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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”

#221

Post by kbenson »

mattnewton wrote: post #204
kbenson wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... interesting, and it also smacks of quite a bit of PR to me. If an app causes your OS to crash, and that problem persists for several years, you can no longer blame that squarely on the app. Your OS should not allow an app to crash it. It happens anyways, and that means you have a bug in your OS at best (and possibly an exploit). All this means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep their OS from…

I think he meant "crashes logged on Mac OS" not that the operating system itself crashed

That's definitely not what that phrasing means, and I find it hard to believe that it would have been accidentally overlooked in a PR piece like this. To me that means the likely explanations are that either it actually caused Macs to crash (which I seem to recall from experience it could, at least occasionally), or that Jobs is purposefully trying to shift OS instability blame to an application, which I think is possible. Or some combination thereof.

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

#222

Post by xanderstrike »

ash_gti wrote: post #6

I wonder what the major use cases are for Flash Player these days? I assume some of the 'Farm Ville' style web games are probably in Flash still these days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...

Tons of animators still use Flash, the tools are by far the best and easiest for making animated and interactive content. It used to also have an awesome publishing path, but Apple killed that off. All the animators I know still work with it, but record the flash animations as videos and post 'em on youtube.

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

#223

Post by wlesieutre »

mattnewton wrote: post #204
kbenson wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... interesting, and it also smacks of quite a bit of PR to me. If an app causes your OS to crash, and that problem persists for several years, you can no longer blame that squarely on the app. Your OS should not allow an app to crash it. It happens anyways, and that means you have a bug in your OS at best (and possibly an exploit). All this means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep their OS from…

I think he meant "crashes logged on Mac OS" not that the operating system itself crashed

This was also published not too long after Snow Leopard came out (August 2009), which is when Safari first split plugins out to a separate process, as long as you were running it in 64-bit mode. Before that it could bring down the whole browser, after it would only kill itself and require pages to be reloaded. So it's not like Apple wasn't doing anything about it.

Obviously a positive change in general, but the push to prioritize that and get it done must have been 99% aimed at problems caused by Flash.

And even after that was implemented, an ad crashing flash in one window would still bring down a video player in another, if I'm remembering right. Still a crappy user experience.

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

#225

Post by ant6n »

melling wrote: post #156
yellowapple wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that last justification is one with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Cross-platform done right is a good thing, and yet here we have Apple explicitly describing how it wants app developers to not use cross-platform technologies and instead rely on Apple-specific interfaces. In other words: "screw developer productivity, if you're not exclusively targeting our platforms, you're doing it wrong".

What's a good cross-platform toolkit that exists today?

Opengl

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

#226

Post by tambourine_man »

oblib wrote: post #181

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…

>The only people who care about the life of this product are those who invested in buying and learning how to use it.

And the ones that have content currently deployed on the platform. A few of my clients still have sites in Flash that I wrote for them in the early 2000s. Every year I try to convince them that they need to switch, but they can't justify the cost.

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

#227

Post by drak0n1c »

colanderman wrote: post #48
larsiusprime wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of serious attempts underway, I've been involved with some of those discussions. Nothing perfect and turn key exists at the moment, but all the necessary pieces are basically there. It depends on what sort of preservation strategy you're going after. 1) "Emulation" style: -- Open source flash player (a la Shumway) 2) "Automated Conversion" style: -- Load-time conversion to a different format (ie, HTML…

There's nothing stopping you from just running Flash itself… even in a Windows XP VM if necessary.

Some kind of conversion is needed to help hosts keep their flash content alive - visitors will ignore what is not accessible.

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

#228

Post by bdcravens »

Samuray wrote: post #120

Good thing I spent so much time learning and using Flash. Never again, Adobe.

There was a time that was a great career path. However, you never can predict how well a technology will perform, especially if it's tied to a closed platform. I suppose this speaks to the power of open source.

Then again, Animate CC should allow you to use those skills for the various platforms it supports.

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

#229

Post by xanderstrike »

whatever_dude wrote: post #27
ash_gti wrote: post #6

I wonder what the major use cases are for Flash Player these days? I assume some of the 'Farm Ville' style web games are probably in Flash still these days.

Lots of games, but that's about it.

Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...

Flash is one of the best workflows for animators ever. This is equivalent to Photoshop being EOL'd because Apple doesn't like the pictures you can make with it.

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

#230

Post by egypturnash »

curun1r wrote: post #193
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.

It was bewildering how bad Flash on the Mac was. Simple animations and videos would spin all of my cores up into the high 90s%. I installed a CPU throttling command line tool and would set the flash process to 30% of one core and the animation or video would still play fine, with no noticeable degradation in quality or framerate. I've always wondered whether part of the monetization of Flash was an embedded Bitcoin M…

Flash has always been crap on the Mac. Always. I was working with it around 2000-05 and the player was always like half as fast as a similarly specced Windows machine. Plus there were some wonderful Mac-only bugs in v5 of the editor that cropped up when you tried to edit files big enough to contain a whole cartoon. And by "wonderful" I mean "I lost a week of my life to editing a cartoon in five minute bursts of work, followed by having to reboot the entire system because Flash had crashed so hard it refused to run until I did that."
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