The rise and fall of Adobe Flash

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/the-rise-and-fall-of-adobe-flash/

by bpierre • 6 years ago

80 62 6 years ago

roland35• 6 years ago

I had some great fun learning how to program with Flash and Actionscript in college. There was a book about physics simulation and it was very easy to make a game or interesting graphics!

I believe the book was called "Foundation in Actionscript Animation"

Now I think the best alternative may be Processing.

leetrout• 6 years ago

Flash was great for all its flaws.

I agree on processing for the areas it has an impact and also what influences it.

Ill also say the Love engine scratches some of those same itches for getting something jammed out and Lua isn’t _that_ hard to pick up.

Now the statement I’ll make for the future — we’re gonna see something like Flash come back in the form of WASM and WebGL.

apignotti4• 6 years ago

(Shameless self promotion)

We (Leaning Technologies) are working to preserve Flash content using WebAssembly-based virtualization.

We have developed a Wasm virtual machine (CheerpX) that can run the binary Flash player plugin safely in the client sandbox for pixel perfect rendering of any SWF.

If you want to read more:

https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...

https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...

Feel free to drop me any question: https://twitter.com/alexpignotti

Wowfunhappy3• 6 years ago

How are you dealing with copyright issues? Do you have a licensing agreement with Adobe?

Adobe is saying all Flash downloads will be completely removed from their website at the end of 2020, and I assume no one else has the legal right to distribute binaries.

apignotti4• 6 years ago

We are also dealing with licensing "the right way", all the appropriate parties are involved. I can't be more specific right now but we plan to announce all details soon.

EamonnMR• 6 years ago

Got a tutorial or working demo showing how to set up a site that displays legacy flash content in modern browsers?

apignotti4• 6 years ago

CheerpX for Flash is not yet available to the public, but it's already being tested internally by our Early Adopters. You can find several videos of our solution in action in the linked posts.

CryoLogic• 6 years ago

Ruffle works great in modern browsers and is open source: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

navanchauhan• 6 years ago

Does this mean, we could play all the flash games?

dave5104• 6 years ago

I know there have been some games that require talking to a server in order to work, so I presume those are as dead as the servers are.

sonicggg• 6 years ago

Please, oh lord! Just let dreaded Flash rest in peace.

echelon• 6 years ago

Please, oh lord! Just let dreaded Flash rest in peace.

This is the wrong reaction to have here.

There is so much beautiful legacy content that was created in Flash. It's a goldmine. Homestar Runner, Strong Bad, Newgrounds. These are mainstays of the millennial childhood and adolescence.

Think about all of the Flash games and interactive video experiences. You can't just record those for YouTube and preserve the fidelity. They're an incredibly valuable part of our history, and they absolutely deserve preservation.

Are you willing to throw out N64 and Super Nintendo video games forever? Because that's the perspective it seems you're taking.

This isn't about helping Flash as a platform hobble along. It's about keeping all of that great content alive.

cylon13• 6 years ago

This is an awesome approach! I especially like that you'll get perfect compatibility, vs something like ruffle that's re-implementing flash. Not to mention that running x86 code in a wasm vm is an extremely general solution, like you've demoed with the python terminal. The Flash-in-wasm part of the project is almost like a happy side-effect.

apignotti4• 6 years ago

Indeed, running the Flash plugin is just the first use case of our tech.

untog2• 6 years ago

I'm a developer that spends 90% of my time in the web world and can say without doubt that the world will be better off without Flash in it today.

But I was also a teenage developer fooling around with code back in the late 90s and Flash was just mindblowing back then, from both the perspective of a developer (the UI for creating interactive animated content is still without rival, IMO) and as a consumer: vector animated 'videos' that used a fraction of the bandwidth of real videos. Weebl was/is a genius, and folks like him created an entirely new aesthetic with Flash that entered the mainstream... I think his videos aired on MTV at one point?! It was fascinating to watch. Even separately from that, Flash was the first to bring things like streaming live video and webcam access to browsers.

I'll always be nostalgic for that era of the internet, and Flash is what allowed it to happen. We're all better off with open standards and multiple browser implementations, but I wish it was still just as easy to be so creative.

rightbyte• 6 years ago

I think Flash and Java Applet was quite nice and have left a void. It is a nice concept to separate code from markup in such away that those widgets did. Also they were quite easy to get something going with as a newbie programmer. What we have today is a joke regarding programmer usability.

no_wizard• 6 years ago

They never did solve the security issues around either one though, not to mention performance issues. I remember flash in particular had a lot of nasty security vulnerabilities, and I remember Java applets that we’re memory hogs. I use to play online chess through a Java applet via FICS, and it never did perform well at all

soulofmischief• 6 years ago

Weebl and Bob was such an incredibly pervasive series at the time. Weebls-stuff was a goldmine of intelligent and funny videos and games, and had a great community.

