It says "December 8,2020: Assorted functional fixes". Apparently not security fixes.
I think the functional fix is that they show reminders because in the release notes, it says: "Some users may continue to see reminders from Adobe to uninstall Flash Player from their system". Adobe seems to say that there aren't security fixes, because they say on October 13, 2020: "Assorted security and functional fixes".
I live in Germany and there are a few bars here that are open around the clock. Many of them hat to close for the first time in years because of the Corona lockdown.
There's an anecdote about the "Elbschlosskeller" in Hamburg: they didn't have a key for the front door at all, so they had to install a new lock to be able to lock up. Before that, the pub was open continuously for about 70 years
For such a seminal web technology, I thought the 'thanks/goodbye' page was a huge missed opportunity from Flash... there's so much goodwill and nostalgia for the old days and they "celebrate" it with urm... https://get3.adobe.com/flashplayer/thankyou/
Ah yes, the good old days when anyone with a bad idea and a little bit of time could chew up your CPU cycles and run ridiculously insecure code on your computer without consent.
We're so lucky that this has changed (narrator: it hasn't).
It definitely doesn't happen anymore (narrator: it still happens).
And it definitely doesn't happen in absolutely every browser out there and it can't really be blocked (narrator: it does, it is just done with JavaScript, which only hermits disable).
> Name one browser-embedded technology in distribution today that has had even half as many security vulnerabilities as Flash has had over its lifetime?
Why should I name a "browser-embedded technology"? I can just point out browser vulnerabilities.
Great. So your two comments taken together prove my point. Don't use technology that's actively working against your best interests, and your interests will be better served..
No, you're just completely missing the point. By a mile.
You can't bury your hand in the sand and pretend that everything is fine. It's not.
Almost every browser out there is dying, everything is being taken over by Chrome/Chromium/Blink. The alternative is Webkit/Safari, which comes with its own limitations.
Firefox's market share is 5% and dwindling. Web developers have stopped caring about Firefox. Many sites are slow or barely working in Firefox. Firefox bugs aren't being fixed.
Soon I'll be forced to use Chrome because the alternatives won't allow me to do my job.
Open Source browser alternatives can't keep up. And even though Chromium itself is Open Source, it's not a complete browser for the modern web (see DRM).
So we're all going to be using Chrome or browsers built by corporations with the same incentives as Google (Microsoft also has an ad network, Opera is now owned by a semi-shady Chinese VPN company). And these browsers are gutting ad blocking.
Plus ads are getting smarter and we're not that far off from a point where ad blocking in its current form is no longer efficient. See for example stuff like the DNS over HTTPS changes.
And if it would only be about this, you'd be missing the point by "only" half a mile.
The other half a mile is that many people are forced to use a certain browser. At work, at school, etc. Or they don't know how to change their browser or what a browser even is. We're all in this together, the internet is one big network.
And for regular people, modern browsers are just as bad as Flash. Maybe even worse, at least Flash had a modicum of design as a platform. The web platform is a huge mishmash.
> Plus ads are getting smarter and we're not that far off from a point where ad blocking in its current form is no longer efficient. See for example stuff like the DNS over HTTPS changes.
10 years ago, it was nearly impossible to browse the web with Flash disabled. Which means that most people had it installed, and thus a vulnerability in Flash would mean all users were exploitable. Browser vulnerabilities only mean the users of that browser are exploitable, which limits its scope somewhat. Of course, the Chrome monoculture that has established itself doesn't help here :).
I'm making fun of you because it's not very realistic to disable it, especially due to network effects.
All the popular sites, including many intranet sites in every company I've worked for, use Javascript. I mean, you can disable it/enable it selectively, maybe I should try it with some Firefox extension. But I expect 95% of the web to break if I disable it.
So it's kind of a revolutionary attitude, which works out if you have nothing to lose, I guess. Or if you're trying to prove a point, but along the way you're probably hurting yourself, too.
> maybe I should try it with some Firefox extensions
So you're making fun of me although you haven't tried it. Yeah, okay.
> But I expect 95% of the web to break if I disable it
And you'll be wrong, it is much lower than that (except if you're talking about adverts failing to display, then I guess yes, in that respect it does).
I don't give a damn about other sites (and I don't browse intranet sites on my home machine -- if I'm in an office I use their office machine).
If they don't work I don't use them except in rare cases when I really need to in which case they get run in a VM.
> you're probably hurting yourself, too
That's deeply patronising from somebody who admits they haven't even tried doing what I do, nor has even asked why I and others do it (hint: it's for many of the reasons you described). It sounds like you're talking to a rather stupid child.
I have tried it a long time ago (4, maybe 5 years ago?). Many, many things broke and I didn't have time to fix them all.
I already use the strictest Tracking Protection stuff in Firefox, for example, and I do hit sites that don't work correctly.
Maybe it's worth revisiting but something tells me that the web uses more JavaScript, not less, since I last tried this experiment.
And regarding the patronizing aspect, let's say your bank's website uses JavaScript, what do you do?
Edit, actually, sorry, I re-read your comment and you answered my question:
> I don't give a damn about other sites (and I don't browse intranet sites on my home machine -- if I'm in an office I use their office machine). If they don't work I don't use them except in rare cases when I really need to in which case they get run in a VM.
Q.e.d.
I'll just rephrase things to something less offensive: you're not "hurting" yourself, you're limiting yourself, sometimes with drawbacks not everyone is able/willing to endure.
> let's say your bank's website uses JavaScript, what do you do
Well mate, take a guess :) I do it on the phone only (and I don't mean smartphone). I've had a little exposure to bank's competence from the inside 20 years ago (large UK bank, mortgages), they couldn't find their own arse with a torch, arrows, diagrams and a PhD in arse-finding.
> 'll just rephrase things to something less offensive: you're not "hurting" yourself, you're limiting yourself, sometimes with drawbacks not everyone is able/willing to endure.
That's much more accurate. We can agree, however consider that that 'limiting [my]self' means limiting my exposure to ads, abuse of my CPU, tracking, most dark patterns, nag screens, malware and more. The tradeoff's very ok for me, and I've experience the web on both sides. Oh yes it's worth it! (for me).
> I mean, you can disable it/enable it selectively, maybe I should try it with some Firefox extension.
The one I use is called, appropriately enough, Disable JavaScript [0]. It puts a simple toggle button in the toolbar, and remembers the setting on a per-domain basis. If a website has annoying behavior, it's little effort to switch JavaScript off to see if the site is still usable that way, or to re-enable it briefly to glance at some missing content. I recommend it; it's surprising how many sites I've disabled JS on, and left that way because there's no major breakage.
I have huge amounts of nostalgia, from when my parents bought me a version of flash from my birthday to kickstart my whole interest in programming, to building animations and games for Albinoblacksheep - Without flash I would never have learned to code.
So yes, some people have nostalgia with no rose tinted glasses, and I would like to think I have a clue about technology.
You can only say this if you haven't met people who have suffered from being hacked. Enormously painful stories. Flash is a trash fire, and Adobe and Microsoft externalised the penalties.
There is no reason we couldn't have had safe Flash except Adobe didn't care.
I've heard the Flash codebase described as a big steaming pile of C++. Perhaps they cared but making a secure Flash was an impossible task. Windows has magnitudes more resources working on it and it still gets exploits all the time.
They could have reimplemented it in a safe(r) language and runtime. It would have been a big effort, and Adobe extracted the maximum cash for least effort.
Comparisons with Windows don't make much sense because it is an OS and a thousand SDKs and ever growing attack surface.
