say nowadays it's a lot more than 3x easier. It's now at least 10x easier to write webapps, if not 30x. The vast majority of one's time was spent hacking around various unexpected behaviors and incompatibilities.
jcampbell1 13y ago
In defense of Adobe, I made my living for many years from a Flash 8 app I wrote 9 years ago. We have since moved to html5, but I swear, I have made 1 change to the flash version in 5 years and it still works flawlessly on all browsers. The html5 version constantly require tweaks for stuff that changes. Support for html5 video is all over the map. e.g. do you get load progress events? Are loaded ranges truthful? Contiguous? I don't disagree with the author as we are now 90% html5, and 10% flash, but the flash version has worked without issue over the last 200 updates to the flash plugin. I have a feeling our app is going down some C++ code path that is never going to get modified because it is a giant shit pile that no one understands. The good news is that it will probably work forever.
- georgemcbay 13y ago
  I've seen the Flash player source (we had a source code license at chumby) and even modified parts of our version of it. It was in fact a giant and difficult to understand and overly abstracted piece of shit. But it mostly worked and a lot of the horrible abstractions helped it be wildly backward compatible.
Nomlab 13y ago
Great example of this is Sliderocket.com (powered by a very complex Flash slide editor/interface), recently purchased by ClearSlide. My guess (with no inside knowledge whatsoever) is that SlideRocket was looking at an expensive tech transformation to move up to current standards and fix all the annoying technical debt they've accumulated along the way. (It's extensive: I'm a customer, their platform is buggy and dated.) Instead they got acquired by ClearSlide.
axilmar 13y ago
What does this mean for Scaleform? if Flash stops being developed, then will Scaleform continue to be developed independently? lots of game studios are using Scaleform for their games.

59 points by relix 13y ago

Adobe cares about developers, they just know when a technology needs to die. Things like the new Generator framework for Photoshop and the entire Edge initiative show that they care more than they have in the past. They just don't care about the dated platform you're using.

k__ 13y ago
Flex was a nice developer centric Flash and they killed it.
- gnaritas 13y ago
  That's what you do with failing products.

Scorponok 13y ago

I'm pretty sure that if your business depends on Flash, you should have started implementing an exit plan a couple of years ago by now.

tieTYT 13y ago
I would have thought so too but I just watched this talk that suggests flash is the best way to go if you want sound effects in your html5 game (click on the second to last slide to skip): http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015669/A-Practical-Guide-to-Building http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015669/A-Practical-Guide-to-Bu... If there's a better solution I'd love to hear it, since this wouldn't work on iOS devices afaik.
- lukifer 13y ago
  The technology is in transition. Flash is the least-worst option for now, but it won't be a year from today. Impressive new Web Audio APIs are already in the pre-release Chrome and Firefox, and I believe some just landed in iOS7 as well.
  - TheZenPsycho 13y ago
    Pre-release? they were in ios6, been in chrome since version 10, ios6, safari 6, and the whole idea of them CAME from firefox. What is coming out in firefox now is the standardised version of what's already there. http://caniuse.com/#search=web%20audio http://caniuse.com/#search=web%20audio If you want a nice abstraction library, check out howler http://goldfirestudios.com/blog/104/howler.js-Modern-Web-Audio-Javascript-Library http://goldfirestudios.com/blog/104/howler.js-Modern-Web-Aud... as for IE support, well, there's not really that much risk in using soundmanager/flash if you still need to support 7 and 8, is there? I even discovered that old MS even exposed some nice windows media activex controls that you can use to do simple sound playing stuff without loading up a flash plugin, if you're that serious about backwards compatibility. Forget a year from now. You can start using this stuff today, and by the time you release a year from now, things will be even better.
    - tieTYT 13y ago
      I'm glad I made my comment. Thanks a lot for the info.
- tiagok 13y ago
  have you tried http://www.createjs.com/#!/SoundJS http://www.createjs.com/#!/SoundJS ?

BigBalli 13y ago

Seems like a rant from someone who's butthurt. Technologies evolve and there's no future for Flash. Adobe has been pushing a lot and investing on new stuff for developers.

nilved 13y ago
butthurt, really?
coldtea 13y ago
Are you 15 years old?

shmerl 13y ago

Either Adobe open sources Flash, or it's as good as dead. And one had to start worrying about Flash dying earlier. It's somewhat late for such concerns now. For example newer versions of Flash aren't even released for Linux anymore for a while. Isn't it a clear indication that it's time to move on?

