Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2010/02/open_access_to_content_and_app.html

by pcestrada • 16 years ago

93 59 16 years ago

blogs.adobe.com

howcool• 16 years ago

This should be interesting

romland• 16 years ago

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 they said about the currently fastest growing web-browser out there? 95% of browsers updated within the span of a few weeks? (I don't recall the sources, sadly)

And this one is almost too good to not take out of context: "We strongly believe the Web should remain an open environment with consistent access to content and applications". Oh well.

bad_user4• 16 years ago

The web didn't had at first a common format for images ... but now all modern browsers have support for GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

And it was probably a smart move on their part to avoid political issues. Apple will add Theora support if the demand increases. Mozilla will add H.264 support when the IP-issues are cleared.

mbreese• 16 years ago

Well, there are still issues with transparent PNGs and gamma settings for GIFs. But your main point is true... eventually the tech will work itself out.

wizard_2• 16 years ago

Is there a moment to "clear" the H.264 issues? I have the understanding that the people who own the copyright are making plenty of money off of it and it quite a popular format. I don't see why they would give that up.

barrybe• 16 years ago

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 pathway to run C code (Alchemy), etc.

inimino• 16 years ago

efficient vector-based animation

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

support for audio mixing

HTML5 has <audio>, 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.

flogic• 16 years ago

FIGHT! FIGHT! FIGHT! I say we arrange for wrestling matches between the executives of Apple and Adobe.

kqr2• 16 years ago

I know you are just kidding but this reminds me of the story of how the CEO of Southwest Airlines (Kelleher) challenged the CEO of Stevens Aviation to an arm wrestling match in 1992 to settle a dispute over the use of a tagline.

http://www.pbs.org/kcet/chasingthesun/innovators/hkelleher.h...

glhaynes• 16 years ago

Interesting how that ended - "Kelleher lost the match, but the event generated so much good will and publicity that Stevens let Southwest continue use of the tagline." I wonder if that was the plan from the beginning. Everybody wins.

technomancy• 16 years ago

The enemy of my enemy is ... wait a minute: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/3/5/

bad_user4• 16 years ago

Jeez, just let the market sort it out ... if the demand is really that high, Apple will just suck it and add Flash to the iPad. Otherwise stop your bitching, you can't win them all.

The iPhone story is irrelevant in this context ... I don't think there are too many people wanting to play flash-games or to watch porn on that little screen ... especially since you need both hands to navigate its tiny browser ;)

Their strong response to the iPad does show one thing though ... they are getting desperate and they are really afraid of HTML5.

Open Access? That should be more like "convenient access". Open access is when the standard is open and has been implemented by third-parties. That's not Flash.

mrduncan• 16 years ago

I completely agree with you, but in the interest of lively discussion I'll play devils advocate for a second here and point out Gordon [1] which is an open-source flash implementation written in Javascript and Gnash which is an open-source flash movie player [2].

[1] http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon

[2] http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

dangrossman• 16 years ago

Gordon is not a Flash implementation. It is a Flash-to-SVG converter for basic vector graphics. That's about 5% of the Flash runtime, the parts that date back to the earliest versions of Flash. To call yourself a Flash implementation, you have to at least take a stab at multimedia, ActionScript, external resources, ...

Gordon will never do anything fancier than play a Newgrounds animated cartoon... without the audio track.

sjs382• 16 years ago

"[Adobe was] the strongest opponent of Theora becoming the official video-codec"

How did you come to that conclusion? The codecs were removed from the standards docs because browser vendors couldn't agree on a video format, not Adobe. Apple refused to include Theora support in Safari.

bad_user4• 16 years ago

Yeah, sorry ... I probably misread something, seeing now that I can't find a reference. So I removed that.

tolmasky• 16 years ago

Let the market sort it out? He's the CTO of Adobe, his job is to push the market one way or another, this isn't bitching, this is exactly what he's supposed to do. If this was just another blogger going on about Flash yet again then I might agree, but that's clearly not the case.

chaostheory• 16 years ago

Open Laszlo (http://www.openlaszlo.org/) a pre-cursor to Adobe's FLEX, can generate rich web UI front ends with or without Flash. Devs can use an IDE for it (I believe an Eclipse plugin).