How is this any different from javascript in HTML5?
The bad thing about flash is they also had network access without SOP... oh wait websockets does that. They also had FS access... which HTML5 has too now. Well the sandbox had some CVEs occasionally but then again, all software does.
I guess the worst thing was that it meant you had to install a closed source package from a large SV company... like most people do with Chrome.
I have adblock and was wondering why there's a big blank box below the message... now it makes sense. This is almost "bundle ask toolbar with JRE"-level greed.
Well Ruffle is already well on the way to providing a viable modern flash player https://ruffle.rs/
Using Rust and wasm for browser. They have browser plugin and desktop versions too. I've been trying to contribute, and it's really already able to play a large amount of content well.
> it's really already able to play a large amount of content well
Can confirm. I've gone through and downloaded the .swf's for some games I had nostalgia for, and ruffle has played a significant chunk of them quite well. For a relatively early version, I'd say that's pretty good.
One thing to note, they're still in the early stages of supporting AVM2/ActionScript 3.0 [0], so if you've got a pile of newish .swf's you'd like to try, they may not work yet.
This is true, however Mike who runs the project seems like a wonderful overlord for it. He's really kind and welcoming with new contributors, gives meaningful and thoughtful PR feedback and I can see that he'll foster the community required to see the project through. Hopefully sponsors help to make sure it gets there.
Certainly I've enjoyed contributing so far, and I think this is my pet OS project for the next while.
100% wasn't trying to knock the project; it's amazing so far. They seem to be working through things very quickly, so I definitely believe they'll have things looking good for AVM2 pretty soon.
The old swf I've tried worked, as in, it showed the content, but the visual output wasn't the same -- the lines around the drawn objects were much thicker. I still don't know how one is to watch the old swf content to replicate what is seen to match the output of the plugin that is going to completely stop working.
I read that there's some "standalone" player, is that downloadable freely or some part of some paid Adobe offer?
>I still don't know how one is to watch the old swf content to replicate what is seen to match the output of the plugin that is going to completely stop working.
Virtual machine. I still have Windows 98/2000/XP ones around for that reason, they still run fine and are so light weight at this point that the cost is essentially nonexistent. Even software 3D can handle anything from that era I've cared to throw at it, let alone anything lighter. All the security issues aren't particularly important since they can be well isolated.
Eh, maybe. Depends on how big a trainwreck code with history dating back to the 90s is.
I have a coworker that worked on flash, it sounded like a nightmare of a project.
Some of that can be seen by what Adobe has done with PDF. That is, cram every single feature you can imagine into a format (including, I believe, flash... lol)
I have just tested the demo, and am happy to see that it can display the Bin Laden (Banana Boat) song, aka "Nowhere to run - nowhere to hide"[1]. It is a culturally important artifact - whose size is 432KB (compare with how much bandwith does a Youtube video of it at Full HD would take).
I could also play the Xiao Xiao stick fight series[2].
Sadly, I still couldn't play a game I've put many hours in back in the day - Gem Tower Defense[3].
However, I could open and play it with KMPlayer[4]. Looks I will be able to continue wasting my time in Flash games going forward!
Hey I'm the original author of the Flash version of Gem Tower Defense (still hosted at http://gemtowerdefense.com/). I'm actually working on a HTML5 version of it and nearly complete, I should have it released within 2 weeks.
Wow, never would have thought this would happen by chance like that!
Several things:
-Thank you for the wonderful game! This is my favorite tower defense game hands down - I never played another one after Gem TD.
-Hope you'll post about it here! More people deserve to know the awesomeness that is Gem TD!
-Things like Gem TD proved a great distraction when I was going through things in life. And one round doesn't take long, it could be played in small increments. I feel like there is a lack of games that.
Good luck in whatever you are working on - including the HTML5 Gem TD! :)
Thanks for the vote for confidence, I created it out of pure admiration of the game mechanics of Gem TD. In regards to HN, I'll probably need to write a tech blog post describing my 13 year journey of Gem TD to have any chance of getting any HN viewership :)
With closed-source software it is often the case that it is using components where the copyright is owned by someone else, not to mention patented algorithms and such.
Open sourcing it would be bad, because that would extend its lifetime for general users, along with all the vulns. The only place for Flash is nostalgia inside a VM.
Yeah, no. It's same dead just like Flash and Java applets. It's just Microsoft keeps it around since, unlike Apple or Google, are hoarders. I mean you can, if you want, spun up VS2019 and write an MFC application just like it's year 2000.
Edit: sorry I made you angry. I didn't know that people are still sore about Flash. My memories of it were that it was buggy, made my computer overheat and crash.
It's not Flash's fault that it was misused. Flash was a great tool for creating and sharing resolution-agnostic high quality multimedia content using incredibly small amounts of bandwidth. You weren't supposed to build entire websites with it.
And now we have giant js bundles composed of thousands of little libraries, ad hoc animation, subpar media playback.
The web stack wasn't prepared to match the ease of authorship and distribution of Flash. It still isn't up to the same par, and it's been 15 years.
If Adobe had open sourced the entire standard and the player itself early on, they'd still have the best authorship tool and would have done amazing things. I don't know what they were thinking. They had an awesome tool, but their strategy was so wrong.
Flash was like PHP. Admittedly not the prettiest, but people did amazing things with it. It was a tool that worked for a lot of people. Teenagers were using Flash and getting really good.
Steve didn't want Flash eating his batteries, so he killed it on Apple. He also left us with the fucking robber barron App Store and the concept that we can't run stuff or upgrade our own devices. Seems like Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you can or can't run on their platform - that's monopoly power. They killed Flash.
There are good reasons to hate Flash, but that decision was an obvious strategy credit: they were going to kill Flash anyway because they wanted to prevent cross platform runtimes and toolkits on iOS, in order to fully control the platform and not be commoditized. Same reason why they banned JIT, in order to prevent Java/C# being used (it took a long time for these platforms to adapt and even today they are not widely used, maybe except for Xamarin, but even that is marginal compared to Objective-C/Swift).
Yes, Jobs and Apple are kind of sharks but on the other hand did you witness Flash running on Android phones? They were so slow that you didn't want to enable it even if you could :D
True, but that's also because phone hardware was crap at the time. I imagine current phone hardware is 20x faster than what we had at the time, probably more.
Javascript was also slow back then, Chrome/V8 were only launched in 2008 and reached phones only years later, yet JavaScript based websites were used on smartphones.
I'd be curious to see a comparison of site performance now, Flash vs a bog-standard HTML + JS + animations site. I think they would be quite similar.
Apple controls the genie in HTML/CSS/JavaScript very tightly.
There is one and only one browser engine on iOS, the one that Apple makes. Everyone and everything has to use it.
Secondly, they can hobble it at will, just like they're doing now with progressive web apps. We've had progressive web apps for how long? 5 years? Safari still doesn't really support them.
I wonder why? Might it have to do with the business selling tens of billions of dollars of platform-specific applications each year? Nah, that can't be! :-)
I don't know how long my NDA period of confidentiality with Adobe is and I'm too lazy to look up my contract; so I won't give the full details but let me just say that this perception ("Thoughts on Flash killed Flash") is, according to my recollection of events & internal information, completely unsubstantiated.
What killed Flash is much more dull and prosaic: it cost a lot to develop & maintain, and wasn't making as much money as Adobe would've liked.
Luckily Ruffle has come along just in time... It has already made huge amounts of content playable and I a lot more soon, in both desktop and browser. It is the open source hero we need. Many sites like Newgrounds(a major sponsor) already using it in places.
