Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.
Hehe. Not really. Jobs may have put one nail in the coffin, but Adobe killed flash. And flash was already dying because of abusive ads and HTML5 before Apple said anything. Here’s one of the Flash developers backing that up: https://m.slashdot.org/story/324267
Can confirm. I was doing flash game development when flash "died." One of the guys I worked with created the Flex compiler. He told me Adobe had a seriously bad combination of brain drain and code ossification. The motto on the flash team was "don't break the internet."
For years, they were terrified of making any changes, especially ones that might break backward compatibility. This lack of ability to change anything meant their brightest never stuck around very long. This only made those who were left even more terrified to make any changes because the institutional knowledge was gone. It's a vicious cycle.
By the time they realized they had to make serious changes and started work on stage3d, they didn't have the expertise necessary to pull it off.
> For years, they were terrified of making any changes, especially ones that might break backward compatibility. This lack of ability to change anything meant their brightest never stuck around very long. This only made those who were left even more terrified to make any changes because the institutional knowledge was gone. It's a vicious cycle.
That's an interesting comment. I actually wonder whether this eventually happens for any successful product. At the end this gives competitors a chance to surpass the product. So it's definitely a cycle.
It happens to a lot of successful products over time, but it's not inevitable by any means. It's possible to make software that is viable long term. But, there are many ugly realities regarding the current state of Corporate America that encourages this cycle.
For example, the fact that most engineers need to job hop in order to get promotions and raises. That makes it nearly impossible to build up long term institutional knowledge at any one company.
Another example: everyone in a publicly held company, from the rank and file programmers to the CEO, are rewarded for short term sales at the expense of long term stability. We had a thread here not too long ago[0] about how being a "maintenance engineer" was career suicide.
I hear this a lot, but where was the Android or BlackBerry or Windows phone that ran Flash acceptably fast, and without weekly security holes?
Mobile killed Flash. It was a poorly implemented technology which was acceptable only during the era where electric power was unlimited, and people were in the habit of frequent reboots to update their OS anyway.
It's worth noting that the Flash platform originated on mobile devices, and pivoted to a Netscape Plugin when the mobile market proved to be premature (early nineties).
For those of you half-considering building a Flash player replacement, I suspect the majority of Flash content (especially pre-AS3) can run performantly on modern mobile browsers with a canvas Context2D shim. Maybe even on 2010-era mobile devices.
Windows CE and Ipaq. I created mobile tour apps for museums like the Louvre, LA County Museum, SFMOMA and the Whitney that successfully served tens of thousands of people daily in the mid/late 2000s.
"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.
> If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today.
Why is it on Apple to save Adobe’a software? Why not Microsoft, BlackBerry, Google ... or Adobe?
> Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem
iPhoneOS lacked support for Flash long before it had a native SDK. Jobs decided the answer was HTML, which is exactly the opposite of a locked-in ecosystem.
Why are you rewriting history? Apple didn't just decide not to embrace Flash, they actively decided to kill it. Apple banned flash based apps in their review guidelines and Adobe didn't see a way forward since Job's had decided everything but native apps were to be purged from the app store. Html 5 isn't a replacement for what flash offered, it wasn't then and it isn't now.
Here is the Jobs quote from when this happened: "He takes a while to get there, but eventually he puts the notion into a nutshell. "Flash is a cross platform development tool," he says. "It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. It is their goal to help developers write cross platform apps.""
""Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs"
You seem to be doing a little re-writing of history yourself right here:
> Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time
Steve Jobs never even envisioned the App Store model when he decided against supporting Flash in Safari.
>... prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser. However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider, with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008
Interesting tidbit: Apple was actually trying to work with Adobe to iron out Flash's security problems but was rebuffed.
Anyways, the fact is, the App Store was actually an afterthought.... An accident of history that even Steve didn't see coming. The decision to forego Flash came way before that.