Sites like Newgrounds, Albino Blacksheep, etc. were the cornerstone of my youth and I would simply not be who I am today without them. And it's been amazing watching so many of these creators go on to have successful careers in animation, writing, production and more.

codekansas• 6 years ago

Flash holds a special place in my heart. I didn't take CS classes until college (probably because it's so hard for middle and high schools to find CS teachers), but my middle school did have (back then) Macromedia Dreamweaver and Flash installed. I have such fond memories of sitting in the library during lunch and after school and following YouTube tutorials to figure out how to make dinky little Flash game. I still think that Macromedia Flash was the best introduction to programming I could have had and I can't for the life of me see why Scratch has become the defacto introductory thing for programming for kids

perardi2• 6 years ago

Let’s pretend that Apple allowed Flash on the iPhone.

Would Flash still have continued to be viable? It’s really difficult to thought experiment that out, but, given the need for responsive designs, and the maturation of JS and the whole React/Angular/etc paradigm, would Flash still have stuck around?

(I realize that a lot of the JS improvements came about because you now could not guarantee Flash, so you had to flesh out the native browser APIs. Remember Flash file uploads? Or using Flash to copy to clipboard?)

Jtsummers3• 6 years ago

HTML/JS was already improving, wrt better handling of the kinds of things Flash was specifically used for (graphics based interactive applications) before the iPhone was released and became popular. The canvas element was introduced around 2004, WebGL started with Canvas 3d around 2006. At that point, I think the writing was on the wall, Flash was a proprietary format that had many of the same issues as Java Applets. Something better integrated into the presentation experience (JS and canvas/webgl) was going to overtake it as it created a more uniform developer/content producer target. And with improvements to JS performance, and the general improvement of computer performance, it was inevitable.

Additionally, you couldn't guarantee Flash availability even before the iPhone. Non-Windows/Mac systems didn't guarantee it, and many corporate networks eliminated it from their computers (though, ironically, now the main reason I still deal with Flash is my employer's training system).

Cutting it from iOS, and the popularity of both the iPhone and later iPad, just hastened the decline.

pjmlp• 6 years ago

Flash continued to be available on iPhone, despite urban myths.

Adobe was quick to react and added support for AOT compilation to native code for iOS.

So plenty of casual games before the rise of Unity, Unreal, SpriteKit, Cocos, were actually AOT compiled Flash games.

perardi2• 6 years ago

I am certain that, colloquially, when people say “Flash”, they mean “the web browser plugin that runs animated content inside of a web browser” and not “that Adobe AIR thing”.

flashnext3• 6 years ago

Creating a throwaway account to comment as I worked with the Flash team when things came to a close...

Who knows if Flash would still be around today, but there was a great deal of innovation happening on the Flash engine up until the point the Flash Runtime team was effectively dissolved, because of Apple's decision. Up until that point, Adobe worked very close with Apple to recreate the Flash Platform from ground up with an entirely new engine. The new engine was vastly superior, and passed all of Apple's requested criteria for performance and memory usage on iOS. The runtime overhead compared to native was astoundingly very close, and effectively negligible for game development. In fact it was so efficient that most people internally thought that the new Flash engine could outcompete Java for general purpose cross-platform runtime based on several internal benchmarks. Even the language was improved with ActionScript4 (including Generics support) and things like threading/parallelism, simd, etc support was a focus.

However, everything went south when Apple when, despite the new Flash engine exceeding their requested requirements, Apple decided at the last minute that they are pulling out of the agreement. While it was not explicitly said, it was implied that Apple thought Flash support may hinder native game development that then could be sold on the iOS store. Once Apple pulled out, it was the straw that broke the camel's back as the massive investment into the new rewrite of the platform couldn't be justified. It was really sad as we had brilliant engineers and researchers working for years on the rewrite. But, sometimes that's life.