I believe that one of those currently has better ActionScript support, but ruffle is better architected and is WebAssembly first—meaning that a simple WebExtension supported by all browsers can be used to provide support for existing Flash content.
Oh the fond memories. I remember being able to develop immersive multi-touch experiences and prototypes using ActionScript 3; there was a cottage industry of businesses supporting these types of application builds. All this existed before the surge of JavaScript innovation and, of course, the entire modern mobile app ecosystem.
At the time, it was said to be because Flash was using too many cycles to be responsive on the iPhone, but I wonder if it wasn't a sensible security decision too.
It isn't like Apple had the ability to re-architect Flash for their platform. Not supporting Flash on iOS was a huge push towards HTML5 (and native iOS apps).
I don't know if it's responsible to reference a propaganda outlet. This is the same organization that lies about privacy and security..
Anyway on topic. Their competition made a safe flash environment. And pages would ask if you wanted to run Flash.
And native iOS apps are bad for everyone. Vendor lock-in is bad for customers. It's bad for programmers who are at the will of Apple. You can see them fighting against web apps to this day.
They are a horrible company and bad for capitalism. You should recognize yourself as an apologist.
Their competition tried to support Flash, and managed to deliver only a buggy, slow implementation with security issue, and only some time after iPhone's launch.
One can believe Apple deserves to be disassembled and still understand that Flash was bad technology, with only Adobe to blame.
The push towards HTML5 stopped dead in its tracks once streaming audio and video became doable without Flash. There's so much more functionality Flash was capable of, functionality that isn't possible without a nearly expert-level understanding of Javascript.
Next time you use some proprietary technology because you don't care about open source values, think about that:
"and it will block Flash content from running on January 12th, 2021."
This is a good example of the lack of respect tech companies have for their users!
After so many years, you learn suddenly that in 1 month of time you will not be able to open existing content anymore.
I would have understood if they had only EOL it and also displayed a warning of obsolescence and risk alert for someone using the plugin that will not be updated anymore.
But imagine the huge amount of content already existing that is lost forever? Even worse, if you had created some yourselves and would not be able to see it anymore.
Imagine one day Microsoft saying that they are deprecating Office documents (docx, xlsx) as now everything will be done online with office365 and so existing office installation will be remotely disabled to not be able to open documents anymore in 1 month...
But for cases where you trust the site that you are on and it is delivered via a secure connection I should be able to decide that I want to give that site access to my computer.
If you are so inclined, you can load up an old version of flash/browser in a VM. Think of it as an extra-hard mode of granting approval for Flash to run.
Not that I disagree with your sentiment, but couldn't you download an older version of the flash player with an older firefox that doesn't have the autodisable baked in should you need to access something?
Most electron apps look and behave almost exactly like their web app counterparts. It reminds me of early mobile apps that were basically a wrapper for a "m.domain.com" website. So what even is the point of creating a desktop version?
I understand why people here are so pissed about Flash, but if I be completely honest with you, IMO this tech was part of the stuff that made the "old" web so vibrant.
I remember about 15 years ago, there was a Flash animations channel on a Chinese website PCOnline.com.cn (Pacific Computer Network), many "Flashkers" published their art works and games there, Little Cherry Cartoon, ShiHuang Animations and that green bean frog to name a few. It was the number 1 place I went to every time when I back from school (that every half month).
For Americans, if you visit NASA.gov in around 2005 (I maybe misremembered the exact time), their intro page was a Flash animation featuring rocket launch and other stuff. And that animation was really cool and moving.
All of that is no more in today's web. Today's web only gives you few pictures or maybe a video in the background, and a big highlighted "Sign Up"||"Get Started" button. They are less and less "Look me, I'm so cool", and the resonance is mostly gone.
It's sad that Adobe was unable to address the security and stability issue in the Flash Player. Bye Flash, it was really fun.
It's true, Flash created and supported a special scene of creativity which drew in both artists and programmers in a way the felt new and unique, and seemed to last for almost a decade from ~2000 - ~2010.
Who could forget Yugo Nakamura's explorations in the early noughties, and many others which defined the early scene.
Even a decade or more ago some pretty impressive experiences were being delivered web-only. I ran a team in London where we really explored pushing the capabilities of the Flash player.
Granted we were just operating in a digital marketing context, in an environment where more involved gaming was already occurring, but we still delivered what feel like pretty decent 2d-gaming experiences, such as Professor Green and the Eco-Rangers: https://youtu.be/gUY2bVnhm44?t=85.
Back then I remember key figures from the Adobe team visiting our London office and candidly telling us the reason Flash was being blocked, esp. on mobile, was entirely due to commercial reasons by Apple, and not for technical reasons.
I believed them at that stage, but in hindsight it does appear there were serious performance, energy and security issues, but ex-Adobe engineers might want to chime in on that...
As someone who lived through that phase of web indulgence, I'm not mournful of a more indulgent time. It was a beautiful, exploratory phase, but the explosion in pointless, nonsense preloaders and custom UI represented usability ignorance and was not something to cherish.
In recent times the creativity and complexity has increased significantly in areas where it matters, such as web gaming, whereas in areas where it doesn't, such as UI interfaces to explore and understand information, it has gotten marginally or a lot better, depending on the context...
There were numerous sites like Bullseyeart.com that served up original Flash based animation. Those cartoons and short films were not available on television or anywhere else. Most are lost and no longer available anywhere.
I'm not sure I'd call it "candid" for Adobe engineers to blame their demise purely on Apple evil.
Anecdote: the Mac OS X dev tools used to come with an app called "Spin Control." It would sit in the background and every time an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (causing the "spinning beach ball of death") it would sample the process and log the trace. One time I accidentally left the app open and forgot about it for a week. When I came back, I found thousands of logged events. All flash.
It popped up in different processes, because WebKit was embedded all over the place, but every single spin event had flash at the bottom. There were several different stack traces within flash, but they were all flash. Yes, I paged through them all. Yes, I thought the 100% figure was a bit suspicious, so I triggered a mail reindex just to see if Spin Control had somehow been configured to look only at flash or something. As expected, the reindex triggered a beachball -- and dropped sqlite into the Spin Control list. There was no filter skewing the results. Flash had literally been responsible for 100% of the beachballs over a week of document editing, email reading, web browsing, and generally typical user activity.
Point is: I find it credible that Apple saw flash as a limiting factor for their ability to deliver smooth UX and battery life, both inside and outside the browser.
Oh I agree with you. When I say 'candid', I mean they conveyed the sense they were sharing some internal opinion that it was entirely about Apple playing commercial games, when in retrospect I don't think that was correct – there were technical issues that made it a non-starter on mobile (battery, smooth UX as you say).
> key figures from the Adobe team visiting our London office and candidly telling us the reason Flash was being blocked, esp. on mobile, was entirely due to commercial reasons by Apple, and not for technical reasons
That doesn't explain why Flash met the same fate on Android. They even had Flash players for Android, but those faded out after a few years.
I'm not an Adobe engineer, but I am a Ruffle developer, so I can give sort of a valid take on this.
Adobe isn't wrong in saying that Apple has a commercial motive to block Flash, but that would only apply to the point in time where Apple was trying to ban all third-party development tools for app developers, not just on the web. That was around the same time as Apple's "Thoughts on Flash" memo - in fact, the memo was written to justify the App Store policy.
