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Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

zdnet.com

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Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#11

Post by Samuel_Michon »

gcp wrote: post #5
Samuel_Michon wrote: post #2

If true, I believe it would be healthy for the mobile web. There are still developers out there who believe that Adobe will come up with a decent mobile Flash experience, even though it has failed to deliver on those promises for the better part of a decade. If Adobe just comes out says "Not gonna happen", we can all move on and invest our time and energy in technologies that actually have a future.

Unfortunately, users are still going to be demanding for a while that their online flash games work.

According to the article, Adobe isn't giving up on Flash altogether. They're simply admitting that Flash does not and will not work on mobile devices.

The people who currently play Flash games on the desktop will continue to be able to do so. However, if a game developer wants to offer a good mobile experience, they'll have to make it using web standards. And if they're going to do that, why build it again in Flash for the desktop?

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#12

Post by Riverbed »

wmf wrote: post #9
Riverbed wrote: post #7

I really hope Adobe can make the transition to a standards-based world fast enough for them to remain a significant player. It is so hard for a mega-company to wean itself from the fat margins of a proprietary world they created.

Since Adobe's fat margins were from authoring tools, presumably that opportunity still exists. AFAIK none of the existing HTML5 authoring tools are close to Flash in power.

When you own both the authoring tools and the runtime, the world is your oyster. Sure, HTML5 authoring tools suck today, and it will be a huge boon if Adobe leads the way to the promised land. But the barriers to entry for others to then go the same way is so much lower than in Adobe's previous environment.

Well, it will be very interesting ride over the next few years!

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#13

Post by gcp »

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #11
gcp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, users are still going to be demanding for a while that their online flash games work.

According to the article, Adobe isn't giving up on Flash altogether. They're simply admitting that Flash does not and will not work on mobile devices. The people who currently play Flash games on the desktop will continue to be able to do so. However, if a game developer wants to offer a good mobile experience, they'll have to make it using web standards. And if they're going to do that, why build it again in Flash f…

That's the sane reaction people like you and me might have, but it does, quite unfortunately, not match reality at all.

Google is heavily advertising Android over iDevices as having Flash support. Users know this and expect Flash to work. It works, sortof, on the default browser. It didn't work for the longest time on Opera and Firefox Mobile. Opera now supports it somewhat reasonably (presumable due to a truly herculean effort of their developers to figure out the real API without any meaningful Adobe support), and Firefox Mobile barely in some of the latest Nightlies. Especially due the latter adding support (for a non-open standard!), I think it's a clear illustration that the feature is considered a must have if you want to have significant user penetration on Android.

Consider also how much effort Google is putting into helping Adobe make Flash more secure. Think about why they bother.

The problem is that Flash websites are out there. The investment has been thrown into the black hole. People who payed for these sites are going to sit on them for a while. And there's quite some sites that only work on Flash.

It only takes one of those that you want to visit, such as a restaurant or whatever, without non-Flash fallback, to see how annoying it is not to have Flash. You can't visit the site, period.

So you must support it until all those sites are rooted out. And Adobe now even officially doesn't give a shit.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#14

Post by redthrowaway »

thought_alarm wrote: post #8

Did Adobe ever put a serious effort into mobile Flash development? It seems they were more interested in blaming Apple for the lack of mobile Flash than actually doing the work required to make Flash a remotely viable option for mobile devices. I wonder, what was the catalyst that caused Adobe to admit what everyone else already knew? Perhaps they saw the 5 year anniversary of the iPhone on horizon and figured enough…

They probably gave it a good shot, but couldn't get it anywhere near lean enough. Flash turns laptops into battery-powered space heaters; on a mobile device it's just a non-starter.

Flash is just a dying tech. Were someone to seamlessly roll its functionality into an easy to use package, I'm sure you'd see it die out for games as well, which is the only remaining use-case there isn't a ready replacement for.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#16

Post by cowpewter »

This makes me a little sad. For all that people complain about Flash, and any problems the Flash Player runtime has, it's really a fun environment to code for. I like AS3, I like the Flash API, and I greatly enjoyed writing Flex back when that was most of my job.

I don't have nearly as much fun writing HTML/JS as I did writing AS3. I liked the (optional) strict typing. I liked writing for a single target and knowing it would just work. I liked having the power to say, "Render this thing in just this spot," and having it do what I wanted rather than spending hours fiddling CSS.

So as much as the decline of Flash is generally heralded as a good thing (and I agree that Adobe really never managed to fulfill their promises/goals with Flash on mobile devices), I'm still going to miss it when it's gone.

Edit: Just want to note that I'm speaking from the perspective of writing large, complex webapps in AS3/Flex, not just websites. Use the right tool for the job, etc etc.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#17

Post by barrkel »

One of the nicer things about Flash is that it's easy to block en masse, which cuts out on so many visually distracting animated things.

One of my worries with HTML5 is that we won't have a good heuristic for preventing animation and video.

As it is, YouTube occasionally serves me up their HTML5 video player, and it's a significantly worse experience than the Flash one, for the simple reason that it autoplays, whereas FlashBlock will stop Flash autoplay. I can't tell you how many times I've been listening to a video, wondering why it sounds so awful, and then figuring out there's another video autoplaying in a background tab.

So we (or at least I) will need some way of killing / freezing HTML5 canvas, video etc. elements until the user assents to their animation.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#19

Post by redthrowaway »

barrkel wrote: post #17

One of the nicer things about Flash is that it's easy to block en masse, which cuts out on so many visually distracting animated things. One of my worries with HTML5 is that we won't have a good heuristic for preventing animation and video. As it is, YouTube occasionally serves me up their HTML5 video player, and it's a significantly worse experience than the Flash one, for the simple reason that it autoplays, wherea…

A Chrome/FF extension to disable autoplay seems trivial.

Re: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, refocuses efforts on HTML5

#20

Post by mcrider »

georgemcbay wrote: post #10
Riverbed wrote: post #7

I really hope Adobe can make the transition to a standards-based world fast enough for them to remain a significant player. It is so hard for a mega-company to wean itself from the fat margins of a proprietary world they created.

They've already been making this transition for at least a year and probably planning it for even longer than that -- look at Muse, look at Edge. Adobe doesn't give a crap about the Flash Player for its own sake, it was just a loss leader for their tools business, which anyone who has been paying attention would have noticed started leaning towards html and away from Flash a while ago now.

Not to mention Phonegap, which is now an Adobe product thanks to their recent acquisition of Nitobi.
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