Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet's Least Favorite Tool

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gone-in-a-flash-the-race-to-save-the-internets-least-favorite-tool

by ingve • 11 years ago

71 57 11 years ago

motherboard.vice.com

jallmann• 11 years ago

There are a few use cases where we don't have a suitable replacement for Flash yet: media capture and low latency video streaming. Until WebRTC is widespread in IE (and Safari to a lesser extent), ditching Flash entirely is impractical.

As someone who's spent too much time wrangling Flash and RTMP, good riddance.

schizoidboy• 11 years ago

And ZeroClipboard

jedrek• 11 years ago

It's amazing how quickly people forget why Flash became so popular: up until Mozilla Navigator got up to around 0.6, all the browsers out there sucked. Navigator 4.x had document.layers, pretty much every script had to be re-written twice to work on NN and IE... that's when they didn't crash and burn.

If you wanted a bit of interface "smoothness" more complicated than roll-over image links, and you wanted to only have to do it once and be pretty sure it wouldn't crash your browser, Flash was the obvious choice. And let's remember that Flash was also a replacement for the true scourge of the internet from 15 years ago: Java applets.

I think that Adobe could've worked with browser developers and saved Flash, but they didn't care. Flash was dead a decade ago, when Adobe bought Macromedia. AIR was a poor man's Java, Flash's basic components were crap. Hell, I remember complaining about the video component and an ex-Adobe employee commented, "oh yeah, sorry about that, I think some interns wrote that over the summer".

jakejake• 11 years ago

Flash also started as vector based animations. It allowed large graphics that were very small in size. Not a small matter back when most home users were connecting on 56k modems. This is a time when a medium sized image would take 30 seconds to load in your screen.

It was simply mind-blowing at the time to see a page with rich graphics that would load so quickly.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years ago

If you wanted a bit of interface "smoothness" more complicated than roll-over image links, and you wanted to only have to do it once and be pretty sure it wouldn't crash your browser...

I don't think this is an indictment on browsers and how they "sucked" back then. Browsers did their jobs just fine as tools for viewing static hyperlinked documents over the network, but it was the huge level of adopters who wanted to build full application stacks on top of the web that necessitated browsers host a concurrent application platform beside the host OS, by any kludgy means necessary.

In some ways, we have a Pyrrhic victory of sorts.

seanp2k2• 11 years ago

Flash was about 10 years ahead of its time.

There's still stuff you can't fully do with JS on all browsers with market shares large enough to cater to. The problem with Flash IMO was more how people used it than the technology itself; if we wanted to make sites with large photo backgrounds that blur and have some slight movement of elements, that was pretty easy to do with Flash 10 years before it became easy to do with JS. The vector stuff was huge at the time.

Lastly, re: CPU usage (mentioned in article), Flash could be a hog, but plenty of sites still eat 100% of 1 core just to re-sort a list of things on screen on a maxed-out rMBP because of their poorly-implemented logic in whatever the new JS framework is this week. Flash at least wasn't usually that bad, and graphics smoothness was way higher with Flash than stuff I've seen using JS animations.

frik3• 11 years ago

Flash was not 10 years ahead.

It's more like the web browser war with IE6 winning and no further development between 2001 and 2006 halted the web development. The AJAX technology was added to Firefox in the meantime (2004) so that IE5+ and Firefox supported AJAX and Web 2.0 was born. As W3C XHTML 1 and especially XHTML2 failed, HTML4 was enhanced to HTML5 thanks to the WHATWG.

SVG was well known in early 2000 but only Adobe provided a plugin for IE. No web browser supported SVG.

There was also the SMIL standard that is an replacement to Adobe Flash: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronized_Multimedia_Integra... , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML%2BTIME , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XHTML%2BSMIL

As Adobe bought Macromedia and the focus shifted from vector animation to video and 3D. The feature creep with Actionscript 2/3/Flex/3D-API/etc. decreased the stability and quality of Flash. The mobile counterpart FlashLite was always several features behind the desktop version.

radley6• 11 years ago

Not only that, Flash was a designers tool. Creative people easily understood the video-like interface and could make amazing stuff quickly without first learning up to 8 different code-based languages. Flash was great after Macromedia. It took a beating by Adobe when they started focusing on Flex instead.

Flash was essentially dead when Adobe introduced the Flash Builder / Flash Designer mess.

userbinator• 11 years ago

Also, games. I still have a directory full of various Flash games I've saved over the years. They packed a lot of content in a tiny file, due to their vector-based nature. SVG looks absolutely obese compared to the compact vector format used by SWF.

sajidnizami• 11 years ago

People who were fired for being flash developers came back and designed the same stuff with Ajax/JavaScript.