However, Flash was also cursed by the circumstances of it's birth. You see, in the 90s, the trend was to do everything in software, because CPUs were getting more powerful all the time and most computers were desktops with wall power. Who cares about memory or CPU usage? That's stuff's getting cheaper all the time! Dev hours are more expensive than hardware! The idea of dedicated accelerators and hardware for video decoding, music synthesis, modems, or even 2D graphics drawing was going the way of the dodo, and 3D accelerators were far too bespoke and uncommon to stick into a browser plugin. (For the record, there were no less than 4 or 5 competing 3D APIs Windows developers had to worry about, and 1 or 2 more on Mac OS)
The iPhone was designed entirely backwards to this, which is ironic because Apple were the kings of "do it in software" going back to the original Apple ][ disk controller. But that's just how mobile phones worked. CPUs are power-inefficient and burn battery. Ergo, everything the iPhone could do had a hardware accelerator for it. Video and audio decoding were done in dedicated hardware blocks, UI elements were composited by the GPU, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had one of those hardware overlay scanout things, too. Flash Player - or, at least, the full desktop version - was simply not designed to work efficiently and use all of these accelerators.
The painfully sad part of this is that Adobe already knew better. Flash Lite came out back in 2003, although you probably would never have known it because it was basically Japan-only until around 2006. None of this was a surprise to them, it just took them until Flash Player 10.2, in 2011, to actually build in support for things like hardware-accelerated video. Oh, and that only applied to new players that used StageVideo, because Adobe hadn't actually done the hard bit of hardware-accelerating actual Stage composition. They even wrote a Stage3D framework for pre-rendering everything as GPU textures, but they didn't build this into the player, so only games built around this framework would get the performance benefit.
Meanwhile, web developers were enjoying the benefits of hardware-accelerated everything right out of the gate. You didn't have to add a 10mb+ reimplementation of HTML and CSS in WebGL to your site. The web browser just transparently sliced your content into GPU layers and rendering got faster. Apple figured this out and every other browser vendor eventually did the same thing. Same with video and audio tags: the browser is entirely responsible for playback, so it just hooks into whatever hardware nonsense it needs to run good. And because it's the easiest way to get video and audio onto a page, most sites are power-efficient by default.
Why didn't Adobe take this approach? Well, the way they handled Flash updates was that everything was versioned, and they didn't touch the player behavior of old movies. They were betting on Flash developers continually upgrading to newer Flash technologies that would be easier for them to make efficient. Instead of figuring out how to JIT a highly dynamic language like ActionScript, they tried to convince ECMA and Brendan Eich to go along with adding immutable classes into JavaScript. ActionScript 3's class system was specifically designed to make writing JITs easier. Meanwhile, Google was busy writing V8, which could just JIT-compile even your nastiest, most dynamic JavaScript into relatively efficient ASM. It even JIT-compiled the obje...
I still would like to know what the idea was with premium features... Emscripten and WebGL were already a thing, and Unity went and wrote their own plugin and canned the Flash export that (I imagine?) spooked Adobe in the first place. It screams of desperation.
The funny thing is, I don't even remember the premium features nonsense from back then. I only learned about it when looking up information on how Domain Memory works. That's how irrelevant Flash Player already was, and THEN they decided to start asking for more money beyond just how much Creative Suite cost.
> they tried to convince ECMA and Brendan Eich to go along with adding immutable classes into JavaScript.
The historical causality runs the other way: I gave Waldemar Horwat keys to the JS kingdom at Netscape and in ECMA TC39 TG1 in late 1997 when I went to cofound mozilla.org. Waldemar then designed "JS2" aka "ur-ES4" (my term) which is still archived:
Believe it or not, Microsoft on the ASP.NET side got excited about this ur-ES4 work and did their own version, shipped server side as JScript.NET around 2001:
The team at Macromedia I was in touch with after Firefox 1.0, mainly Gary Grossman, Edwin Smith, and Jeff Dyer, were trying to do a successor to Gary's ActionScript work (which was based on JS). They tried to license Sun's small footprint Java VM, for full Flash (not FlashLite) on mobile devices, but when Sun learned it was going to run ActionScript 3, not Java, they denied a license.
So Ed whipped up a proof of concept that the Macromedia folks could do it themselves, and this led to AVM2 (open sourced as Tamarin with Mozilla; alas the team got pulled back to work on a doomed Flash for mobile play, so Tamarin was in practical terms abandoned).
My work with Macromedians was a high point of early Firefox era standards rebooting. Jeff and I went to Geneva in spring 2005 to meet with Ecma and Microsoft folks to restart JS standards work in TC39. When Adobe bought Macromedia, we saw a path to ES4 as a standard. This ended only partly in tears, as AS3 was too static and different (namespaces!), but the good parts got into ES6.
But immutable classes originated with Waldemar's JS2/ur-ES4 work in the very late '90s.
Thanks for the correction - most of what I know has been gleaned from reimplementing AVM2 in Rust for Ruffle, so I suppose I might have a bit of a Flash-centric attitude.
Blaming Apple is provably not true. Adobe claimed that they could get Flash working on the first Apple iPhone in 2007. When Adobe finally bought Flash to Android, it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz CPU. Even then it ran badly and drained the battery.
The first iPhone had 128MB RAM and 400Mhz CPU. The first iPhone that met those specs came out in 2011.
One of the biggest knocks against the iPad in 2010 was that you couldn’t view the “real Internet” without Flash. Adobe promised Flash on the Motorola Xoom that came out a year later. Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t view its Flash based home page on the device.
Like many people here, you seem to be slightly misunderstanding what it means for the flash player to be killed.
The flash plugin was always just an output format for Adobe Flash, which is now Adobe Animate, and the reason Adobe can kill the plugin is because it's simply not necessary anymore: as of many years ago (since around when the iphone came out and didn't support the flash plugin) it has been possible to make the exact same stuff in the current version of what's essentially the same program and export it as standards compliant html.
In other words, Adobe isn't killing flash (which is now Animate) at all, they're just killing an obsolete browser plugin format.
If this type of animation is less popular now that's just an issue of fashion; if people still wanted to make the exact same type of animated landing pages using Adobe Animate they absolutely could.
You're right from the perspective that capabilities have increased, not decreased (though that was not true for a period during the flash / HTML5 crossover). You can make anything you want – and more – in the current context, and any particular historical format or container love is anachronistic pointlessness.
But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices.
The flash plugin itself, as a format, does not enable something different, but the editing environment and culture definitely did, so in some way the death of the container does mark an end of a particular creative era in digital society.
Perhaps only for the participants, and even then I'm not mournful, but it is an ever-so-slightly sentimental moment for those that witnessed that fusion of creativity between types who were decidedly not technologoical and those who were, fused in a shared creative endeavour.
> But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices.
The parent commenter is correct. Adobe Animate is literally the Flash creation tool you remember, and provides the same experience.
[1] "Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional, Macromedia Flash, and FutureSplash Animator) is a multimedia authoring and computer animation program developed by Adobe Systems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate
I'm the lead on an art/dev team where Animate is our main graphics app. We've been making Flash-based graphics, animations, games, and other media for almost 20 years. Our artists enjoy the idiosyncrasies of Animate, and find it easier to work with (to create the style of art we've arrived at) than Illustrator, Affinity, etc.
The fact that Animate can export to a web-compatible format is not sufficient for replicating the richness of Flash-based media with web standards. We tried. The output was far too bloated and inconsistent and didn't interact well with other web content. It also didn't support many the features of SWFs that we had previously been using.
