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“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

blogs.adobe.com

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Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#141

Post by toyg »

sushisource wrote: post #123
rocky1138 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still have time. There's nothing stopping them from doing this. It would certainly help archival efforts and benefit people who do animations.

Not much money in it, though.

A company like Adobe, constantly struggling with accusations of greed and carelessness, should consider this as a PR exercise and budget accordingly.

My guess is that they won't do it because there might be proprietary stuff they don't own, in the codebase. Macromedia wasn't that huge a company, I wouldn't be surprised to learn they embedded 3rd party components here or there. At that point, untangling legals might become very hard.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#142

Post by mrpippy »

wlesieutre wrote: post #65
djsumdog wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content. Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos. It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable…

I don't know about Linux, but back when Flash was relevant the Mac version always felt like an inefficient crashy dumpster fire to me. I don't have a source to back this up, but I always assumed that was a big part of why Jobs was so uninterested in supporting it on iOS.

Exactly, and the Linux version was similarly bad and unmaintained. I don't think they released a 64-bit x86 version until 2008/2009 when Linux on amd64 had been common since 2005 if not before. I remember having to either keep a 32-bit browser around just for Flash or use (impressive) hacks like nspluginwrapper.

I suspect the crappiness of the Mac/Linux versions was not because of developer incompetence, but a severe lack of developers/resources for those teams. Hopefully there are some managers at Adobe who realize that, if they hadn't shipped a crappy product for so many years used by every Mac user, they could have made an actual case for their ability to support high-quality Flash on iOS.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#143

Post by ikreymer »

djsumdog wrote: post #39
methodover wrote: post #12

I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and g…

A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content. Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos. It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable…

Webrecorder supports remote browsers that allow you to run older browsers pre-configured with Flash, as well as Java applets.

http://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/oct/25/rhizome-releases-ma...

Example: Record Flash: https://webrecorder.io/_new/temp/flash-example/record/$br:ch...

An archived Java applet: https://webrecorder.io/demo/java/20170505193641$br:firefox:4...

In this mode, the browsers run remotely and stream the video to your browser. We are still working on the audio support but hope to have audio support soon. It should be possible to archive Flash in this way, though we could use more help/research in this area.

Once the last version of Flash is released, we'll include the latest browsers that can run it.

If the Mozilla Shumway project or similar picks up again (we hope), Webrecorder can integrate that as well to offer a native JS based Flash-recording and replay.

If anyone is interesting in helping out, let us know!

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#144

Post by menacingly »

make3 wrote: post #116
sashk wrote: post #100

Flash will die 10 years after this -- https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

I hadn't read this. The security and battery life arguments are the best imho. The last part about the apps make Apple look like they only want to protect their financial interests in a sort of sketchy monopolistic way.

It always made me feel like the open web is implicitly viewed as competition as well, but it's just not as palatable to the public to bash it

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#146

Post by disease »

simion314 wrote: post #62
methodover wrote: post #12

I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and g…

And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework

Flex had some good ideas but many things made it a pretty bad experience to work with: Adobe abandoning WYSIWYG editing in Flash Builder, having two ways to do everything (XML and code) made things more confusing than it had to be, and the official components from Adobe generally weren't very good. I much prefer building by own in React.

AS3 was awesome for its time but TypeScript has surpassed it in my opinion.

After building up components directly in the language with React there's no way I could go back to using Flex.

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#147

Post by thebouv »

simion314 wrote: post #62
methodover wrote: post #12

I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized. There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned Flash's toolset and g…

And AS3/FLex is still better then JS/and any JS framework

I soooooooo miss AS3/Flex. :(

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#148

Post by k__ »

End of an era...

I did my first project, when I was 14, with Flash, simple animated cartoon. Was super easy and fun.

Today I read we would have Iron Man style UI if Steve Jobs didn't shot down Flash with the iPhone. The reasoning was, nothing we have today had such easy 2D/3D animation features, yes WebGL can do everything Flash can, but it's waaay more complicated.

When I started programming, I liked the idea of Flex, but somehow that never cached on. Later in 2011, when I finished my CS degree, I moved to JavaScript because it was open and rapidly catching up.

I liked the whole openness of JavaScript much more and like I said, the Web platform can theoretically do everything Flash can, but we need better tools. I can do rather much, because I'm a developer, but when I look at me 18 years ago, I didn't know anything about programming and still got things done with Flash.

I also met a few people who build their whole career on Flash. Some media degrees here were basically 80% Flash content creation and I'm still working with people who got into IT by doing Flash, they miss it pretty much...

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#149

Post by icebraining »

cookiecaper wrote: post #125
ivraatiems wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd encourage people to use flash, which is the opposite of what most everyone in web development (and possibly on the web, period) wants.

There are a lot of bad things about Flash, but it still has not been adequately replaced. AFAIK there is nothing web-centric that comes close to the developer experience it offered. Yes, things can be pieced together: animation programs and sprite exporters here, some custom scripting there, throw in your own tween, sound, and networking libraries, etc., but this is much less efficient than a unified write-once, run-…

I think what you're missing is that the Flash editor lives on, Adobe is just killing the format itself.

http://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

Re: “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

#150

Post by gpawl »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #40
seanalltogether wrote: post #8

> will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash. Adobes stance on backwards compatibility in Flash has always been "Don't break the web". Where does this leave all the existing flash content that still exists around the web after 2020? As far as I know, those JS emulators are way to slow for most content.

I assume they're giving everyone 2.5yrs advanced notice to port anything considered important to something else.

Meanwhile, DOS programs from 1986 still run in DOSBox.
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