Jasper_ 13y ago
Adobe actually wants to open-source Flash, but they're concerned about the security impact. The source would make it a lot easier to find a 0day and infect somebody's computer. They actually have trusted customers that they share the Flash source code with: Google and Mozilla both have it, for instance.
- shmerl 13y ago
  Security by obscurity is not a real security anyway. So I don't think open sourcing would hurt it. If anything, it can even improve security, since more researchers would be able to review it.
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
    Patent trolls are also a big disincentive to open-sourcing one's commercial products.
    - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
      Is that something with any real evidence behind it or just Microsoft FUD? I have a hard time believing that patent trolls would even be interested in hiring engineers to read source code. Their business model is to send you a threatening letter with a settlement demand which is noticeably less than the cost of vindicating yourself in a courtroom. What do they care anything about what the code actually does, so long as they can maintain the charade sufficiently to make the threat credible?
  - Jasper_ 13y ago
    These are Adobe's concerns, not mine. I don't work for Adobe, but I'm familiar with Flash and have talked to Adobe engineers before. And it's not an easy call to make: keep in mind how many computers have Flash installed. If open sourcing the project would double the rate that vulnerabilities get found and exploited, that's a real problem for Adobe. Trusted partners already have the Flash code and report security issues.

nikatwork 13y ago

Adobe has never cared about developers. I'm not sure whether from greed or incompetence. One of my first gigs was as a Director developer (eww Lingo) - I managed to jump off that ship right before it sunk from neglect. It's frustrating, Adobe make really useful products that hover on the edge of greatness - Director, Flash, Coldfusion, Air - then somehow seem to lose interest right before they break through. I mean, if Adobe had of lifted even one finger to work with Apple, then Flash might have had a bright future in front of it. As it stands, Adobe stood stupidly chewing their cud in usual fashion until El Jobsy gave up. In some ways, I regret every one of the many hours I have put into learning Adobe dev platforms; on the brightside, their BS pushed me straight into the arms of OSS.

coldtea 13y ago
>Adobe has never cared about developers. True. Another problem is, they now seem to not care about users either, with the possible exception of large design studios. The CC subscriptions are fucking over customers who used to skip a version or two (now they have to constantly pay up or they lose their CC programs), and they also fuck people that don't need all of CC but a few choice programs (you either fit with their pre-defined bundles or you're screwed if you need access to only a few programs: after 2 programs, it gets cheaper to buy the whole suite, even if you don't need it). I'd appreciate a full_suite_price/number_of_components base pricing for a single program (with a slightly larger weight for star programs like Photoshop and Premierre), instead of the current "need 3-4 programs? Sorry, you have to rent the whole thing"). Plus the non-US Creative Cloud pricing is a joke. The formula seems to be: take the US price, add any local taxes (legit) and hike it another 30-40% just because. >It's frustrating, Adobe make really useful products that hover on the edge of greatness - Director, Flash, Coldfusion Hmm, all of those were made my Macromedia (Cold Fusion by Allaire and then Macromedia).
- nikatwork 13y ago
  > Hmm, all of those were made [by] Macromedia True, although they maintained a lot of momentum after the acquisition. But maybe that's the answer - perhaps Adobe slowly starved the dev platform teams to death whilst rolling in all the filthy lucre from the design products. What sucks is that for media creation apps, Adobe still has untouchable quality. Nothing even comes close (sorry Gimp, RIP Freehand), except maaaybe Final Cut or Vegas for simple editing.

kqr2 13y ago

The writing was on the wall when Adobe killed flash for mobile about two years ago. It's pretty clear that they wouldn't invest much resources into flash and instead focus on HTML5. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/nov/09/adobe-flash-mobile-dead http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/nov/09/adobe-flas...

