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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”

#331

Post by gmmeyer »

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…

Flash on Linux was discontinued in 2012: http://www.pcworld.com/article/250784/for_flash_on_linux_the...

Even back then you had to do hacks to get it to work. But after that it became very hard to get anything to work. Eventually someone came out with a service called pipelight that I used to use that would allow you to use windows only plugins in Firefox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight. It worked great until I didn't need it anymore.

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

#332

Post by wooter »

kbenson wrote: post #313
nardi wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As is common, Apple uses the term “panic” to describe the OS itself failing. “Crash” is reserved for applications.

If that's so, then the way it was worded seems needlessly unclear. It specifically says it caused Macs to crash. The normal terminology (and proper English) would be to say "cause Mac applications to crash" when referring to the applications and not the OS or hardware. It's like someone saying "Windows crash" is supposed to refer to Windows applications because people say blue screen instead of crash usually. Even if…

a kernel panic is a specific type of phenomena

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

#333

Post by [deleted] »

pm215 wrote: post #297
WalterBright wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Flash player might be dead, but that doesn't mean $THIRD_PARTY_LIBRARY that it uses isn't still being profitably licensed by its original developers. Or maybe the player uses a library that Adobe have a perpetual binary license to, but the original company that owned that library went bust a decade ago and nobody knows who owns the copyright on it now to allow a relicense. Open sourcing things does have a cost, and a…

[deleted]

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

#334

Post by cookiecaper »

icebraining wrote: post #149
cookiecaper wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, I'm aware of that. Animate's HTML 5 export only exports the animations (in a relatively simplistic manner), leaving all of the logic and interactivity in the dust.

That's a big change. It downgrades Flash from an all-in-one development solution to a single piece of the art pipeline. Users are left to their own devices to try to figure out everything else.

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

#335

Post by ZenoArrow »

vr46 wrote: post #312
amitt wrote: post #107

End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

Loved AS3. We managed to make lots of great work with it that didn't hog the CPU and performed beautifully. But the Flash runtime was the big problem. I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming. Still, big ups to everyone who worked on Flash, past and present. Thanks, y'all.

> "I'd love to have AS3 now as a language of useful programming."

Haxe is probably something you'll be interested in:

https://haxe.org/

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

#336

Post by kbenson »

wooter wrote: post #332
kbenson wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's so, then the way it was worded seems needlessly unclear. It specifically says it caused Macs to crash. The normal terminology (and proper English) would be to say "cause Mac applications to crash" when referring to the applications and not the OS or hardware. It's like someone saying "Windows crash" is supposed to refer to Windows applications because people say blue screen instead of crash usually. Even if…

a kernel panic is a specific type of phenomena

> a kernel panic is a specific type of phenomena

Yes, but he didn't say panic, he said crash. Crash is often used to refer to both application crashes, and os crashes, which are also often called kernel panics. Saying something causes "Macs to crash" when you mean applications running on a Mac, as people are suggesting, is very unclear.

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

#337

Post by Kenji »

dandare wrote: post #289
Kenji wrote: post #38

Hate flash however much you want. I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which is almost identical). To this day, all the applications I wrote still work perfectly. That's an achievement . Not to mention, Macromedia (later: Adobe) Flash was a fantastic environment for minigames and I haven't yet seen anything re…

Same here. "I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript which" ... was way inferior to AS3. AS3 was based on ECMAScript 4 that was later abandoned by JS vendors. Until TypeScript came along JS was horribly inferior to AS3. I will be forever glad for AS3 and the Flash ecosystem.

I started to learn AS3 but quickly transitioned to other technologies because even back then, the end of flash was forseeable. I liked AS3 but it was time to move on for a variety of reasons, among them a desire to have more control over hardware accelerated rendering and general performance concerns.

Fun fact: At university, a teaching assistant at "Introduction to programming" asked in which languages we've programmed before and I said ActionScript and he said that is not a programming language :)

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

#338

Post by titanix2 »

tracker1 wrote: post #173
simion314 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As others said Adobe is at fault here, same as Microsoft is at fault of not open sourcing Silverlight and now we end up with html5/js mess that was not designed for what is used. Flex4 is really good and after you learn it you get good GUIs that are efficient and that are easy to reuse and much more efficiient then HHTML based GUIs

IIRC, the format for Silverlight output was well documented, and open. It was a zip file with a manifest, assets and JS. The down side is they didn't get the penetration. Silverlight was FAR closer to what I'd hoped that Flash would have become when Adobe bought Macromedia. Adobe was really pushing SVG before that, and my hope was that flash content would become a zip, with assets and a manifest, where 2D assets were…

Only Silverlight v1 was Javascript based. From version 2 upwards a small CLR implementation was the runtime. It allowed .net languages (C# and F# mainly) to be run.

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

#339

Post by slackingoff2017 »

boubiyeah wrote: post #323
amitt wrote: post #107

End of an era. We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could stream the main binary and assets) 0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack available at the time.

Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it was SO much better than the web platform. BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg a…

God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long.

Just needed to say that.

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

#340

Post by wlesieutre »

kbenson wrote: post #336
wooter wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a kernel panic is a specific type of phenomena

> a kernel panic is a specific type of phenomena Yes, but he didn't say panic, he said crash. Crash is often used to refer to both application crashes, and os crashes, which are also often called kernel panics. Saying something causes "Macs to crash" when you mean applications running on a Mac, as people are suggesting, is very unclear.

I agree, the wording isn't great. Kernel panic is a specific thing, yes, but there are other system-wide crashes that are much more common on Macs than kernel panics.

"Sleep Wake Failure" comes to mind. When the 2016 MBP was new I'd get one literally every night that I left my computer asleep. It's now much less frequent (a couple a month, still more than it should be), but more often than panics (haven't had one yet).

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