Live data from Hacker News

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

blogs.adobe.com

231–240 of 508 posts

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

#231

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

When was this? They've been trying to discourage people from using flash for years now.

https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-an...

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

#233

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…

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.

Someone from Adobe once told me the main reason holding back open sourcing the player was licensing. Apparently the player consists of quite a bit of licensed technology that Adobe obviously couldn't open up, and some of these are so core to the player that refactoring it wouldn't really be feasible or not really worth doing. Rewriting it to not use these technologies or use them in such a way that they could be plugged in with alternatives would be too expensive and for little apparent business gain.

I paraphrase of course and I can't really vouch for the veracity of these claims, but I'm hoping someone with first hand information might be able to corroborate or deny. Sounds plausible to me.

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

#234

Since Flash and MS-Paint are going to be dumped, why not open source them?

MS Paint is still going to be around. https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2017/07/24/ms-pa... Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14845225

If it's going to be free in the app store, why not just make it open source?

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

#235
Without Flash live streams on Youtube cannot be played in Firefox 45 on Windows XP. So Flash is still useful.

And by the way videos in Twitter and Vimeo don't work in both Chromium and Firefox on Windows XP. Because HTML5 video cross-platform compatibility is not perfect and developers have chosen not to encode videos in formats supported on this platform.

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

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only real* browser I can think of that isn't listed there is Opera, and they're only barely hanging on. The numbers I've seen peg them at roughly 1% of desktop browsers, mostly in Europe. *: That is, one that isn't just a reskin of another browser on the list.

How about Safari?

What they said so far is https://webkit.org/blog/7839/adobe-announces-flash-distribut...

Of course that describes what they are doing now, not their plans. Which is not surprising, because Apple never says anything about plans, as a matter of corporate policy...

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

#239

Since Flash and MS-Paint are going to be dumped, why not open source them?

I don't know about MS-Paint, but there are a number of licensing issues with simply open sourcing Flash.

If the product is dead, that means the licencors are likely to no longer make any money off it it. This means they will likely be open to open sourcing the code for free or next to free.

Open sourcing dead projects do have advantages for the licencors:

1. nobody likes the code they worked hard on to be dead

2. it's valuable free marketing for their brand name

3. they can charge for support

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

#240

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

It almost feels like we have regressed.

Making simple CRUD SPAs using HTML5/CSS3/JS/whatever frameworks is way more complicated than using AS3 to do the same thing.

It all feels like a giant kludge.

What have we gained by going into using modern web stack to make application like pages?

Perhaps source is shared more freely and code is more "open", but as the React licensing ruckus shows that is not clear cut.

We have certainly not gained more consistency over AS3.

There really wasn't anything wrong with the idea of flash compiler doing the heavy lifting for app like pages.

Post reply on HN