cpncrunch 13y ago
Yes, they basically shot themselves in the foot. It would have been fine if html5 provided all the features of flash, but that isn't the case yet.
dougk16 13y ago
Just to clarify, they killed flash for mobile browsers. Adobe AIR for mobile, which packages the Flash runtime and user application together as a native app, is still alive and wellish. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air.html I used it myself for a small project a year ago and was well pleased. I find that Flash has such a PR stigma now that developers don't even admit to using it. I unbundled an app I use occasionally just the other day cause it smelled a little Flash-ey...what do you know, it was!
- xerophtye 13y ago
  Adobe Air? isn't that what League of Legends is made on? (though they might have been moving away from it in recent updates... not sure about that)

aidos 13y ago

It's a shame because Adobe have done some really interesting work. I'm no expert in lower level tech but I used one of their tools to compile libjpeg to AS3 bytecode. I was able to write a file uploader half in AS3 and half in C. Faster than any other uploader I've ever used with the ability to reliably compress jpegs before sending from the client machine. Unfortunately, I don't think they ever completely open sourced the work they did and it was a lab project so they don't support it (though it's been a long time since I looked).

dougk16 13y ago
It was Adobe Alchemy, now http://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/ http://adobe-flash.github.io/crossbridge/ but doesn't look very alive. I remember I used it to compile Box2D and Bullet...took some finagling, but was doable in a few days. They managed to compile the Citadel Demo at some point: http://www.unrealengine.com/flash/ http://www.unrealengine.com/flash/

unknownian 13y ago

Don't mean to get dramatic, but what went wrong with Adobe? Don't they still have some of the best engineers in the world?

smtddr 13y ago
Well, I would say Flash's inability to perform well on mobile was the killer-blow but even before that flash was the only thing that caused blue-screen on my Win7 box... and it's always the thing that makes may laptop's fan go into warp-drive... and on linux, Flash kept claiming the whole sound-system and I'd have to close the browser to get sound out of any other app(but that may have been a linux issue more than Flash. Just interesting that Flash was the only audio-enabled thing that would cause it.) Flash was great, certainly better than COM object that embedded WindowsMediaPlayer into your browser(IE only). I was a major[1] Flash lover at one time, but it's really past its expiration date at this point. We're just waiting for solid & frozen'ish HTML5,<video> and <audio> tag RFC specs and to agree on a non-patent-landmine-covered decoders for all significant browsers to support. Then maybe someway to "compile" javascript so websites that do flashgames(Nintendo's Japanese website is big on this) can keep doing it with HTML5+js without worrying that it's super-easy to have their content "borrowed" and re-hosted somewhere else. 1.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vP692sCbw4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vP692sCbw4 Note, there are ways to make a Flash game(swf) not work outside of a given domain that would be at least semi-difficult to remove since it generally follows the same-origin rules of XMLHttpRequest. If you test for that in your actionscript, export-to-swf with obfuscation enabled and make sure the string is obfuscated so it can't be found in a hex-editor even if the export-obfuscation was reversed, a flash game hosted at http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ will not run anywhere else and it'd be kinda difficult to alter that behavior.

sami36 13y ago

if as of September 2013, you still have your business depend on Flash, you have bigger problems than Adobe.

AaronFriel 13y ago

Adobe just patched several remote code execution vulnerabilities in the latest update in the past month, don't you think it's a little premature to state that them patching shader compilation to prevent exploit is something that will literally never be solved ever? More than likely, Adobe determined that it was much easier to secure a known slow path for shaders on the CPU than a fast GPU path. As a security-conscious user, I think I prefer that they adopted a quick fix that might have incurred a performance cost rather than put everyone else at continued risk for an indeterminate amount of time.

dietrichepp 13y ago
What really shows how much they care is the fact that it didn't even go in the changelog, apparently.
- AaronFriel 13y ago
  Are you assuming ignorance or malice? Here are a few options: * They were trying to intentionally hide this change to spite you * They were avoiding unintentional disclosure of the attack vector for this vulnerability (indeed, none of the CVEs that I could find for this month's Adobe Flash update describe the attack) * The security hand didn't talk to the changelog hand * The security team worked independently of the perf team, and perhaps this case wasn't thoroughly tested or the regression not detected And so on, and so forth. Let's be honest, there are lots of reasons we can imagine why Adobe did this, but imagining things doesn't make them true.
  - dietrichepp 13y ago
    It doesn't matter whether it's ignorance or malice. I don't have to imagine anything, because what I care about is whether changes that affect me are in the changelogs.
frenger 13y ago
It was marked as "never fix", though.

cpncrunch 13y ago

I wonder if that explains why the flash ads on sites like techcrunch have been so slow recently. For the most part flash is a pain in the ass. I've never programmed it myself, but my wife tells me it is horribly buggy.

