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Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

blogs.adobe.com

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Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#51

Post by tomlin »

jrockway wrote: post #45
tomlin wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So hostile. I'm not the one releasing devices that don't support Flash but do support HTML and JavaScript. If Apple wants to give Adobe the finger, they have every right to and I can't/won't argue it because it is their business logic. Are they billionaires? Yes? I support HTML5 and it's apparent "crushing" effect on Flash, but call it like it is. Your entire original comment is so far into the future that Marty Mc…

HTML5 is great, but it's not going to change the world and dethrone Flash anytime soon. Saying that or anything of that nature is dishonest and completely without evidence. Isn't that what everyone said about Firefox and Safari? I think Apple has enough fanbois in the design industry to say, "Apple's not supporting Flash very well anymore; maybe I will try a plain HTML design for this site." There may be a lot of mon…

> Why artificially limit yourself to 98% of the Internet? You shouldn't. But you're telling yourself that 100% of the users on the 'net will be using an HTML5+JS power browser. See how that doesn't make sense?

Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#52

Post by maxharris »

Many companies and people are building decent-enough web-based substitutes for their stuff now. (I just used pixlr today, for example.) Adobe as we know it is probably toast.

The important products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) were mature about ten years ago, and there's not much they could have done to improve them, aside from porting them to newer OSes and adding minor features. So there was a push to use their resources in some other way, which has obviously been to build platforms. The trouble with this is that Adobe is awful at it! They moved far away from what they were competent at, ruining their products along the way. Think about the terrible things Adobe has done to their products in the last decade:

* Acrobat reader is a ridiculously slow and bloated product. Preview.app is much faster and nicer-looking. I uninstall Acrobat whenever I can, and tell other people to do the same.

* Their creative suite has a ridiculously slow installer. Just let us drag the app to the Applications folder and leave things alone!

* They don't obey user interface guidelines (they never really did), but what they come up with now is almost always worse. (It wasn't always that way - the vertical toolbar was beautiful.) They really didn't need to add that crappy horizontal bar thing to Photoshop and Illustrator.

What should they do? Sell to Apple at a firesale price (which will seem really, really high after Adobe craters over the next five years). They should then get rid of everyone that manages all of this redundant platform-building bullshit (this would save Acrobat on Windows by making it decent - but then again, I'm not sure that Windows will be a major consumer platform in five years), and focus on building the beautiful creative tools that made their company great once. While there's a lot of work left to do to make Photoshop and Illustrator take advantage of the multitouch technologies that are coming in future Macs, we may rest assured that Adobe's present management will find a way to fuck it up.

Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#53

Post by jsz0 »

" so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues."

I'm already living here in the dark ages with Flash performance on OSX. Things can't get much worse.

Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#54

Post by stevenwei »

jrockway wrote: post #32

If I were Adobe, I would start working on an IDE (and library set) for JavaScript + HTML5. Everything Flash does could easily be JavaScript and a library; their language is already JavaScript anyway. It's time to let their proprietary VM die, because modern browsers already have all those features working better. Adobe's advantage is in making animation a point-and-click operation that doesn't involve programming. Th…

Indeed. I argued for the same thing in more detail here:

http://www.stevenwei.com/2010/01/31/the-best-way-for-adobe-t...

Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#55

Post by doronba »

cjbos wrote: post #46
marbletiles wrote: post #18

Much more interesting to me than Apple vs Adobe is Macromedia vs Adobe. Adobe was once a seriously great company (Jobs apparently talked wistfully about those days in his Q&A), which together with Apple pretty much created desktop publishing and everything that goes with it (like Photoshop, Illustrator, PostScript, PDF, PageMaker, InDesign). The world would be a much worse place without it. It started going off the r…

Weird, I always looked at Adobe destroying the Macromedia culture, not the other way round? Look at the Flash Player Timeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player the advances through versions 5 to 8 are spaced 18 months apart and are quite major. Once Adobe took over they shortly upgraded the VM, but the next major release (10) took over 2 years. This was almost 18 months ago, and the only advancements we…

Interesting, Macromedia was geared on its flagship products to the internet, While Adobe was essentially revolving around print publications and single user PC software. In that context it makes sense that Macromedia will take the helm in a sensibility.

Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#56

Post by inimino »

barrybe wrote: post #21
romland wrote: post #3

His strongest argument to keep Flash relevant is "the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers" . Boy, they are in worse shape than I first thought. They will open source the parts they own of this beast, the problem is it will be too late to make a difference. Sure, he brings up the fact that they can update the majority of Web clients in less than a year . But what was it th…

I don't think he's laying out the whole flash vs HTML5 argument in that post. He says: If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. which is probably referring to how HTML5 does not have: efficient vector-based animation, support for audio mixing, strong tool support and ecosystem for creating interactive content, a pathwa…

efficient vector-based animation

SVG in HTML (embedded directly in the DOM, not an ) is all but certain to happen; the SVG and HTML working groups just have to agree on the details. Of course SVG in an island is possible already, which is what already more integrated with the browser than Flash.

support for audio mixing

HTML5 has , and the rest will come in time, with enhancements to what's there now.

tool support

Actually, there are already more Web developers than Flash developers, so I'm not sure this argument holds much weight... but you can be sure there are people working on this very issue for the Web platform.

If these and similar issues all that Flash has going for it against the Open Web, then Flash is on the way out. In a decade, I expect Flash will be as relevant to the Web as Java applets are today.

Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#57

Post by statictype »

tomlin wrote: post #36
briggsrs wrote: post #20

I wonder if anyone has done a feature by feature comparison between HTML 5 and Flash? That is what can I do with Flash, that I cannot with HTML 5 and vice versa? As of right now, I am forced to assume that Flash has an advantage over HTML 5 solely because most people are not aware of the potential benefits of HTML 5 over Flash.

Flash 5 == JS+HTML5.

Flash = JS + HTML 5 + tcp networking + more video support + more audio support + more ubiquitous (for now) + works on more browsers.

Of course, Flash is also more proprietary.

Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#58

Post by statictype »

jrockway wrote: post #37
tomlin wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is simply not true. Flash 5 == JS+HTML5. I know you don't want to hear that, but you might have to actually face the fact that HTML5 is not the Flash killer you want it to be. Not yet, anyhow.

You can play full-screen, streaming, 1080p video without Flash, you can render vector graphics without Flash, you can use OpenGL without Flash, you can play sound without Flash, and you can write code that is dynamically compiled to native machine code... without Flash. So apart from missing libraries (which Adobe would port), I fail to see what Flash is needed for. Modern browsers have the ability to do everything F…

Flash also does tcp\ip. Flash also does Internet Explorer. That last point may not be relevant to you but it is certainly relevant to many people.

>and if they don't, the ability can be added. (Adobe could even add the features themselves; every relevant browser is Free Software!)

um, yeah, thats exactly what they've done - in the form of a plugin called Flash.

Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#59

Post by hkuo »

My 2 cents on why Flash is irrelevant. Content is king. We all agree on this yes? People want that content through RSS, on a browser, on their phone, through email through etc etc... It must be open, sharable, free to see in any way the user wants.

Flash is merely one of these content delivery tools (often delivering it in a frustrating non-standard way). Repeat: a content delivery tool. Flash in itself is not content, aside from some visual senses when used as art or music or performance.

Now of course, the manner the content is delivered is important to some. Important to branding & marketing. That's an entirely nother topic. But to generalize, the manner of content delivery is becoming less and less relevant. A person wants to see a video or read an article. They want to read and write comments. They want to see related material. These are the absolute essentials, and Flash is absolutely unnecessary for this.

I do see one last branch that will save Flash until there is alternative. Streaming video. Live sports and events will be getting much much bigger in the near future. When there is an easier alternative, then Flash will be gone.

Re: Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

#60

Post by est »

jarrodtaylor wrote: post #26

"By augmenting the capabilities of HTML, Flash has been incredibly successful in its adoption, with over 85% of the top web sites containing Flash content..." And how much of that is just ads?

what makes you think canvas or svg can't make ads?
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