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> Flash sites, apps and games also earned a bad reputation for eating up CPU, loading too long, doing too much and running poorly. And it was mostly due to the

by tl 11y ago

> Flash sites, apps and games also earned a bad reputation for eating up CPU, loading too long, doing too much and running poorly. And it was mostly due to the culture of the developers. That's one reason. The other reason is that all Flash runtimes other than the heavily-optimizied primary implementation for Windows universally suck. That ends up being a rather large pain point when developers are more likely than average users to be running Mac or Linux.

est 11y ago
To be fair, in Linux, X window GUI sucks in general. For Mac system, everything besides Quicktime sucks. Also NPAPI sucks compared with ActiveX. Flash in its original popularity was its vector animation streaming capability, think SVG withe a timeline with streaming. Plus a decent ECMA scripting environment, and later hardware accelerated 3D apis and C++ compilation support. It's a good platform past its prime time and caught in a marketing controversy in an unfortunate mobile age.
- bottled_poe 11y ago
  > "caught in a marketing controversy in an unfortunate mobile age." I understand this argument, but I don't believe that this was primarily a marketing war. Browser plugins are dirty, they always have been. It is not surprising that the latest web standards are attempting to plug this gaping security hole. Furthermore, all of the features you have listed were only implemented because Adobe had a huge financial monopoly on the technology.
  - est 11y ago
    No, abused and over-powered browser plugins are dirty. Quicktime is a plugin, do you feel its presence? Yet WWDC video pages were not HTML5 compatible and using Quicktime plugin. The same applies to Canvas or SVG, yes they are standards, but their performance will suck worse than Flash if advertisers start abuse animations with canvas. Best part, you can not disable canvas like you can with Flash.
- xorcist 11y ago
  Flash was always very buggy. Perhaps you didn't see them if you kept to a strict web developer subset of Flash. But the problem was that it had a different set of bugs on every platform. I guess that codebase was very old and could have been shared better between platforms. So at least for for non-Windows users that meant the plugin crashed daily on whatever input you happened upon on the web. It also had (and still has) an enormous set of language features, a billion codecs, a handful of protocols and several different scripting languages, a vanishingly small subset of which was still maintained. The result was probably the most insecure software ever to grace the face of the Earth. Running by default. Taking input on every web page you ever visited. So it was never just a "marketing controversy". Sure, Apple and Adobe could never agree on the terms for flash on non-Mac devices. But that alone would never have been enough for the demise of Flash. Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, did large parts of the work. They were rightfully concerned not just with Flash as a vector for malware, but also the power it brought to Adobe who could single handedly decide what Flash would run and on which platforms.

by tl 11y ago

est 11y ago

To be fair, in Linux, X window GUI sucks in general. For Mac system, everything besides Quicktime sucks. Also NPAPI sucks compared with ActiveX. Flash in its original popularity was its vector animation streaming capability, think SVG withe a timeline with streaming. Plus a decent ECMA scripting environment, and later hardware accelerated 3D apis and C++ compilation support. It's a good platform past its prime time and caught in a marketing controversy in an unfortunate mobile age.

bottled_poe 11y ago
> "caught in a marketing controversy in an unfortunate mobile age." I understand this argument, but I don't believe that this was primarily a marketing war. Browser plugins are dirty, they always have been. It is not surprising that the latest web standards are attempting to plug this gaping security hole. Furthermore, all of the features you have listed were only implemented because Adobe had a huge financial monopoly on the technology.
- est 11y ago
  No, abused and over-powered browser plugins are dirty. Quicktime is a plugin, do you feel its presence? Yet WWDC video pages were not HTML5 compatible and using Quicktime plugin. The same applies to Canvas or SVG, yes they are standards, but their performance will suck worse than Flash if advertisers start abuse animations with canvas. Best part, you can not disable canvas like you can with Flash.
xorcist 11y ago
Flash was always very buggy. Perhaps you didn't see them if you kept to a strict web developer subset of Flash. But the problem was that it had a different set of bugs on every platform. I guess that codebase was very old and could have been shared better between platforms. So at least for for non-Windows users that meant the plugin crashed daily on whatever input you happened upon on the web. It also had (and still has) an enormous set of language features, a billion codecs, a handful of protocols and several different scripting languages, a vanishingly small subset of which was still maintained. The result was probably the most insecure software ever to grace the face of the Earth. Running by default. Taking input on every web page you ever visited. So it was never just a "marketing controversy". Sure, Apple and Adobe could never agree on the terms for flash on non-Mac devices. But that alone would never have been enough for the demise of Flash. Google, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, did large parts of the work. They were rightfully concerned not just with Flash as a vector for malware, but also the power it brought to Adobe who could single handedly decide what Flash would run and on which platforms.