This open source project is getting more interesting now.

timdorr• 16 years ago

Does Laszlo have a WYSIWYG editor? That's really the only component that's missing: the ability for any artist that just wants to draw a vector animation and hook up some simple events to make a game. If we can lower the barriers to entry on HTML5, it'll eclipse Flash in no time.

bad_user4• 16 years ago

Having a WYSIWYG editor for HTML5 or Laszlo is only a matter of popularity, since that would be a good business.

And as a dev, trust me, you don't need one for Laszlo.

Sandman• 16 years ago

There have been some attempts at making an IDE for Laszlo, but as far as I know, none of those projects are still maintained, except for the NetBeans OL plugin. It doesn't have a UI designer, though. OpenLaszlo is really a great open source project, but the facts that there was no good IDE for it for a long time, that the only current IDE is a plugin for NetBeans, which you may or may not use, and that there is still no UI designer for OpenLaszlo are all major obstacles for it's widespread adoption.

allenbrunson• 16 years ago

Well! This looks to me like Apple holding out on them might have finally gotten their attention. I am curious to see if they are still nimble enough to react accordingly.

kylec• 16 years ago

If Adobe wants Apple (and me) to care about the future of Flash, they have to make it not suck on Mac OS X. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple omitting Flash from the iPhone and iPad isn't a ploy to light a fire under the Mac Flash development team.

jodrellblank2• 16 years ago

Agreed. How can he say "For example, the recent Nexus One from Google will rock with a great experience in the browser with Flash Player 10.1." with a straight face?

Aren't there a few more Mac users who would like "a great experience in the browser" than Nexus One owners?

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

More tellingly they claim to have had an adequate Flash just sitting waiting for Apple to give them the okay for the last year or so, but for the platforms that actually want Flash we're still waiting after multiple delays.

GHFigs• 16 years ago

Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.

Not really. Most of that 75% is in h.264, a format supported natively by every browser/platform that doesn't support Flash (e.g. iPad) and some that do (e.g. Chrome). Even Microsoft, if and when they do implement <video>, are likely to support it.

It may be messier than just assuming Flash is available (welcome to web "standards"!), but I would hardly call it "the dark ages".

marbletiles• 16 years ago

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 rails after founders Geschke and Warnock left but after the Macromedia deal went through in 2005 the lunacy just took off. The only bright spot since then has been Lightroom -- sorry Adobe Photoshop Lightroom -- and even that was a skunkworks project that they had effectively killed until Apple previewed Aperture. All the rest has been just hicky and nasty, and Flash has become endemic (Flash for Photoshop palettes? Really?)

It feels to me as though, rather than being acquired, Macromedia has actually overrun Adobe, to its serious detriment. There's lots of precedent for this in tech deals like this: there were big political struggles in Apple between the incoming NeXT people and the existing Apple people (those struggles emerged as Carbon vs Cocoa, and you can guess who won).

I don't have any insider information on this, but it's interesting to note that all this recent childish posturing and blow-harding about Flash has come from former Macromedia people (this link, the inane blue lego image, everything jdowdell writes). Meanwhile, old Adobe hands like John Nack have been pointing out that, actually, the company's future lies in making great communication tools, not in making sure Flash "wins" a pointless fight.

cjbos3• 16 years ago

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 see really are 10.1 changes to support mobile devices... things have slowed down considerably since Macromedia became Adobe.

Oddly enough though I was a big user of JRun (Allaire version) before it was brought out by Macromedia. Saw this product die a horrible death once Adobe brought out Macromedia as well.

doronba• 16 years ago

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.

jacobolus• 16 years ago

Maybe the kind of people in charge at Adobe who wanted to buy out Macromedia have killed innovation coming from the remains of both companies?

drewda• 16 years ago

Adobe created PostScript, but since then, almost everything has been an acquisition.