We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs. It's faster and leaner than the web export from Animate, and we were able to figure out ways to replicate the special features we needed (or design around them). Plus, it acts like responsible, interoperable web content, not a blob of JS that acts like a compiled binary.
Point being — there's a lot more nuance here. Yes, Adobe Animate is the same tool as ever. But the fact that you can't as easily take the output from that tool, publish it, and get an It Just Works™ experience means there's a significant barrier now that never used to exist.
> The output was far too bloated and inconsistent and didn't interact well with other web content.
Well that's unfortunate.
"Bloated" I get, since there's no longer a black-box binary output format.
"Inconsistent" I'm not sure I understand, since presumably Animate's output is consistent. Does Animate create content that isn't rendered consistently across browsers?
"Didn't interact well with other web content" is interesting, because Flash never did this well IIRC. What was lost?
> We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs.
So in reality Flash is no more for the casual/novice/time-constrained/etc. user, unless Adobe makes a one-click solution for the new intervening steps in the future. But of course by then the web will be a much different place. So the original poster was correct.
A. Creative people creating games and other fun stuff with Flash in similar vein than HyperCard and Visual Basic allowed decades earlier
B. Bloody stupid web page enchancements and whole sites made in Flash for the effects and they were PITA to use and find. Ie. you cannot use the website without flash because the button animations have been done with Flash so the whole navigation doesn't work because Flash broken or disabled on purpose.
Most of the time I just ended up hating Flash-content because its randomness to work with Linux even on Mac and Windows was really, really annoying. Having fancy effects on a web page without any real added value didn't help.
All they had to do was open the spec for SWF and Flex. Those greedy you know whats at Adobe. There was no threat whatsoever of the official tools being overtaken by alternatives. There is still no replacement today for motion tweens and the kinds of projects people built back then.
That was probably about five years too late for the open-sourcing strategy to be successful. By 2010 Flash was already widely reviled on the desktop and doomed to be shut out of the mobile browsing experience. But if there had been at least a fledgling open-source Flash ecosystem for a year or two before the iPhone was released, things could have played out very differently.
I was an Adobe Flex developer years ago. There still isn’t a similar replacement right? Last I checked when I was still developing you had to do insane things with CSS for even the most basic animations. Is there something better now?
It really fucking annoys me that they are not just EOL, the copy suggests that they are forcibly disabling it? What about all the old Flash content that will never be updated? I am talking about things like Ishkur's EDM guide (the new one is kind of terrible and lacks the sass of the Flash based on). How are we supposed to use that any more?
Sad look for tech industry: 15 years later, there is no comprehensive alternative, web tech is slow and annoying, and videoconferencing in the browser is basically a space heater. Flash did all of these and more
Have i understood right that the only thing this update does is to disallow my pc run any flash content after january 12? I use flash in firefox browser very often for some reasons and definitely will use it after 12 january so i just afraid to update.
Some mention about nostalgia. I'm afraid whenever I think of flash, I think mainly of "punch the monkey" and dodgy .so files in my browser. I won't miss it.
This week I was listening to the radio and the host said (live) that he could not see the script (he made a bigger than usual pause) because of a flash update. I had to laugh. Other members of the show referred to "remind me later" as "kill me later".
That evening, watching some movie online it suddenly stopped. I check and it is the same flash update. I guess Flash updates bring us together in a bonding experience.
A pity for the environment that enabled so many media experiments and animations. I won't miss the memory leaks or the updates, though.
For everyone fond and nostalgic of any flash content, the Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations (using Ruffle https://ruffle.rs), games and toys in their software collection.
Yesterday I was asked for my email for a fresh install of Windows 10.
This immediately enraged me and I considered Linux.
I couldn't help but to consider Apple. But Apple is worse, they started the trend of collecting your information just to use their product. Apple is the reason Microsoft can ask for an email. Apple is the reason for the death of Flash. Apple bent at the knee to china. Apple uses pricing as a marketing tactic.
You can't reliably use an apple device without icloud anymore. So if an email pissed you off with Windows, Apple is going to be no better. Then youve really got a nanny state to deal with.
I don't have an email associated with my windows version. I opted out. I don't sign into anything windows related. But I swear if I have to authorize every exe I download from github, I'm just gonna be a full on linux junkie.
Reminder that if you disconnect from the internet while setting up win10 you won't be asked for a microsoft account and can make a local only account like in the past.
You can also use this to allow you to tweak personalization settings on an unactivated copy of windows before it hits up the activation servers and locks you out of personalization options.
166 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadI think the functional fix is that they show reminders because in the release notes, it says: "Some users may continue to see reminders from Adobe to uninstall Flash Player from their system". Adobe seems to say that there aren't security fixes, because they say on October 13, 2020: "Assorted security and functional fixes".
https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/release-note/fp_32_air_...
I clicked skip/cancel from muscle memory and IIRC it took me to an uninstall page!
First time I've come across that behaviour!
* Yet Another Pointless Update
I live in Germany and there are a few bars here that are open around the clock. Many of them hat to close for the first time in years because of the Corona lockdown.
There's an anecdote about the "Elbschlosskeller" in Hamburg: they didn't have a key for the front door at all, so they had to install a new lock to be able to lock up. Before that, the pub was open continuously for about 70 years
It definitely doesn't happen anymore (narrator: it still happens).
And it definitely doesn't happen in absolutely every browser out there and it can't really be blocked (narrator: it does, it is just done with JavaScript, which only hermits disable).
If your world view is "block javascript or let any and all javascript run", I don't know how to help you, because that isn't reality.
Why should I name a "browser-embedded technology"? I can just point out browser vulnerabilities.
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html...
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?...
If anything, they're not that great against Flash:
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.h...
Keep in mind that Flash itself was a runtime, much as a browser is. More limited, but still pretty big.
> If your world view is "block javascript or let any and all javascript run", I don't know how to help you, because that isn't reality.
You can't help me, I think no one can. For now we can still kind of run ad blockers, even though Chrome is working hard on stealthily removing them.
But for regular users, who don't run them (probably 99% of users out there), how do they protect themselves from cryptominers? From nasty ads?
You're using a browser build by a giant privacy abusing ad company, and you wonder why it isn't so friendly to ad-blocking/privacy-protecting plugins?
COLOUR ME SURPRISED.
You can't bury your hand in the sand and pretend that everything is fine. It's not.
Almost every browser out there is dying, everything is being taken over by Chrome/Chromium/Blink. The alternative is Webkit/Safari, which comes with its own limitations.
Firefox's market share is 5% and dwindling. Web developers have stopped caring about Firefox. Many sites are slow or barely working in Firefox. Firefox bugs aren't being fixed.
Soon I'll be forced to use Chrome because the alternatives won't allow me to do my job.
Open Source browser alternatives can't keep up. And even though Chromium itself is Open Source, it's not a complete browser for the modern web (see DRM).
So we're all going to be using Chrome or browsers built by corporations with the same incentives as Google (Microsoft also has an ad network, Opera is now owned by a semi-shady Chinese VPN company). And these browsers are gutting ad blocking.
Plus ads are getting smarter and we're not that far off from a point where ad blocking in its current form is no longer efficient. See for example stuff like the DNS over HTTPS changes.
And if it would only be about this, you'd be missing the point by "only" half a mile.
The other half a mile is that many people are forced to use a certain browser. At work, at school, etc. Or they don't know how to change their browser or what a browser even is. We're all in this together, the internet is one big network.
And for regular people, modern browsers are just as bad as Flash. Maybe even worse, at least Flash had a modicum of design as a platform. The web platform is a huge mishmash.
