I know that there were almost certainly patent issues and the like that made this difficult, but I firmly believe that if Adobe had open-sourced the Flash player, then Flash would still be as big or bigger today.
If it were opened up, it could have been integrated directly into browsers and maybe even the web standards. The Flash desktop program would still probably be the de facto means of creating Flash content but at that point it could have conceivably still been on iPhone, at least eventually.
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
The death of Flash kind of makes me sad. A lot of HTML5 stuff feels like it's playing this huge game of catchup from what we had in Flash in 2004, and I still think that Flash was one of the most fun development platforms ever; the ease of quickly going from "drawing" to "animation" to "code" was so streamlined and as a teenager I had a lot of fun with it, and I haven't found a tool since then that I've had as much fun playing with.
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
I just do not believe it. It was the best available rich presentation/interaction game in town. Trivial to get started and no need for a platform to sign off on your work.
No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.
There were performance issues too, and it was pretty bad on Android phones, at least when I used it in 2012.
I think it might have been able to live on in the form of Adobe AIR if Adobe hadn't given up on it. I think AIR could have occupied the space that Electron does now.
Totally. I still think that more development can cover a lot of sins. Look at JavaScript. It started for changing text colors or something. Now it is one of the fastest interpreted runtimes.
Years of incremental improvements on this bustling platform could have made Flash into a performant beast.
Anyway, we will never know what could have been if Flash had been a mobile option on day one.
The ruffle.rs project has most of newgrounds back up running flash inside a wasm runtime. Is there any reason we can't all use the same old development tools in a vm to create more new flash content?
Kindof, but there was a ton of work done on ActionScript 3 making it all ECMA (?) compliant and there was a heck of a lot of road left on that. It was TypeScript before there was modern Javascript. And that could have been parlayed into a different runtime, like Haxe did. Flash the runtime had many problems, but the IDE and tools behind them were mature and well-understood.
AS3 is a pretty underrated language. It was ridiculously fun to make stuff with it, and if you bought the official Flash Builder IDE (which was Eclipse based), you had decent autocomplete and everything.
The runtime definitely needed to be improved, but I feel Flash gets a bit more hate than it deserves. By the tail end, there was even decent 3D graphics support, and CrossBridge was a pretty cool predecessor to Emscripten that allowed you to convert C++ programs into SWF stuff (IIRC an early version had the Doom engine ported over).
I couldn't agree more. AS3 was my gateway drug into static typing, IDEs, all manner of things. I did have Flex/FDT at one client, but after that I ended up using Flash Develop because it was so good, even if it was Windows.
Having first MTASC and then the as3 compiler on the command line was another route into modern-day build pipelines. The 3D engines were great, Box2D port was great, and looking at it all now in 2024, the APIs still hold up and Adobe could restart an entire multimedia division with it.
> Apple bears a ton of responsibility for killing Flash.
Correct, and that might have been the single greatest gift Apple has bestowed upon the open Internet. Flash was the walled garden of the web — closed source, proprietary and a perennial security nightmare — and the community owes Apple a huge debt for gratitude for hastening its demise.
I know some people have fond memories of flash games, flash art and, in some instances, Flash websites. I do appreciate that it was a cultural moment. I do appreciate that it was accessible to novices and artists in a way that HTML5 is not. But the web is not, and should never have been, reliant on a closed source proprietary platform.
