The Slow Decline Of Adobe Flash Player

http://www.fastcompany.com/3049920/tech-forecast/the-agonizingly-slow-decline-of-adobe-flash-player

by technologizer • 11 years ago

22 13 11 years ago

neals• 11 years ago

I do some Flex (Which is build on Flash) contracting, the money is crazy and there are some Flex/Flash applications out there that I don't see getting replaced by JS anytime soon.

Marazan5• 11 years ago

Yeah there are massive internal applications inside Big Corps across the world in Flex that aren't/can't be replaed soon.

wilsonfiifi• 11 years ago

You are one of the brave few and I salute you! When flash fell out of favor I joined all the other devs who jumped ship. I really enjoyed application development with Flex/actionscript. It was a much saner ecosystem than client side javascript IMO.

I think it's a pity Adobe hasn't open sourced flash, I'm sure there are some rockstar developers out there who could help fix the bugs and boost the performance/efficiency of the runtime.

francisl2• 11 years ago

you have haxe (http://haxe.org/), open source and even better.

Marazan5• 11 years ago

Flash being a resource hog is down to bad coding of the flash applications rather than the runtime itself (the runtime isn't a masterpiece of efficiency or anything but it isnt intrinsically a resource hog).

All the crappy programmers making punch the monkey flash ads will just make punch the monkey html ads and you wont realise what it is consuming your battery.

Also, "Thoughts on Flash" is full of easily verifiable lies.

anotherangrydev2• 11 years ago

The runtime is pretty awesome as well. I remember the work of people like Joa Ebert exploiting the platform and the language to the max, really cool stuff. The world is barely coming closer to what Flash was capable to do... 8 years ago.

IMO Apple killed Flash not because of the "battery, security, etc..." "issues", but because they didn't want their devices to depend so heavily on another company. It was business, and strangely, Adobe didn't even put on a fight. And they just spread FUD and all the developers that didn't know better went with it, but I agree with you, shitty flash developers will now just be shitty HTML developers and everything will be the same in another 5-6 years or so.

francisl2• 11 years ago

There is probably business strategy in that, but I remember flash on my mac to be terrible (100% cpu, draining battery like crazy). While the same version on windows was running perfectly.

zaitcev• 11 years ago

Lies such as?

Marazan5• 11 years ago

Lets start with the first one

"Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. . . By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system."

The Actionscript 3 virtual machine and compiler were both open source at the time that "Thoughts of Flash" was written. So a lie.

I don't have all night to go through lie-by-lie but here's another one "Flash was designed for PCs using mice, " No it wasn't, it was created to produce interfaces for touch screen kiosks.

It is astounding the amount of lies packed into "Thoughts on Flash" and how much was uncritically gobbled up by the tech press.

pc2g4d• 11 years ago

What I don't understand is why Adobe hasn't made HTML5 a supported compilation target for the existing Flash tools. Yes, tons of work. But a great way to stay relevant in the web app development space.

The Slow Decline Of Adobe Flash Player

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