- Photoshop from Thomas and John Knoll

- PageMaker from Aldus

- FrameMaker from Frame

- Flash, Flex, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, et al. from Macromedia

O.K., Illustrator was developed in-house, but you can almost call that a PostScript editor. And PDF is a more portable version.

I don't know the development history of Premier. A copy of Avid?

Well, I'm sounding pretty negative about Adobe as a tech innovator (I actually preferred the Macromedia vibe), but I've still paid my bucks for Creative Suite, and I'm a fan of their (mainly well-designed) tools.

tumpak• 16 years ago

Why does CTO of Adobe want Apple to open up to them when Flash is not opened up to Apple and others ?

towards the later part of his text, he argues for an open access to all devices, yet his app is not open (to apple's accusation that flash crashes a lot and part of that is others can't fix the problems that flash causes their systems- flash being a closed system). Maybe one can illuminate

briggsrs• 16 years ago

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.

tomlin5• 16 years ago

Flash 5 == JS+HTML5.

cjbos3• 16 years ago

As a flash developer I can say that version 5 of flash is not comparable to HTML 5, the video tag equivalent wasn't really implemented until version 7 (HTTP progressive download of video assets).

Some missing things from HTML5 I'm watching to see how they progress:

1) Microphone & Camera support, and supported publishing encoders (Flash only encodes video as very basic Spark which is poor quality)

2) Web Sockets = Flex Remoting. But Flex Remoting sends AMF objects so you don't need to serialize/deserialize is this the same for Web Sockets or do you send data as JSON?

3) Live Video Streaming (Or just regular streaming video)

4) Peer 2 Peer connections (And soon to be Multicast support)

5) I saw webkit has fullscreen support, do you have limited keyboard input when this happens like in Flash?

If those were in place I don't see why I couldn't build my app in HTML5 instead of Flash, its a corporate application so we can control the supported browser version

statictype2• 16 years ago

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.

jodrellblank2• 16 years ago

Our mission at Adobe is to revolutionize how people engage with ideas and information [..]

We are continuing to focus on enabling our customers to do their best work, and helping them reach people effectively and reliably around the world

[..]

Please note that the comments aren't currently working and we're in the process of fixing right now.

Oh, Adobe. Hello? Hello?

jarrodtaylor2• 16 years ago

"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?

boucher• 16 years ago

Why shouldn't ads be relevant? Turns out it's how the majority of the web is making money.

_delirium• 16 years ago

They're relevant for site owners, sure, but flash ads aren't a very good argument for, "without flash, users won't get the full web user experience". Presumably nobody will refrain from buying an iPad because of flash ads not working on it.

jarrodtaylor2• 16 years ago

It just sounded to me like he was trying to make it sound like most of the top sites were using Flash for their own content, when it's more likely they are only displaying someone else's ad.

I don't have a problem with ads, though Google is a good case of not needing Flash to make effective ads.

est• 16 years ago

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

jrockway4• 16 years ago

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. They need to let Flash die and embrace the open version of Flash; JavaScript.

tomlin5• 16 years ago

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.

jrockway4• 16 years ago

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

cjbos3• 16 years ago

I would love to see this, already you can use the Flash IDE to compile to the iPhone, so also being able to compile to canvas or HTML would be great, unifying the IDE to the current Flash IDE would be the way to go.

I would love to be able to share my vector assets across flash apps and canvas apps, also write tweens that can be used in both flash and canvas as well.

wmf• 16 years ago

Adobe CS5 will output to JS+HTML5: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2009/10/sneak_peek_ai_fl_dw_can...

stevenwei• 16 years ago

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

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

maxharris• 16 years ago

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.

jsz0• 16 years ago

" 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.

hkuo• 16 years ago

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.

Adobe CTO on the state of Flash

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