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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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181–190 of 508 posts

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

#181

Post by oblib »

The only people who care about the life of this product are those who invested in buying and learning how to use it. I can understand why they care, but I don't.

I decided not to invest in it back when Macromedia bought it because I knew it would be expensive and subjected me to their whims. I thought "Futuresplash" was great and had high hopes for it but I'd already been burned by Adobe's planned obsolescence and I hated the way Macromedia designed their UIs and thought they charged way too much for their products.

I stopped using Adobe's plug-in on my Mac even before Jobs came out and complained about Flash. I considered it a form "spyware" and even if it wasn't it was constantly pestering me to update it and I seldom ever visited a site that used it. As I recall it was a bit of a pain to get rid of it too.

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

#182

Post by tracker1 »

rocky1138 wrote: post #56
threeseed wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should've open sourced it and invested heavily in security, stability and performance. People blamed Apple back in the day for not including it on iOS but given that how many critical bugs have been found in the time since then you can't blame them.

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

I wish they'd just come up with Flash X (sub X for whatever), where the tooling was flash in a flash interface, and geared towards react in a flex-like (flashbuilder) interface. Where the output was a directory with assets that could run directly in a browser/iframe, and svg for vector assets.

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

#183

Post by kakwa_ »

mrpippy wrote: post #142
wlesieutre wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could not agree more.

The Linux version was really badly maintained for ages.

Circa 2014, I had to do weird stuff like sed on the .so flash plugin to bump artificially its version string from 11 to 12

This was to work around a requirement for VMware VCenter UI which required flash versions newer that the one available for Firefox at that time (11.2 IIRC).

I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code. It's probably not the most beautiful code in the world, but at least, it would provide a reference implementation and help other implementations a lot.

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

#185

Post by vecinu »

cpncrunch wrote: post #10

What about Adobe Connect? They have been talking about moving to HTML5 for years, but nothing seems to happen. Then recently they announce that if you don't have Flash you can instead download an executable: https://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2016/02/add-in.html Could this be the end of AC, or will they pull something out of a hat at the last minute?

Connect is not going to die, is my understanding.

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

#186

Post by azinman2 »

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.

Important to what? Individuals? Digital historians? Those concerned with abandonware? Companies that want people to pay for new porting work?

The majority of content that is still in flash and active use probably won’t get ported... the iPhone 10 years ago set that trend.

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

#187

Post by chungy »

kakwa_ wrote: post #183
mrpippy wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could not agree more. The Linux version was really badly maintained for ages. Circa 2014, I had to do weird stuff like sed on the .so flash plugin to bump artificially its version string from 11 to 12 This was to work around a requirement for VMware VCenter UI which required flash versions newer that the one available for Firefox at that time (11.2 IIRC). I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash sou…

As much as I personally dislike Flash, I have to agree that making it open source would be a net benefit to the world, even if only for preservation of existing media.

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

#188

Post by richardwhiuk »

azinman2 wrote: post #186
SkyMarshal wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Important to what? Individuals? Digital historians? Those concerned with abandonware? Companies that want people to pay for new porting work? The majority of content that is still in flash and active use probably won’t get ported... the iPhone 10 years ago set that trend.

The flash player won't stop working when Adobe declare it EOL....

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

#189

Post by komali2 »

gpawl wrote: post #151
komali2 wrote: post #145

>Adobe also notes that it plans to be more aggressive about ending support for Flash “in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.” What did they mean by this line?

China.

Why would China be interested in distributing out of date versions of Flash? And how would Adobe more aggressively ending life for these regions affect them if they're already out of date and unlicensed anyway?

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

#190

Post by chrischen »

yellowapple wrote: post #136
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.

People mainly want Flash to die because it's a closed standard/platform that can't be improved by third parties and has lagged behind modern web standards as a result. Opening up Flash would address that problem and make the idea of Flash on a modern website significantly less horrid.

Whatever flash is, it’s the opposite of “lagged behind modern web standards”. If anything that was the one thing it didn’t do in its lifespan since it enabled apps that are only now html5 achieving parity.

It enabled a consistent cross platform interpreter for javascript and xml based apps.

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