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

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

#31

Post by thought_alarm »

redthrowaway wrote: post #14
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.

I'm sure no one understands the technical challenges better than Adobe's engineers. The problem is that the company never admitted these challenges to their developers and customers (until now). Instead, they continually explained the problem as merely a political fight with Apple. Your website is no good on mobile? Don't blame us, blame Apple's lust for control.

At worst, they flat out lied to their developers and customers. At best, they are merely incompetent. Either way, if I were heavily invested in any Adobe technology I would seriously question how I could continue to trust that company.

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

#33

Post by jaredsohn »

culturestate wrote: post #27
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…

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. The default behavior in Safari is not to play any content until the tab it's in has been focused - that goes for HTML5 video, Flash, QT, or what have you. Cons…

Chrome and FireFox have FlashBlock extensions and Chrome has a "Click to play" option in about:flags (but unlike Safari it is turned off by default.)

These features should behave similarly except it sounds like in Safari players are enabled by default when you visit a page but for these other browsers you will have to manually click on things to start them playing.

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

#34

Post by lloeki »

redthrowaway wrote: post #14
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.

> Flash on a laptop turns it into a battery-draining space heater

The worst part being it is so even for trivial flash objects like those "copy to clipboard" clicky thingies (e.g github). It was not skyrocketing to 1.0 loads but enough to prevent the CPU to go in some deep C-state mode and/or back off frequency or whatever. Having such a NOOP Flash object was literally removing in order of hours from my battery life ("was", because ClickToFlash is brilliant).

I guess that way they will be true to their promise: the next iteration of Flash for Mobile will, in a way, be both stable and a non-battery sucker.

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

#35

Post by analyk »

magicalhobo wrote: post #26

Why does an entry titled "Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash" link to an article that starts "Our future work with Flash on mobile..."?

Because you didn't read the rest of the sentence?

"...devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores."

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

#36

Post by cowpewter »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #24
cowpewter wrote: post #16

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…

Surely you saw this coming though? But anyway, a lot of your issues with HTML/JS for the types of things you'd use AS3 for are a matter of immature tools and libraries I think. Google's added static type notation to JS via their Closure compiler - you might take a look at that. And straightforward rendering is something that Adobe could be great for giving us now that they're refocusing on this.

Oh yeah, I've seen it coming. There's a reason my day-to-day at my job doesn't involve much Flash anymore. It doesn't make me any less sad about it becoming more 'official' though. It's more of a nostalgic sad than an upset sad.

I can certainly hope that HTML/JS evolves more in the direction of AS3, though I fear that Adobe will either push in the direction of Canvas-manipulating tools (where now you have a crappier API than Flash and you still lose the ability to arbitrarily throw some html in the mix (say, for including ads)) or their tools will mostly lend themselves to huge bloated div-fest monstrosities like what we've seen out of Muse so far.

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

#37

Post by culturestate »

jaredsohn wrote: post #33
culturestate wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. The default behavior in Safari is not to play any content until the tab it's in has been focused - that goes for HTML5 video, Flash, QT, or what have you. Cons…

Chrome and FireFox have FlashBlock extensions and Chrome has a "Click to play" option in about:flags (but unlike Safari it is turned off by default.) These features should behave similarly except it sounds like in Safari players are enabled by default when you visit a page but for these other browsers you will have to manually click on things to start them playing.

Safari has a similar plugin called ClickToFlash, but no Chrome-like option as far as I know.

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

#38

Post by lloeki »

jaredsohn wrote: post #30
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…

FlashBlock just uses CSS to hide certain and elements from the page; the same techniques work for and (My MuteTab Chrome extension ( http://www.mutetab.com ) does this) and I'm sure the same could be done for . If you want to completely prevent animation of the page, though, you'll need to disable JavaScript completely (as you can currently do in the NoScript extension), although this could be troublesome if the site…

Alternatively you can selectively block elements on the page by any DOM criterion. I use GreaseMonkey and jQuery for that, and I hear AdBlock allows you to ban DOM elements with a right-click.

As for trivial blocking, I observed an increasing number of Flash objects falling back to just as much eyesore animated GIFs. I don't think I'm ready to fall back to lynx/links.

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

#39

Post by cowpewter »

cft wrote: post #29
jay_kyburz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to agree, I'm really enjoying working in flash every day at the moment. Web development has a long way to go before it's this much fun.

The fact that Adobe acquired Macromedia was quite unfortunate for the web. Had Google acquired it, they would have probably opensourced the player code, and maybe contributed the AS3 rendering engine into WebKit as an alternative to javaScript, making Flash native for WebKit browsers. Maybe it's not too late for this step even now.

Adobe open-sourced their AS3 engine[1] to Mozilla, instead. That potential future of JS (based on ECMAScript 4) was rejected in favor of Harmony.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(JavaScript_engine)

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