We're still stuck with badly designed sites. At times you can just use a simple hyperlink to open a document and don't need a JavaScripted window that breaks apart on mobile browsers with small screen size.

ghaff• 11 years ago

The "funny" thing is that restaurants are among the worst offenders for some reason for sticking all sorts of gratuitous pop-ups and weird sliding animations etc. And this for sites that, probably more than most, are going to be accessed by someone on a phone who just wants an address or to take a look at a menu.

larzang• 11 years ago

Well, restaurants and small businesses in general usually have websites that come about through the joining of customers who have no understanding of ux or the trade-offs that come with going for the showiest thing possible, and creators who are offsetting their low prices by pushing through jobs as quickly as possible and don't have time to go through the delicate dance of telling the customer that their desires are unreasonable and awful.

vollmond3• 11 years ago

I never cared about Flash, but I absolutely loved developing in Flex. Was always sad that getting rid of Flash meant losing Flex, too.

aikah• 11 years ago

The resources allocated to Flex meant less resources for flash. Adobe lost focus with Flex. It meant the IDE never really evolved , the flash api was still full of unpatched bugged and the general quality went down.

There is nothing left from Macromedia anyway,Flash is almost dead, Fireworks an excellent image editor for web projects is dead, Dreamweaver is a zombie. They eliminated all competition, but at the end of the day Adobe didn't won the web authoring tool market. They destroyed that sense of community Macromedia helped create. There is nothing like the Flash community anymore.

th3iedkid• 11 years ago

>Dreamweaver is a zombie

So true!Back in those days(circa 2008) i used to see people design decent and good websites(by those times standards) with ease.It was so cool .Dojo amongst others in those days could've only made it more cool!But yes, today its dead!

bdcravens• 11 years ago

There is nothing left from Macromedia anyway

ColdFusion is still sticking around, but its shelf life is open to debate

frik3• 11 years ago

WYSIWYG HTML editors are dead, an incredible sad fact.

Dreamweaver never advanced after Adobe bought Macromedia (beside UI color changes and minor upgrades), Microsoft killed FrontPage (trident engine) and the successors Web Expression 4, Adobe killed GoLive, Netscape/Mozilla killed Composer incl. their forks Nvu and KompoZer and BlueGriffon. Only SeaMonkey (the former Mozilla/Netscape Suite) still ships with the outdated editor. Microsoft Word 2010 still ships with Frontend 2003 HTML editor code for its "Web" view that produces broken HTML4 output. Outlook 2010+ now also use Word as HTML editor/viewer (based on Frontpage code). So nowadays, there are only two HTML editors with design view left SeaMonkey and Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver comes with an outdated and discontinued Opera 8 based pre HTML5 design-view (Opera browser engine has been discontinued and is nowadays just a Chrome based browser) and SeaMonkey's Composer and their forks Nvu/KompoZer/BlueGriffon haven't been updated for years and Mozilla Thunderbird basically dead too (its HTML email editor uses the same component).

ContentEditable HTML5 API (WYSIWYG editor for HTML5) is broken in all browsers too and no one fixes the bugs!! - see the bugs listed there: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/execCommand.html , http://caniuse.com/#feat=contenteditable , https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement...

As ContentEditable is used in many online email services as HTML email editor like GMail (and used GoogleDocs v1) and online rich text editors there is a tiny little hope at least some browser developers fix ContentEditable bugs.

Apple has an WYSIWYG editor on top of Webkit, it is used in their word processor "Pages". The open source community needs an WYSIWYG editor based on webkit/chromium or at least as bug-fixed ContentEditable.

testrun• 11 years ago

Flex is still in active development, it is now Apache Flex.

vollmond3• 11 years ago

Wait, really? I had no idea! Off to check it out...

im3w1l2• 11 years ago

My theory is that Jobs killed Flash because it was too good. Would have been able to compete with the appstore.

notatoad• 11 years ago

At the time Apple killed flash and announced the iPhone, they claimed they had no intention to support native apps on the iPhone. Web apps were the future and if developers wanted their app on the iPhone they should make a web app.

tomjen3• 11 years ago

That seems unlikely given that Apple originally didn't want to enable third-parties to develop native apps for the iPhone at all.

setpatchaddress• 11 years ago

I love the sarcasm, keep it up.

im3w1l2• 11 years ago

The theory doesn't seem to fit with the facts in sibling comments, but it was no sarcasm on my part.

When flash died, html+js was far from a viable replacement. And many appstore games were clones of earlier flash games.

MBCook3• 11 years ago

Jobs wanted to kill Flash because it sucked.

They were basically four uses of Flash on the Internet. Some people used it to make entire websites, which generally ended up looking nicer but been much harder to use (I am STILL looking at you HBO). I was didn't work on the iPhone at all.

Next up you had games, which also didn't work on the iPhone. Games basically all assumed a mouse and keyboard so the chances of them actually working well if you try to play them on an iPhone would've been terrible anyway.