It's not well known, but ActionScript 4 language specs was publicly released: https://github.com/adobe-research/ActionScript4

More info: http://www.rivellomultimediaconsulting.com/actionscript-4-re...

vlovich1232• 6 years ago

I worked at Palm on WebOS. If this is the same engine we got for WebOS (which is also what Android phones had afaik), it was still enormously power hungry, slow, unstable, and ripe for security exploits. I’m not sure I’d buy the claim that you met their requirements as security would be a big one, especially since Safari already had a huge attack surface for quite a while on iOS and Flash integration would effectively be increasing that many times over.

nicoburns• 6 years ago

Do you know if there is any reason (other than simply not wanting to) why adobe couldn't open source the Flash Runtime? It would likely have been very successful if they had (iOS or not, and it would have put quite a bit of pressure on Apple to support it), and Adobe would have stood to make a lot money selling the Flash IDE.

Wowfunhappy3• 6 years ago

Was this before or after the launch of the iPhone? I'm primarily curious because I was under the impression—based on several reports I've read—that at launch Apple actually had no intention of building an app store or allowing third party iPhone apps, which means "native" game development would not really have existed.

scarface74• 6 years ago

Let’s not sugar coat history.

Adobe claimed that they could have gotten Flash working on the first generation iPhone if Apple had allowed them.

When Flash finally was running barely on Android, it required a 1Ghz professor and 1GB RAM.

The original iPhone had 128MB RAM and 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until 2011 that an iPhone had those specs.

jokoon• 6 years ago

Flash is a blackbox, and is a completely closed environment, and it's only software, there is little hardware relation. So no.

Even today, windows is able to survive because of hardware.

Flash could have gained from opening their format and making it a little more standard. I'm really happy that it's dead.

pan69• 6 years ago

Although the Flash authoring and Flash Player software have always been closed source, Macromedia, and later Adobe, have for a long time opened various formats used in the Flash ecosystem. Some examples:

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil...

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/amf-fil...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(software)

nicetryguy3• 6 years ago

No.

It was designed for desktops, as Jobs stated in his thoughts, it really requires a keyboard and a mouse for most SWF's to work properly. It also became feature rich and power hungry at a time when Mobile devices were taking off, so it was never going to run on the mobile devices of the day. This is all besides the fact that its custom networking features were proprietary, highly exploitable and notoriously buggy.

It was great for it's day, and still has features and advantages in animation and networking that JS Canvas or Node can't equal today; but it had to go. I loved Flash and worked as an AS3 dev professionally, so i wanted it to succeed as much as anyone, but it did not adapt or fix its issues so it had to die. Good riddance.

rkhassen92• 6 years ago

This: “Game makers now have a bewildering selection of tools to choose from—Unity, Game Maker, Godot, Construct, Phaser, and more, many of which share Flash's content-centric approach to development and most of which extend the "build once, deploy everywhere" philosophy of Flash to the modern era. But both McNeely and Fulp argue that none of these can match the fun, simplicity, or ease-of-use as Flash.”

Those last few words are the key to creativity: “ fun, simplicity, or ease-of-use”

What I miss most about Flash is the quick feedback loop, intuitive visual tools, iterative processes, ability to extend with serious code in AS3, and the huge community. It was fun and I’ve never seen it’s match on those features in a single tool since then. It’s made me very sad as it was really cool and supported learning and different modalities.

Did it create crazy interfaces, no, people did. It also allowed people also to create really amazing interfaces, magical experiences, which we don’t see today without a large team and mastery of several tools instead of one.

In short, today, you either have something that is basically a copy of everything else (ala bootstrap) or if you have the money, a large team and careful planning, you have the equivalent of an orchestra and that’s cool, but it’s not what we had before which was more like a process akin to that of Jazz impro - You succeed or fail on your own merits and that was exciting. Similar to how in a Jazz improv, you can start with one guy with a sax and build and build on it, even if you were not an abstract thinker. What do I mean my abstract thinker? Today you have to start with what is possible via code and your visual concept either has to fit that box or it will get expensive/time consuming. In Flash you could build an idea on a small scale, starting with visuals first and for the most part, code and flexibility of the system would support your ideas, one step at a time. Was it perfect, no, but it was vastly more supportive of spontaneous creativity than what we see now in terms of tools.

I laugh when people blame Flash for messy interfaces. Mess is a necessary bi product of human creativity. What we are missing now is that spirit of humanity and creativity.

Flash allowed us to play. I miss the playground.

Play and fun are also integral to leaning.