>... prior to its unveiling in 2007, Apple's then-CEO Steve Jobs did not intend to let third-party developers build native apps for iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser. However, backlash from developers prompted the company to reconsider, with Jobs announcing in October 2007 that Apple would have a software development kit available for developers by February 2008
Let me translate that:
Steve Jobs did not intend to let anyone else profit from iOS, instead directing them to make web applications for the Safari web browser that would provide subpar experience.
They released a publicly accessible SDK in less than 4 months? And you believe it wasn't in their plan at all to allow anyone else to develop on it? They clearly planned to have a way to sideload app on it. Itunes already existed since 2001, it wasn't anything new for them. The only things they decided to change was to allow everyone to access it.
Flash would have been a way to allow everyone to access much more powerful feature. This is why they avoided it. The app store was an alternative that allowed them to keep control of it.
I'm referring to were jobs went on a 1600 word rant about flash while not once mentioning the shortcomings of his own objective-c authoring environments and the many good things about flash that lead to the enormous community it had.
https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
This combined with updated app review guidelines banning flash on iOS accelerated the adoption of html5.
Afterthought or not, apps quickly became the biggest selling point of smartphones from the second gen onward and many technical architecture decisions had the intended effect of locking developers in. Ports to android were often delayed by months and years if they happened at all.
You accused someone of "trying to rewrite history", when what they said was factually correct.
It's also been established that Apple tried to work with Adobe on addressing the issues it saw with Flash but was rebuffed.
The issue of Apple forbidding non-native code is one I disagreed with but has many layers and complexities. It's not nearly as simple as your implication that Jobs seemingly woke up one day and decided to kill Flash for no good reason.
> rant about flash while not once mentioning the shortcomings of his own objective-c authoring environments and the many good things about flash that lead to the enormous community it had
I'm just going to re-phrase what the poster above said - Why is it on Apple to evangelize Adobe's software (and criticize it's own)? That just doesn't make any sense.
In case you missed it, he was discussing Flash in the context of a mobile device. There is simply nothing positive to say about it. Nothing.
Everything he did mention, from power consumption to terrible security and poor usability has since been proven true. I don't know of a single reputable technologist, or tech journalist, who would dispute that. Do you?
Here's a write up of why Flash failed on Android. Notice any familiar themes?
I can tell you've never used the flash authoring tool or you wouldn't be making snarky remarks about this. Nobody is disputing that the runtime had problems and it was never good enough for prime-time on mobile on older devices. But a blanket ban on Flash was anti-competitive behavior that means Adobe never got the chance to prove it could work.
>Adobe never got the chance to prove it could work
Wait, what? They had years to demonstrate it working well on Android. They failed. Spectacularly. Why are you ignoring widely accepted fact of tech history? Are you implying that is also Apple's fault?
Look, if you want to discuss Apple being anti-competitive I'm all ears. I more or less agree. But using Flash as an example does nothing to help your argument. That's because everything Apple claimed about why Flash wouldn't work on mobile was later proven to be true. Everything.
Flash on Android was a disaster. Ignoring that fact to claim it could have worked on iOS (because... magic?) is nothing but revisionist anti-Apple zealotry.
Never let facts get in the way of a good Apple-bashing I guess.
Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.
That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.
HTML5 video had significantly better performance in terms of CPU from the beginning, and I'm fairly certain the Flash video players weren't written by amateur programmers with bad programming practices.
Except that it can. Youtube lets producers (channels) post polls, let's consumers (viewers) post comments, and if channels want to, they can do something interactive- over a video series & etc.
Youtube has no interactivity within videos. There used to be a little bit of it with annotations, but those were killed off ages ago.
Compare that to Flash video series like Homestar Runner, every episode had little Easter eggs where you could click on background characters to unlock a bonus scene about them. It really helped you feel engaged with the medium in a way unmatched by anything but full-length video games.
Sure it didn't make much sense in the HTML5 world, but if Adobe hadn't killed the upcoming new version of the language and engine (I think it was called Flash Next) it would have been an amazing tool for making apps and games.