kclay 13y ago

I did flash/flex/air development for 5 years.. it was fun for sure but when you had problems you were at the mercy of adobe. Don't get me started on the many hacks I had to do to be able to use the core flash, hacks that fixed problems that adobe knew of but didn't care to fix for multiple version releases(they still break webcams every few releases). Needless to say I was sad when adobe stop pushing flash and I quickly had to switch gears ,but looking back I'm glad adobe did this. Flash is pretty pointless unless you are doing video. It hurts to see the company and tech you spent so many years/hours in just died without even fighting. R.I.P Adobe and Flash

mschuster91 13y ago

Can anyone read that Adobe bug report mentioned in the article? All I get is "We're sorry but we weren't able to process this request due to an unforeseen error.".

columbo 13y ago

Flex... I thought flex was great. I really did. The funny thing is I used to do a bunch of cold fusion work back in the day so I already had firsthand experience with Adobe's complete lack of interest in supporting a developer platform. All I have to say is "allaire homesite", most CFdevs should remember. Nevertheless I got involved a handful of huge flex applications. This was back when it was Apollo, so 07/08. Firefox was gaining traction but not much, Jquery didn't really exist and google was for searching, not web browsing. These apps looked beautiful, every pixel was accounted for, they were responsive(ish) and, the best part, when they were done they were DONE (mostly). No more trying to support IE5.5 or IE6. Flex was something you could sell to an enterprise shop. Then native technologies finally caught up. The IPhone, perhaps rightly so, gave a huge middle finger to Adobe. Then JQuery, then Bootstrap comes into the picture and... amazingly... the shit actually works. Seriously, this is not expected behavior when dealing with html/css/js libraries. Flex was really just a means to an end. For devs like me it meant I didn't have to code another $#@! table layout or drop-down-select or menu-navigation or accordion. On one hand I feel the industry caught up to Flex and the better player (native support) won. I feel that I shouldn't personally blame Adobe on this one. On the other hand I know that Adobe has killed off so much through their process of atrophy-driven-development that I can't help but want to point a (very specific) finger at them. Eh, yeah, at this point when I hear Adobe I walk away, I can't blame them for everything, but I've lost all faith in their ability to deliver.

sillysaurus2 13y ago
the shit actually works. Seriously, this is not expected behavior when dealing with html/css/js libraries. People learning html/js/css today have no idea how incredible they have it. They don't even have to think about IE compatibility! I used a lazy evaluation strategy for my life: in 2007 after it became clear to me how ... well, awful ... the webdev technologies were, I switched fields for a few years. And hey, presto, now in 2013 everything works. And works well! I can be a web developer with about 1/3rd of the effort it would've taken me in '07. EDIT: Actually, after spending a few minutes remembering what those times were like, I'd say nowadays it's a lot more than 3x easier. It's now at least 10x easier to write webapps, if not 30x. The vast majority of one's time was spent hacking around various unexpected behaviors and incompatibilities.

jcampbell1 13y ago

In defense of Adobe, I made my living for many years from a Flash 8 app I wrote 9 years ago. We have since moved to html5, but I swear, I have made 1 change to the flash version in 5 years and it still works flawlessly on all browsers. The html5 version constantly require tweaks for stuff that changes. Support for html5 video is all over the map. e.g. do you get load progress events? Are loaded ranges truthful? Contiguous? I don't disagree with the author as we are now 90% html5, and 10% flash, but the flash version has worked without issue over the last 200 updates to the flash plugin. I have a feeling our app is going down some C++ code path that is never going to get modified because it is a giant shit pile that no one understands. The good news is that it will probably work forever.

georgemcbay 13y ago
I've seen the Flash player source (we had a source code license at chumby) and even modified parts of our version of it. It was in fact a giant and difficult to understand and overly abstracted piece of shit. But it mostly worked and a lot of the horrible abstractions helped it be wildly backward compatible.

Nomlab 13y ago

Great example of this is Sliderocket.com (powered by a very complex Flash slide editor/interface), recently purchased by ClearSlide. My guess (with no inside knowledge whatsoever) is that SlideRocket was looking at an expensive tech transformation to move up to current standards and fix all the annoying technical debt they've accumulated along the way. (It's extensive: I'm a customer, their platform is buggy and dated.) Instead they got acquired by ClearSlide.

axilmar 13y ago

What does this mean for Scaleform? if Flash stops being developed, then will Scaleform continue to be developed independently? lots of game studios are using Scaleform for their games.