This quote by Seymour Papert says it so well:

“Seymour’s belief in playful learning remains firmly grounded not only in over 50 years of field research with children in-and-out of schools, but also on the work of seminal thinkers about how the mind works and develops, and how children acquire language and manipulate knowledge; or, to use his language, how we learn to construct objects and play with powerful ideas to the point that we own these ideas as our own knowledge.“

I remember feeling after a month or so of Flash that some aspects of creation within the tool, were “mine” and over the years more and more of the ways of creation within flash became extensions of my mind and creative abilities. That was madly empowering.

Today, when I’m on a large team and we are all jiving, and creating something cool with all of the various abilities and skill sets(designers, front end coders, back end coders, server admins) there are moments when I feel a ghost of the power and sheer fun what I felt using Flash.

If anyone knows of a single well supported tool that brings that sense of joy without a huge overhead of learning, please let me know. I’m dying for it.

peebeebee• 6 years ago

Couldn't have described it better!

kgraves• 6 years ago

Is there an animation/code environment similar to Adobe Flash Professional (now called Adobe Animate) on the modern web?

sogen• 6 years ago

- Saola Animate

- Hippani

saola forums seems more active

irrational2• 6 years ago

I used to work on an eLearning platform that used Flash. We had a team of animators creating content and working with professional voice talent. The content was rich and engaging. Asia especially loves the animated content. Then the iPad came out and all of our retail partners announced that they were adopting it. We had to switch to boring text and images nearly overnight. We tried adding some videos, but they are bandwidth hogs compared with Flash and didn’t do well in Asia where the bandwidth speeds were slower. Plus it turns out that it is much harder to create quality video content than animated content.

Prior to that job, I worked with a different company also creating eLearning content in Flash. We worked for a major printer manufacturer and created a series of flash movies that had a 3D printer that could be rotated around. The tech could choose a task they wanted to do with the printer and it would walk them step by step through the process, showing on the 3D printer this screw being removed or that part being swung out of the way. The tech could zoom in and rotate the printer in any direction. Since it was all vector graphics they could zoom in and out all they wanted. It allowed them to completely disassemble the printer down to the smallest detail. Two guys could knock out one of these flash printer movies in a few days.

I’m quite surprised that nobody has been able to replace flash vector animations and interactivity on the web. We were able to do things with Flash 20 years ago that was far in advance of anything you see today. I would think that someone could create a flash replacement that could work in canvas, but if anyone has managed to do it, I haven’t seen it. We seem to have replaced low-bandwidth interactive vector animations with high-bandwidth static videos. The web is the poorer for it. If content is king, someone should really work on creating a modern version of flash.

nicetryguy3• 6 years ago

The advantage of Flash was that is was a plugin that ran uniformly across browsers, and integrated directly into whatever hardware it ran on. The trouble with Canvas or even SVG is that you never quite know what you're going to get, and even today, they don't quite have the horsepower of what Flash was able to accomplish with vector graphics 15 years ago.

There are many things that i do not miss about Flash, and i do think it had to go due to becoming a security hole infested bloated mess and running terribly on smartphones; but boy do i miss that development GUI... and i loved Actionscript 2 and even 3, you know, when they worked...

irrational2• 6 years ago

Yes, we came for the cross-platform nature of Flash (browsers were even worse at being standards compliant back then so something like Java/jQuery/Flash was essential), but we stayed for the low-bandwidth high-quality vector animations. It's too bad they didn't just stick to the core features and had to continually add features that introduced security holes. I had high hopes that between SVG and Canvas that someone would create a flash replacement, but it hasn't happened yet.

xacky• 6 years ago

The fall isn’t over yet. I can see lots of organizations panicking in January 2021 when the flash plugin suddenly stops working. It dosen’t matter how much advance warning is given, there will always be someone caught out.

tenebrisalietum• 6 years ago

It'll likely be their HR departments who use training websites that haven't changed their video delivery to work with anything other than IE, let alone not use Flash.

Jtsummers3• 6 years ago

I was going to say the same. Ours finally work with Chrome and Firefox, not just IE (didn't even work with Edge previously). You could run the training, but it wouldn't record the results unless you used IE. But most of the training is still flash and for no good reason (the content could easily be presented with HTML and JS, only one or two of the trainings contain anything complicated enough to justify Flash, and most of it is in what could become video cutscenes between question prompts).

Wowfunhappy3• 6 years ago

I can see lots of organizations panicking in January 2021 when the flash plugin suddenly stops working.