How?
> Plus ads are getting smarter and we're not that far off from a point where ad blocking in its current form is no longer efficient. See for example stuff like the DNS over HTTPS changes.
Surely there will be ways to work around that.
All the popular sites, including many intranet sites in every company I've worked for, use Javascript. I mean, you can disable it/enable it selectively, maybe I should try it with some Firefox extension. But I expect 95% of the web to break if I disable it.
So it's kind of a revolutionary attitude, which works out if you have nothing to lose, I guess. Or if you're trying to prove a point, but along the way you're probably hurting yourself, too.
So you're making fun of me although you haven't tried it. Yeah, okay.
> But I expect 95% of the web to break if I disable it
And you'll be wrong, it is much lower than that (except if you're talking about adverts failing to display, then I guess yes, in that respect it does).
I don't give a damn about other sites (and I don't browse intranet sites on my home machine -- if I'm in an office I use their office machine). If they don't work I don't use them except in rare cases when I really need to in which case they get run in a VM.
> you're probably hurting yourself, too
That's deeply patronising from somebody who admits they haven't even tried doing what I do, nor has even asked why I and others do it (hint: it's for many of the reasons you described). It sounds like you're talking to a rather stupid child.
I already use the strictest Tracking Protection stuff in Firefox, for example, and I do hit sites that don't work correctly.
Maybe it's worth revisiting but something tells me that the web uses more JavaScript, not less, since I last tried this experiment.
And regarding the patronizing aspect, let's say your bank's website uses JavaScript, what do you do?
Edit, actually, sorry, I re-read your comment and you answered my question:
> I don't give a damn about other sites (and I don't browse intranet sites on my home machine -- if I'm in an office I use their office machine). If they don't work I don't use them except in rare cases when I really need to in which case they get run in a VM.
Q.e.d.
I'll just rephrase things to something less offensive: you're not "hurting" yourself, you're limiting yourself, sometimes with drawbacks not everyone is able/willing to endure.
Well mate, take a guess :) I do it on the phone only (and I don't mean smartphone). I've had a little exposure to bank's competence from the inside 20 years ago (large UK bank, mortgages), they couldn't find their own arse with a torch, arrows, diagrams and a PhD in arse-finding.
> 'll just rephrase things to something less offensive: you're not "hurting" yourself, you're limiting yourself, sometimes with drawbacks not everyone is able/willing to endure.
That's much more accurate. We can agree, however consider that that 'limiting [my]self' means limiting my exposure to ads, abuse of my CPU, tracking, most dark patterns, nag screens, malware and more. The tradeoff's very ok for me, and I've experience the web on both sides. Oh yes it's worth it! (for me).
The one I use is called, appropriately enough, Disable JavaScript [0]. It puts a simple toggle button in the toolbar, and remembers the setting on a per-domain basis. If a website has annoying behavior, it's little effort to switch JavaScript off to see if the site is still usable that way, or to re-enable it briefly to glance at some missing content. I recommend it; it's surprising how many sites I've disabled JS on, and left that way because there's no major breakage.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas...
https://developers.ibexa.co/blog/embed-flash-swf-content-wit...
The only people with "goodwill and nostalgia" about Flash, are either wearing ridiculously rose tinted glasses, or have zero clue about technology.
So yes, some people have nostalgia with no rose tinted glasses, and I would like to think I have a clue about technology.
There is no reason we couldn't have had safe Flash except Adobe didn't care.
Comparisons with Windows don't make much sense because it is an OS and a thousand SDKs and ever growing attack surface.
Zombocom has more value than all today's social media combined.
You can do anything there.
The bad thing about flash is they also had network access without SOP... oh wait websockets does that. They also had FS access... which HTML5 has too now. Well the sandbox had some CVEs occasionally but then again, all software does.
I guess the worst thing was that it meant you had to install a closed source package from a large SV company... like most people do with Chrome.
So not 100% true that it's the last update ever if China will get further updates.
I do this from time to time since some of the old games were rather entertaining.
But the greedy fucks they are, they won't.
On the positive side, at least open implementations won't be dealing with a moving target anymore.
Using Rust and wasm for browser. They have browser plugin and desktop versions too. I've been trying to contribute, and it's really already able to play a large amount of content well.
Can confirm. I've gone through and downloaded the .swf's for some games I had nostalgia for, and ruffle has played a significant chunk of them quite well. For a relatively early version, I'd say that's pretty good.
[0] https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/issues/1368
Certainly I've enjoyed contributing so far, and I think this is my pet OS project for the next while.
I read that there's some "standalone" player, is that downloadable freely or some part of some paid Adobe offer?
Virtual machine. I still have Windows 98/2000/XP ones around for that reason, they still run fine and are so light weight at this point that the cost is essentially nonexistent. Even software 3D can handle anything from that era I've cared to throw at it, let alone anything lighter. All the security issues aren't particularly important since they can be well isolated.
I have a coworker that worked on flash, it sounded like a nightmare of a project.
Some of that can be seen by what Adobe has done with PDF. That is, cram every single feature you can imagine into a format (including, I believe, flash... lol)
I have just tested the demo, and am happy to see that it can display the Bin Laden (Banana Boat) song, aka "Nowhere to run - nowhere to hide"[1]. It is a culturally important artifact - whose size is 432KB (compare with how much bandwith does a Youtube video of it at Full HD would take).
I could also play the Xiao Xiao stick fight series[2].
Sadly, I still couldn't play a game I've put many hours in back in the day - Gem Tower Defense[3].
However, I could open and play it with KMPlayer[4]. Looks I will be able to continue wasting my time in Flash games going forward!
[1]https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/2767
[2]https://dagobah.net/flash/xiao_xiao_5.swf
[3]https://dagobah.net/flash/download/gemtd.swf
[4]http://en.kmplayer.com/
Several things:
-Thank you for the wonderful game! This is my favorite tower defense game hands down - I never played another one after Gem TD.
-Hope you'll post about it here! More people deserve to know the awesomeness that is Gem TD!
-Things like Gem TD proved a great distraction when I was going through things in life. And one round doesn't take long, it could be played in small increments. I feel like there is a lack of games that.
Good luck in whatever you are working on - including the HTML5 Gem TD! :)
As an archivist, I'll have to disagree with that.
History must be preserved properly.
[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C270SViXAAAzTLh?format=jpg&name=...
And now we have giant js bundles composed of thousands of little libraries, ad hoc animation, subpar media playback.
The web stack wasn't prepared to match the ease of authorship and distribution of Flash. It still isn't up to the same par, and it's been 15 years.
If Adobe had open sourced the entire standard and the player itself early on, they'd still have the best authorship tool and would have done amazing things. I don't know what they were thinking. They had an awesome tool, but their strategy was so wrong.
Flash was like PHP. Admittedly not the prettiest, but people did amazing things with it. It was a tool that worked for a lot of people. Teenagers were using Flash and getting really good.
Steve didn't want Flash eating his batteries, so he killed it on Apple. He also left us with the fucking robber barron App Store and the concept that we can't run stuff or upgrade our own devices. Seems like Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you can or can't run on their platform - that's monopoly power. They killed Flash.
Steve was worse than Flash and stole from us.
There are good reasons to hate Flash, but that decision was an obvious strategy credit: they were going to kill Flash anyway because they wanted to prevent cross platform runtimes and toolkits on iOS, in order to fully control the platform and not be commoditized. Same reason why they banned JIT, in order to prevent Java/C# being used (it took a long time for these platforms to adapt and even today they are not widely used, maybe except for Xamarin, but even that is marginal compared to Objective-C/Swift).
