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Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

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Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#91

Post by fenomas »

code_duck wrote: post #72
dyarosla wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterargument, look at the state of the web today without Flash. Many websites are still bloated, still slow to load, still hijack the back button, still mess with copy and paste, still force same-window-only opening. So was Flash really the issue?

With the flash sites i refer to, the back and forward buttons didn't work at all. Slow to load today is nothing like loading a 1 mb flash app over dialup on a 800mhz pentium iii. I mean copy and paste, like back and forward, were not just l 'messed with'... you often couldn't even highlight text. Flash sites were far worse than the average awful HTML site of 2004, and this is why they're now almost totally dead. Sure…

This blame is misplaced. Flash was never designed for full websites and developers at the time knew that perfectly well - nobody was making a design decision to disable the back button.

The reality is just that HTML in those early days was grim - IE and Netscape were making up tags willy-nilly, and any kind of interactivity or media playback was nigh-impossible to achieve without plugins. (Even for static layouts it could be a significant challenge to make things work the same way across browsers and platforms.)

So the result was, for interactive media-driven sites, developers used Flash outside the bounds of what it was meant for, and the back button broke. The alternative wasn't to not break the back button, the alternative was having a big "This site only works in Netscape!" banner, or having no interactivity at all.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#92

Post by zwetan »

About the open source AVM2, there are in total 3 versions:

The tamarin project on Mozilla mercurial with tamarin-central [0] and tamarin-redux [1]

Then after the project got abandoned, Adobe renamed it to avmplus and moved it to github [2] and made a couple updates.

Later on, they moved it to another repo [3], updated it on December 2015 to the equivalent of Flash Player v19.0 and updated it again on Mars 2016 to the equivalent of Flash Player v20.0 (codename rankin).

I maintain a fork/extension named redtamarin [4] which focus mainly on adding native API to make ActionScript 3.0 run on the command-line, shell scripts, server-side, etc.

imho FlasCC/Alchemy/CrossBridge did not take off because it is much harder for dev to produce a project in C++ than in AS3, also why redtamarin took an opposite approach: bring the C API to the AS3 context instead of forcing users to actually write C/C++ code.

[0]: https://hg.mozilla.org/tamarin-central

[1]: https://hg.mozilla.org/tamarin-redux

[2]: https://github.com/adobe-flash/avmplus

[3]: https://github.com/adobe/avmplus

[4]: https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#93

Post by Brajeshwar »

Ah! Flash!

I started my career as a programmer but always had a mind for creative designs. When I discovered Flash around 2002-2003, I was all over it. ActionScript was my ultimate weapon to make Flash sing and dance to all my tunes.

I was so involved then, Macromedia picked me as one of their "Professional Expert" or something in that line. Those were the times when I made good money, lots of friends, clients, met few interesting business partners.

In the summer of 2005, just as it was about to be acquired by Adobe, I got an email that I was invited to their office in San Francisco. I was one of the 20-odd people from around the world picked up for something called the "Lego" Team. I was overwhelmed, humbled, and scared - to meet all the authors from whose book I learned ActionScript, all those developers whose files I downloaded to learn Flash/ActionScript. It was a blast.

If you were into Flash during those times, you'd remember names such as Guy Watson (FlashGuru), Brandon Hall, Peter Hall, Colin Mook, Aral Balkan, Jesse Warden, Peter Hall, Marcos Weskamp, Grant Skinner, etc. Well, it was the congregation of the whos-who of the Flash world at that time.

Well, all of our names were then featured on the credit screen of Macromedia Flash. Some of us also realized that Flash was dying and something needed to be done. Adobe came along and well, Macromedia and Flash became just another archive on Wikipedia.

Next year, 2006, the company I founded was acquired by a Startup from Silicon Valley. That's when I started my very bumpy Startup journey, and I'm still chugging along.

Here are some of the Macromedia Flash Lego Summit photos - https://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/albums/720575940814... (who do you recognize).

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#94

Post by code_duck »

fenomas wrote: post #91
code_duck wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the flash sites i refer to, the back and forward buttons didn't work at all. Slow to load today is nothing like loading a 1 mb flash app over dialup on a 800mhz pentium iii. I mean copy and paste, like back and forward, were not just l 'messed with'... you often couldn't even highlight text. Flash sites were far worse than the average awful HTML site of 2004, and this is why they're now almost totally dead. Sure…

This blame is misplaced. Flash was never designed for full websites and developers at the time knew that perfectly well - nobody was making a design decision to disable the back button. The reality is just that HTML in those early days was grim - IE and Netscape were making up tags willy-nilly, and any kind of interactivity or media playback was nigh-impossible to achieve without plugins. (Even for static layouts it…

Correct, nobody made the design decision to disable the back button - they did it in complete, oblivious disregard.

I'm well aware of what you state and the entire point of my statements is that those decisions were wrong.

The solution I would have preferred to those issues you describe is actually not that at all. It's to make simple, usable sites like the one we are currently on.

As far as what you're saying about intent, i am not so sure that adobe never intended or encouraged flash to be used to make whole websites. I suppose one could research that, but it's beside any point i was making.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#95

Post by sillysaurus3 »

kbenson wrote: post #77
eli wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but certainly they were planning to launch an app store when Jobs penned his open letter on flash. My understanding is they just didn't have the app store and the sdk ready in time.

