I hate Adobe with the passion of 100 suns for killing flash like they did… yea it had problems, most software does, but it was like 20 years ahead of its time ffs, and the web has been ridiculously bland since they killed it. My conspiracy theory is that apple and google paid them to kill it to force sites to support mobile.
Who needs a conspiracy when your product creates such a terrible user experience? I've never written a lick of flash, and I don't care to. I still have awful memories of just how broken Flash sites were. They'd stick out like a sore thumb since none of the widgets ever worked like native ones, there were constantly keyboard focus issues in Firefox, video never seemed to be accelerated and would decimate battery life, the privacy nightmare of the persistent cookies you'd need to load a flash app from Adobe to clear (permissions as with everything else gave the finger to the host system/browser). Who could forget the near constant security and stability issues? I, for one, am glad flash died.
Flash died because while it sucked on desktop systems, it was somehow way worse on mobile just as mobile was becoming more important.
Well, we've now gone from "none of the widgets ever worked like native ones" to "there is nothing even remotely in the same category as OS widgets available to the developer". Not sure if it's an improvement.
Flash sucked. It was bad for accessibility, it was closed, it was slow, it was a way to force ads on us. Sure you could do animations, but that was not what most of use needed/wished at the time.
The only population that liked flash were:
- marketing departments
- wanna be game devs and the teenagers that played their games
I for one won't shed a tear for developers and their users that have been screwed over by their garden master. You go for closed proprietary technology because it has certain benefits, so have the consequences too. Same thing also goes to classic ASP, Silverlight, etc. You have one master.
But I can't say I did not enjoy flash games. They had a mini boom around mid to late 2000s with "tower defense" type of games which was excellent. For me it felt a bit back in earlier 90s DOS, you had a lot of well made and unique minigames heavily concentrated on gameplay as opposed to "assets"
If they hadn't EOLed Flash then projects like Ruffle would have the difficult job of playing catch up with a proprietary runtime that would still be in wide use.
I'm no Apple fan, but Apple killed it because Adobe was letting Flash be an awful, unreliable piece of software for years, and seemed fine with letting that be the status quo for a decade more. If Adobe did a better job of improving the stability and resource management of the Flash clients, they wouldn't have had to "capitulate".
Citation needed. Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were. I think that flash got a bad rap because browser vendors didn't like it's monopoly on content and they wanted a slice.
> Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were.
Citation needed. Saying that because Flash was widely touted as a significant contributor to browser crashes.
Though, looking for a citation for that myself just now... all of the search results I'm getting back are just an endless sea of "Flash crashed my browser" type of things instead. :/
Chrome was the first browser to stop letting plugins crash the whole thing, so yea it was a thing before for sure, but it was still way better than other things like ActiveX or Java applets…
This is a page where Firefox developers are discussing how to inject their own crash-reporting code into the sandboxed flash container. I never said that 3rd party plugins didn't occasionally have crashes, so I don't see the point of this link. Can you elaborate?
Javascript also has "crash protection" in the form of a sandbox. That's why pages can "crash" without taking down the entire browser. This would also work exactly the same for Flash.
I'm working on bringing Flash to iOS via browser proxy^0. Basically, what we do is run the browser on the server and stream the viewport to your regular mobile browser (ie, Safari). Then we use Ruffle injected into the remote page.
Basically it's a "monkey patch" to give you extensions-like capabilities but on mobile devices!
Adobe worked on it, and even they could not show anything convincing. This was the time when Flash was causing the vast majority of crashes on OS X. Even on Android they could not make it work reliably and it was plagued with security, performance, and overheating issues.
Adobe had stopped trying years before Apple officially stopped caring.
I remember celebrating when it died but looking back it wasn’t so bad. At least from a dev perspective, working with a batteries-included sdk from a single vendor is a lot nicer than this node_modules cancer.