Javascript was also slow back then, Chrome/V8 were only launched in 2008 and reached phones only years later, yet JavaScript based websites were used on smartphones.
I'd be curious to see a comparison of site performance now, Flash vs a bog-standard HTML + JS + animations site. I think they would be quite similar.
Also computing power increases with time, so this is a silly reason to kill off a feature.
There is one and only one browser engine on iOS, the one that Apple makes. Everyone and everything has to use it.
Secondly, they can hobble it at will, just like they're doing now with progressive web apps. We've had progressive web apps for how long? 5 years? Safari still doesn't really support them.
I wonder why? Might it have to do with the business selling tens of billions of dollars of platform-specific applications each year? Nah, that can't be! :-)
What killed Flash is much more dull and prosaic: it cost a lot to develop & maintain, and wasn't making as much money as Adobe would've liked.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242115 - https://ruffle.rs/
Steve Jobs, "Thoughts on Flash",2010 https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
Anyway on topic. Their competition made a safe flash environment. And pages would ask if you wanted to run Flash.
And native iOS apps are bad for everyone. Vendor lock-in is bad for customers. It's bad for programmers who are at the will of Apple. You can see them fighting against web apps to this day.
They are a horrible company and bad for capitalism. You should recognize yourself as an apologist.
One can believe Apple deserves to be disassembled and still understand that Flash was bad technology, with only Adobe to blame.
"and it will block Flash content from running on January 12th, 2021."
This is a good example of the lack of respect tech companies have for their users!
After so many years, you learn suddenly that in 1 month of time you will not be able to open existing content anymore.
I would have understood if they had only EOL it and also displayed a warning of obsolescence and risk alert for someone using the plugin that will not be updated anymore.
But imagine the huge amount of content already existing that is lost forever? Even worse, if you had created some yourselves and would not be able to see it anymore.
Imagine one day Microsoft saying that they are deprecating Office documents (docx, xlsx) as now everything will be done online with office365 and so existing office installation will be remotely disabled to not be able to open documents anymore in 1 month...
Otherwise, users will be taught to ignore the warnings.
If corporates started banning Electron (i.e. Teams#, Slack 'thick' installs) there would be motivation to come up with something better.
# Wormable interactionless RCE via Teams (Electron) a few months ago and they refused to acknowledge it.
Although luckily most electron apps are available on the web as well.
/s
I remember about 15 years ago, there was a Flash animations channel on a Chinese website PCOnline.com.cn (Pacific Computer Network), many "Flashkers" published their art works and games there, Little Cherry Cartoon, ShiHuang Animations and that green bean frog to name a few. It was the number 1 place I went to every time when I back from school (that every half month).
For Americans, if you visit NASA.gov in around 2005 (I maybe misremembered the exact time), their intro page was a Flash animation featuring rocket launch and other stuff. And that animation was really cool and moving.
All of that is no more in today's web. Today's web only gives you few pictures or maybe a video in the background, and a big highlighted "Sign Up"||"Get Started" button. They are less and less "Look me, I'm so cool", and the resonance is mostly gone.
It's sad that Adobe was unable to address the security and stability issue in the Flash Player. Bye Flash, it was really fun.
Who could forget Yugo Nakamura's explorations in the early noughties, and many others which defined the early scene.
Even a decade or more ago some pretty impressive experiences were being delivered web-only. I ran a team in London where we really explored pushing the capabilities of the Flash player.
Granted we were just operating in a digital marketing context, in an environment where more involved gaming was already occurring, but we still delivered what feel like pretty decent 2d-gaming experiences, such as Professor Green and the Eco-Rangers: https://youtu.be/gUY2bVnhm44?t=85.
Back then I remember key figures from the Adobe team visiting our London office and candidly telling us the reason Flash was being blocked, esp. on mobile, was entirely due to commercial reasons by Apple, and not for technical reasons.
I believed them at that stage, but in hindsight it does appear there were serious performance, energy and security issues, but ex-Adobe engineers might want to chime in on that...
As someone who lived through that phase of web indulgence, I'm not mournful of a more indulgent time. It was a beautiful, exploratory phase, but the explosion in pointless, nonsense preloaders and custom UI represented usability ignorance and was not something to cherish.
In recent times the creativity and complexity has increased significantly in areas where it matters, such as web gaming, whereas in areas where it doesn't, such as UI interfaces to explore and understand information, it has gotten marginally or a lot better, depending on the context...
No.
Anecdote: the Mac OS X dev tools used to come with an app called "Spin Control." It would sit in the background and every time an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (causing the "spinning beach ball of death") it would sample the process and log the trace. One time I accidentally left the app open and forgot about it for a week. When I came back, I found thousands of logged events. All flash.
It popped up in different processes, because WebKit was embedded all over the place, but every single spin event had flash at the bottom. There were several different stack traces within flash, but they were all flash. Yes, I paged through them all. Yes, I thought the 100% figure was a bit suspicious, so I triggered a mail reindex just to see if Spin Control had somehow been configured to look only at flash or something. As expected, the reindex triggered a beachball -- and dropped sqlite into the Spin Control list. There was no filter skewing the results. Flash had literally been responsible for 100% of the beachballs over a week of document editing, email reading, web browsing, and generally typical user activity.
Point is: I find it credible that Apple saw flash as a limiting factor for their ability to deliver smooth UX and battery life, both inside and outside the browser.
That doesn't explain why Flash met the same fate on Android. They even had Flash players for Android, but those faded out after a few years.
Adobe isn't wrong in saying that Apple has a commercial motive to block Flash, but that would only apply to the point in time where Apple was trying to ban all third-party development tools for app developers, not just on the web. That was around the same time as Apple's "Thoughts on Flash" memo - in fact, the memo was written to justify the App Store policy.
However, Flash was also cursed by the circumstances of it's birth. You see, in the 90s, the trend was to do everything in software, because CPUs were getting more powerful all the time and most computers were desktops with wall power. Who cares about memory or CPU usage? That's stuff's getting cheaper all the time! Dev hours are more expensive than hardware! The idea of dedicated accelerators and hardware for video decoding, music synthesis, modems, or even 2D graphics drawing was going the way of the dodo, and 3D accelerators were far too bespoke and uncommon to stick into a browser plugin. (For the record, there were no less than 4 or 5 competing 3D APIs Windows developers had to worry about, and 1 or 2 more on Mac OS)
The iPhone was designed entirely backwards to this, which is ironic because Apple were the kings of "do it in software" going back to the original Apple ][ disk controller. But that's just how mobile phones worked. CPUs are power-inefficient and burn battery. Ergo, everything the iPhone could do had a hardware accelerator for it. Video and audio decoding were done in dedicated hardware blocks, UI elements were composited by the GPU, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had one of those hardware overlay scanout things, too. Flash Player - or, at least, the full desktop version - was simply not designed to work efficiently and use all of these accelerators.
The painfully sad part of this is that Adobe already knew better. Flash Lite came out back in 2003, although you probably would never have known it because it was basically Japan-only until around 2006. None of this was a surprise to them, it just took them until Flash Player 10.2, in 2011, to actually build in support for things like hardware-accelerated video. Oh, and that only applied to new players that used StageVideo, because Adobe hadn't actually done the hard bit of hardware-accelerating actual Stage composition. They even wrote a Stage3D framework for pre-rendering everything as GPU textures, but they didn't build this into the player, so only games built around this framework would get the performance benefit.