> Yeah but certainly they were planning to launch an app store when Jobs penned his open letter on flash. That was almost two years after the opening of the app store, and almost three years after the release of the iphone. I'm unsure whether they really had a fully thought out app store strategy initially, or whether they stumbled into it sort of by accident. Even if an app store was planned, I'm not sure they reall…

This is correct. People were clamoring to write native apps, but Steve tried to deflect them by saying it'd introduce too many security problems. Carmack blasted him publicly, saying that if Apple can't figure out how to secure a unix-based OS then they were incompetent.

I wish I saved the pamphlet that Apple sent to developers during the iPhone 1 era. It was hilarious. It was all about how to use Safari to write webapps. They even highlighted how you could save a bookmark as an icon on your home screen so that your webapp launched like a native app. But of course it was just Safari.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#96

Post by [deleted] »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #76
turnspike wrote: post #2

I still haven't forgiven Madobe for killing Macromedia Director - a thousand hours of my work lost. It taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of Open Source - protect your investment from the caprice of a single corp.

> caprice of a single corp. There was no sudden-change: they kept on maintaining Director, years after its main use-cases (kiosk applications, magazine cover demo disc launchers and CD autoplay software) stopped being relevant. If my experiences at other software companies are anything to go by: Adobe's staffers probably wanted to open-source it but were held back by licensed third-party components. I haven't seen an…

[deleted]

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#97

Post by acdha »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #23
jugg1es wrote: post #7

I feel as though the author missed talking about Flex, which really took flash to the next level. It was short-lived, as it came a few years before the end of Flash-as-we-know-it when Steve Jobs decided to block it - but it was a great way to build sophisticated SPA's before the javascript ecosystem was able to catch up. Thanks Flash!

it came a few years before the end of Flash-as-we-know-it when Steve Jobs decided to block it I forgot about that. Does anyone have any info about this? I didn't pay much attention at the time, but in retrospect it seems like it was one of the main reasons everyone stopped using flash. Did Adobe try to get Steve to pay a licensing fee, or was he just inherently against implementing flash? The excuse Steve made at the…

Beyond the security issues, Adobe was just terrible as a platform maintained. Flash was the largest source of crashes in every browser until they moved it to a separate process, there were endemic performance issues even in core features (e.g. video playback was significantly more CPU intensive, and general code was well behind native speed), and most of the toolchain was in a state of obvious neglect, from the library inconsistencies (e.g. fonts rendered differently in some controls in the standard library and many of the method/property names didn't match), to the wrong or missing documentation, the many crashing bugs in the IDE, and the debugger which couldn't even pause on a breakpoint reliably. Nothing ever got fixed because their resources went into new features but the support people would reliably ignore tickets until sending a message telling you that it might be fixed in the next paid upgrade - could you buy it and let them know?

Had Adobe shown even the slightest sign of responsibility it might have been a different call but at any point after maybe 2002 it was pretty obvious that you shouldn't depend on Flash because Adobe was just milking the customers.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#98

Post by turnspike »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #76
turnspike wrote: post #2

I still haven't forgiven Madobe for killing Macromedia Director - a thousand hours of my work lost. It taught me a valuable lesson about the importance of Open Source - protect your investment from the caprice of a single corp.

> caprice of a single corp. There was no sudden-change: they kept on maintaining Director, years after its main use-cases (kiosk applications, magazine cover demo disc launchers and CD autoplay software) stopped being relevant. If my experiences at other software companies are anything to go by: Adobe's staffers probably wanted to open-source it but were held back by licensed third-party components. I haven't seen an…

> There was no sudden-change

Yep, it was death by neglect rather than violence. Shockwave was much more powerful than Flash for gamedev, it had true 3D baked in and fantastic audio and video support - in 2001. IIRC lack of a timely OSX version killed it.

Arguably it was the same neglect of the Flash plugin on Mac that partly caused Apple to deep-six iOS support, decimating Flash's marketshare.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#99

Post by IIAOPSW »

theamk wrote: post #50
dyarosla wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Flash screwed up security because of the way users could control what Flash had access to (through a Security Sandbox Controller on the Macromedia/Adobe website) Imagine that instead Flash went the way of App Permissions: asking users for permission to access, read, and write different things to the browser. Could you imagine? Advertisers wouldn't be able to pull as many annoying/shady things, and security wo…

I don't remember the flash permissions model being problematic. I saw two main problems with flash: - it was a lightweight and compatible way to insert animated ads. The animation consumed a lot of CPU. This is why most people blocked flash, and why most Apple refused to support it on ipads. - it had horrible security record. For some reason, Adobe could not fix the bugs in the Flash plugin. This is why IT department…

That's Job's stated reasons. My understanding is that Apple/Adobe rivalry goes way back. "Thoughts on Flash" was Job's "now the tables have turned" moment. Once upon a time Adobe wouldn't make a version of their software for Apple machines cause it was to niche.

Re: Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different

#100

Post by ricardoteix »

I was 16 in 1999 when a high school teacher presented me the Flash 4. From there I built my professional career. For most than one decade I improve my Flash and ActionScript skills and loved that. I never felt that nothing but joy when building things with Flash Platform. It was a good knowledge. Even these todays I did somethings with ActionScript 3. My company developed educational solutions with Flash for 6 years and the transition to the HTML5 promesse was painful, expensive and complex. I did not realize why Adobe did not invest some effort to keep us using Flash and ActionScript 3 to build web applications transpiled to JS (without HTML5 canvas).

Is there another tool capable to compile to iOS and Android over Windows with no need of a Mac with XCode? I loved that in Flash.

"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain". Harvey Dent, The Dark Knight.

Sorry for poor english. I am not native.

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