I'm still confused as to what this actually means. Is Flash going to remotely disable itself? Is Microsoft going to silently update Internet Explorer 11 to prevent flash from starting? Is Mozilla going to remove features from Firefox 78 ESR in a point release? Or is there just going to be an EMP explosion that corrupts every copy of the Flash plugin on every single hard drive in the world?

boudin• 6 years ago

I've always wondered what the web would have been now if adobe would have opened flash player and created a foundation to manage its evolution when it was at its prime time.

Their source of revenue was the flash editor (if I'm not mistaken) so I guess it wouldn't have had that much impact on their business.

wintorez• 6 years ago

It would have been great. Right now we're at a somewhat awkward situation where we are trying to make a document delivery network act as an application platform, and things are a bit more complicated than they ought to be.

If Flash and Flash player were open, it could have matured into a fantastic application platform for both web and mobile and embedded devices.

acdha• 6 years ago

The real problem was that they aren’t good at platforms: the editor, debugger, runtime, etc. desperately needed a QA team but Adobe was not interested in spending money on anything that wasn’t a keynote demo. For an expensive commercial product you have to do better than that, especially since their paid “support” was basically just a reminder to email you at the next major release to speculate that the problem might be fixed and you could test to find out.

fortran77• 6 years ago

I don't know why people are so negative about Adobe Flash today. It was a great technology for its time--which has come and gone. We don't mock other great technologies of the past, like the Palm Pilot, the Cassette Walkman, Castle Wolfenstein, etc.

Jtsummers3• 6 years ago

Flash has been both widely used and widely mocked over the years. The negativity is not a contemporary (2020 or the last few years) thing, it's been around since I started paying attention to it almost 20 years ago.

paulchap• 6 years ago

Fortunately, Flash is not a limit for ZomboCom: https://html5zombo.com/

anonms-coward• 6 years ago

Is there a comparison somewhere of how many flash features ES6/7 still lack? Also any performance comparisons between the two.

rkhassen92• 6 years ago

I get the impression that feature for feature, ES6 is identical because AS3 and AS4 were build on ES. I remember reading performance is better today, but can’t find the stats on that.

It’s the “creation experience” that has never been matched.

Of course, it depends on who you are - For true coders, the current systems are fine and in many ways better, but for wholistic visual first creatives, who may also code well, the current tool sets are totally lacking.

pixelmonkey• 6 years ago

As much as I cheer on the death of Flash, it did play a part in my "coming up" as a programmer. Reading the book, "The New Masters of Flash"[1], published in 2000, was the first time I got truly inspired by the intersection of design and programming that was then becoming popular on the early web.

Flash is now a footnote in history, but, as I shared on Twitter[2], for me, Flash was almost like an early glimpse into what the future of web technologies would eventually become. If Adobe had released Flash as open source after acquiring Macromedia, we'd likely all be using a very different web, which is quite the mindbender to reflect on.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1125594.New_Masters_of_F...

[2]: original tweet -- https://twitter.com/amontalenti/status/1272699635375759362 -- and unrolled into thread form here: https://threader.app/thread/1272699635375759362

grishka• 6 years ago

Oh. Flash quite literally changed my life.

VKontakte, the most popular Russian social network, launched a game/app platform, along with the first version of its API, in 2008. At the time, the only kind of apps available was Flash (iframe apps were added later). I did make some, the most popular one being a card game "durak"[1], not really known outside ex-USSR. It worked in real time through sockets with a server I wrote in Java, but I knew little about multithreading, defensive programming, and network protocol design, so the thing bugged out fairly often. Nevertheless, it had hundreds of thousands of installs. There also were tiny ads that you could get from VK through an API call, that's how I made my first money.

The interesting part was that the barrier to entry was extremely low thanks to Flash, and growing the user base of your app required no effort whatsoever if the app is good enough. People "installed" apps on their pages, which meant simply adding it to one's own list of apps and granting it permissions. These lists were public — you could open friend's profile and see what they have installed. This meant that you'd get explosive growth by just making something interesting enough so many people would click on it.

There was a community of Flash app developers that I was a somewhat prominent part of. I made many friends there, some of them being my close friends to this day.

VK team itself organized contests where you had to recreate some part of the website in Flash as closely as possible — I took 2nd place in two of those. That's how I got their attention. There then were other contests that I took part in, to eventually get a job at VK, but that's another story...

Fun times.

I miss all that tbh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durak

The rise and fall of Adobe Flash

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