Meanwhile, web developers were enjoying the benefits of hardware-accelerated everything right out of the gate. You didn't have to add a 10mb+ reimplementation of HTML and CSS in WebGL to your site. The web browser just transparently sliced your content into GPU layers and rendering got faster. Apple figured this out and every other browser vendor eventually did the same thing. Same with video and audio tags: the browser is entirely responsible for playback, so it just hooks into whatever hardware nonsense it needs to run good. And because it's the easiest way to get video and audio onto a page, most sites are power-efficient by default.
Why didn't Adobe take this approach? Well, the way they handled Flash updates was that everything was versioned, and they didn't touch the player behavior of old movies. They were betting on Flash developers continually upgrading to newer Flash technologies that would be easier for them to make efficient. Instead of figuring out how to JIT a highly dynamic language like ActionScript, they tried to convince ECMA and Brendan Eich to go along with adding immutable classes into JavaScript. ActionScript 3's class system was specifically designed to make writing JITs easier. Meanwhile, Google was busy writing V8, which could just JIT-compile even your nastiest, most dynamic JavaScript into relatively efficient ASM. It even JIT-compiled the obje...
The rev-share licensing controversy was around the point I'd started moving away from the Adobe world.
As you illustrate, the web won and many of us in the Adobe community moved on (who weren't involved specifically in games etc).
The funny thing is, I don't even remember the premium features nonsense from back then. I only learned about it when looking up information on how Domain Memory works. That's how irrelevant Flash Player already was, and THEN they decided to start asking for more money beyond just how much Creative Suite cost.
The historical causality runs the other way: I gave Waldemar Horwat keys to the JS kingdom at Netscape and in ECMA TC39 TG1 in late 1997 when I went to cofound mozilla.org. Waldemar then designed "JS2" aka "ur-ES4" (my term) which is still archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010119185300/http://www.mozill...
https://web.archive.org/web/20001206082000/http://www.mozill...
Believe it or not, Microsoft on the ASP.NET side got excited about this ur-ES4 work and did their own version, shipped server side as JScript.NET around 2001:
https://www.drdobbs.com/a-talk-with-andrew-clinick-on-micros...
The team at Macromedia I was in touch with after Firefox 1.0, mainly Gary Grossman, Edwin Smith, and Jeff Dyer, were trying to do a successor to Gary's ActionScript work (which was based on JS). They tried to license Sun's small footprint Java VM, for full Flash (not FlashLite) on mobile devices, but when Sun learned it was going to run ActionScript 3, not Java, they denied a license.
So Ed whipped up a proof of concept that the Macromedia folks could do it themselves, and this led to AVM2 (open sourced as Tamarin with Mozilla; alas the team got pulled back to work on a doomed Flash for mobile play, so Tamarin was in practical terms abandoned).
My work with Macromedians was a high point of early Firefox era standards rebooting. Jeff and I went to Geneva in spring 2005 to meet with Ecma and Microsoft folks to restart JS standards work in TC39. When Adobe bought Macromedia, we saw a path to ES4 as a standard. This ended only partly in tears, as AS3 was too static and different (namespaces!), but the good parts got into ES6.
But immutable classes originated with Waldemar's JS2/ur-ES4 work in the very late '90s.
The first iPhone had 128MB RAM and 400Mhz CPU. The first iPhone that met those specs came out in 2011.
One of the biggest knocks against the iPad in 2010 was that you couldn’t view the “real Internet” without Flash. Adobe promised Flash on the Motorola Xoom that came out a year later. Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t view its Flash based home page on the device.
The flash plugin was always just an output format for Adobe Flash, which is now Adobe Animate, and the reason Adobe can kill the plugin is because it's simply not necessary anymore: as of many years ago (since around when the iphone came out and didn't support the flash plugin) it has been possible to make the exact same stuff in the current version of what's essentially the same program and export it as standards compliant html.
In other words, Adobe isn't killing flash (which is now Animate) at all, they're just killing an obsolete browser plugin format.
If this type of animation is less popular now that's just an issue of fashion; if people still wanted to make the exact same type of animated landing pages using Adobe Animate they absolutely could.
You're right from the perspective that capabilities have increased, not decreased (though that was not true for a period during the flash / HTML5 crossover). You can make anything you want – and more – in the current context, and any particular historical format or container love is anachronistic pointlessness.
But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices.
The flash plugin itself, as a format, does not enable something different, but the editing environment and culture definitely did, so in some way the death of the container does mark an end of a particular creative era in digital society.
Perhaps only for the participants, and even then I'm not mournful, but it is an ever-so-slightly sentimental moment for those that witnessed that fusion of creativity between types who were decidedly not technologoical and those who were, fused in a shared creative endeavour.
The parent commenter is correct. Adobe Animate is literally the Flash creation tool you remember, and provides the same experience.
[1] "Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional, Macromedia Flash, and FutureSplash Animator) is a multimedia authoring and computer animation program developed by Adobe Systems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate
The fact that Animate can export to a web-compatible format is not sufficient for replicating the richness of Flash-based media with web standards. We tried. The output was far too bloated and inconsistent and didn't interact well with other web content. It also didn't support many the features of SWFs that we had previously been using.
We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs. It's faster and leaner than the web export from Animate, and we were able to figure out ways to replicate the special features we needed (or design around them). Plus, it acts like responsible, interoperable web content, not a blob of JS that acts like a compiled binary.
Point being — there's a lot more nuance here. Yes, Adobe Animate is the same tool as ever. But the fact that you can't as easily take the output from that tool, publish it, and get an It Just Works™ experience means there's a significant barrier now that never used to exist.
Well that's unfortunate.
"Bloated" I get, since there's no longer a black-box binary output format.
"Inconsistent" I'm not sure I understand, since presumably Animate's output is consistent. Does Animate create content that isn't rendered consistently across browsers?
"Didn't interact well with other web content" is interesting, because Flash never did this well IIRC. What was lost?
> We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs.
Neat!
A. Creative people creating games and other fun stuff with Flash in similar vein than HyperCard and Visual Basic allowed decades earlier
B. Bloody stupid web page enchancements and whole sites made in Flash for the effects and they were PITA to use and find. Ie. you cannot use the website without flash because the button animations have been done with Flash so the whole navigation doesn't work because Flash broken or disabled on purpose.
Most of the time I just ended up hating Flash-content because its randomness to work with Linux even on Mac and Windows was really, really annoying. Having fancy effects on a web page without any real added value didn't help.
I can imagine spinning up a virtual machine to use legacy flash content.
https://ruffle.rs/
and on hardware that was less powerful than a premium phone today.
That evening, watching some movie online it suddenly stopped. I check and it is the same flash update. I guess Flash updates bring us together in a bonding experience.
A pity for the environment that enabled so many media experiments and animations. I won't miss the memory leaks or the updates, though.
https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-fo...
This immediately enraged me and I considered Linux.
I couldn't help but to consider Apple. But Apple is worse, they started the trend of collecting your information just to use their product. Apple is the reason Microsoft can ask for an email. Apple is the reason for the death of Flash. Apple bent at the knee to china. Apple uses pricing as a marketing tactic.
Any support of that company is bad capitalism.
I don't have an email associated with my windows version. I opted out. I don't sign into anything windows related. But I swear if I have to authorize every exe I download from github, I'm just gonna be a full on linux junkie.
You can also use this to allow you to tweak personalization settings on an unactivated copy of windows before it hits up the activation servers and locks you out of personalization options.