It's the insane power that companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple hold over the tech world. It's like they can just dictate everything to suit their own interests, and it's the users who end up losing out.
Remember when Apple killed Flash? I heard it was because they wanted people to use their app store more instead of us playing games in the browser, so they could make more money. And Microsoft installing IE and setting it as the default browser? And now, Google is making changes to how we browse the web and adding things like Manifest v3, to boost their ad business.
The most irritating part is it is always gets packaged as being for our safety. The sad thing is I've often seen people even drink this user safety kool-aid, especially with Apple (like restricting browser choices on mobile - not sure if it's changed now).
I really think there should be some laws in place to prevent this kind of behavior. It's not fair to us, the users and we can't just rely on the EU to do it all the time.
> Remember when Apple killed Flash? I heard it was because they wanted people to use their app store more instead of us playing games in the browser, so they could make more money.
Even without the incentive of “moar profit$” they never entertained Flash because fundamentally, it sucked. When it landed in Android, it was a bloated mess that sucked the battery dry and was slow as molasses. On every platform it existed on, it was a usability and security nightmare. No, Apple “killed” Flash by making a sane decision not to allow it in their fledgling platform because Flash outright sucked, informed largely by the abhorrent performance on all platforms.
> And Microsoft installing IE and setting it as the default browser?
SMH. There was never an issue with Microsoft providing IE as a default initially - that came later with the EU. The biggest issue was that if an OEM (a Dell or an HP) struck a deal with Netscape to provide that as default, Microsoft threatened to remove the OEMs license to distribute Windows. In the late ‘90s and early ‘00s that would have been the death knell of an OEM. And that is the anti-trust part. They abused the position as the number 1 desktop os ( by a significant margin) to take control of the then nascent browser market.
Fundamentally the iPhone sucked. It came out without 3G when every other internet enabled phone had it, and constantly dropped calls in the US for the first 2 years until AT&t upgraded their networks. Android phones could run Flash just fine, it was a selling point for them, at least until the Google app store had enough content.
Android phones could not run Flash "just fine". There was no version of Flash released for any mobile device that was what anyone would call "good".
I was writing Flash-based apps/sites at the time and there wasn't a single device we had in our QA set that we thought was "acceptable" in its performance. It was buggy. It'd crash out of nowhere. It'd consume so much memory that user's apps were force quit left and right. It would kill a battery with a quickness such that we had one customer who had to carry multiple spare batteries just to use the app we wrote for their internal team.
I had an Asus tablet with the Nvidia Tegra 3 chip and 1GB RAM in 2011, it ran Flash sites fine, though obviously not at desktop-level quality. Flash games on on Newgrounds were hit or miss, but mostly because they weren't touch-friendly.
You probably recall that mobile internet in general was far from fluid in those days; Browsers couldn't handle multiple tabs well, and iOS would show an annoying mosaic if you scrolled web pages too fast (before the browser could render the page). I would rather have the option of having something imperfect available, than have the OS vendor lock them out entirely.
Yes. Every SECOPS person let out a collective sigh of relief when the weekly p0 patches for flash stopped coming. Apple may have been trying to push towards 'native' apps but that was almost certainly secondary; safari was leading the way on html5 APIs.
Let's not pretend that the death of Flash was a tragedy.
At the time (2013ish), I was working with a company that used to make a lot of very cool stuff in Flash; we were already starting most new projects in HTML5, and (coincidentally) the company was also growing like crazy (also in terms of new hires).
With that, at one point we actually started running low on physical space in the office. We've had a running joke (started by a Flash dev of course) that we'll just move all of the remaining Flash guys to the toilet...
But in all honesty, Flash was a terrible, absolutely horrible technology. I was lucky enough that I've only had to work with it from the backend, but I still remember the dread.
I think Adobe missed a huge opportunity where they could have built new tooling and a framework to target HTML5.
> Remember when Apple killed Flash? I heard it was because they wanted people to use their app store more instead of us playing games in the browser, so they could make more money
The original iPhone which killed flash didn’t even ship with the App Store. They assumed we’d only be using web apps.
It’s in the original Steve Jobs presentation when he announced the iPhone.
Remember when Apple killed Flash? I heard it was because they wanted people to use their app store more instead of us playing games in the browser, so they could make more money. And Microsoft installing IE and setting it as the default browser? And now, Google is making changes to how we browse the web and adding things like Manifest v3, to boost their ad business.
The most irritating part is it is always gets packaged as being for our safety. The sad thing is I've often seen people even drink this user safety kool-aid, especially with Apple (like restricting browser choices on mobile - not sure if it's changed now).
I really think there should be some laws in place to prevent this kind of behavior. It's not fair to us, the users and we can't just rely on the EU to do it all the time.