  A highly despised use with advertising. Thanks to the incredible power of flash not only could pop ups be made, but you could have dancing around little distracting graphics with lots of sound and even video sucking up all your bandwidth.

Last you had online video, which was fixed by the built-in YouTube app and Apple's pushing for HTML5 and HTML live streaming.

But the most important thing you have to remember is that flash absolutely sucked down resources. On a (at the time) recent laptop you could easily tell when a website loaded flash. Not only did things respond better with flash off but battery life could be significantly affected. You could get extra hours on your computer. And if you think flash on windows was bad, you should've tried living in the Macintosh ecosystem. Adobe clearly didn't care so flash performance was drastically worse.

If it was bad on a laptop, you know how much worse it would've been on the original iPhone. The original (and even the 3G) were very constrained devices. Even if flash could've been put on them, I doubt it would've been performant at all for real content.

I think Apple was completely correct. I had already started using a flash blocker by that point just so my laptop wouldn't get too hot and drain the battery too fast. There were better ways to do video, answer now less of noxious since they can't play sound, and games run better than ever since they are apps.

Incredible popularity of the iPhone and the iPad was the thing that finally put flash out of its misery you. It should've died long before that for being so on optimized but no one else had enough power to do it. Apples move did more than anything else to get us into the modern HTML5 Web 2.0 world. I imagine there'd still be tons of flash only sites if it wasn't for the iPhone.

cpeterso• 11 years ago

Google's Swiffy is an offline SWF to SVG converter, whereas Shumway is includes an AVM1 and AVM2 interpreter and jIT (to JS). Shumway has a JS library that will work any most browsers, but can implement more advanced Flash features like RTMP streaming and clipboard support when it is installed as a Firefox extension (using Firefox Apis).

kleiba• 11 years ago

Interestingly, just this week for the first time ever I disabled my flash plugin in Firefox 36 (I think) on Ubuntu 14.04. The only use I've had for it was videos anyway, mostly youtube. However, I promptly found cases where my personal UX with the HTML5 video player on youtube was worse than with flash: in one occasion, I couldn't jump to a specific point in time by clicking on the red progress bar just above the player controls; and another time, clicking on video annotations that contained a hyperlink didn't work.

So I ended up turning Flash back on.

Is this something particular to my setup, or have others had similar experiences?

bad_user• 11 years ago

Jobs isn't the one that killed Flash.

Flash had a real chance to survive thanks to Android and people might not remember, but Android was shipped with Flash installed. Unfortunately it sucked, being unstable, a resource hog, plus the Flash games available weren't meant for touch screens. And the same thing happened with Linux btw. I mean, here I was, with both Firefox, Chrome and Opera working well on my Ubuntu machine and Adobe wasn't capable of keeping a freaking plugin up to date for my platform.

So they simply didn't cared. My guess is that Adobe was looking for an excuse to kill it.

Also, Flash isn't the only proprietary plugin that was killed by the transition to HTML5. Silverlight is another one.

MichaelGG• 11 years ago

Yeah if the Flash plugin allowed you to take a game and just go full screen, versus trying to dick around resizing the browser window they coulda done great on Android. Tons of games instantly available. They could have also figured out some way to deal with touch that didn't suck.

hiphopyo4• 11 years ago

I think it's important to make the distinction between the Shockwave Flash format and Adobe Flash the design tool.

Adobe Flash the design tool is by far the simplest and most intuitive tool out there for designing web graphics, be it in vectors or pixel-perfect raster graphics. Not to mention its combination of layers and timelines which allows you to do a lot more in less time. The whole animations / ActionScript thing is just an added bonus if you're feeling frisky.

Most people use Photoshop for web graphics but that's wrong -- Photoshop was meant for photos. Others use Illustrator but it is way overkill unless you're doing fine arts or complex illustrations.

alexvoda• 11 years ago

Adobe/Macromedia Fireworks? AFAIK Fireworks is the web graphics tool, so you should compare Photoshop and Illustrator to Fireworks not to Flash.

hiphopyo4• 11 years ago

Fireworks is more a collection of stock graphics and widgets geared towards people who want to make quick mockups and such. As a design tool it doesn't even come close to Flash.

radley6• 11 years ago

That's where Fireworks ended up. But it started off as a graphics editor for Flash.

frik3• 11 years ago

Adobe Edge Animate a new tool similar to Adobe Flash (the design tool). Instead of swf one can create CSS3 and JS based animation. The tool is partly open source (afaik, at least the first version was) and is coded in HTML5/JS itself and runs in a Chromium/webkit application.

Ezhik• 11 years ago

I've been wondering for quite a while, with most of what Flash is used online for getting replaced by HTML5 stuff (games and etc.), has a suitable replacement popped up for Flash as an animation tool?

hiphopyo4• 11 years ago

Absolutely not. It's sad how all the hate towards the Shockwave Flash format has automatically spilled over on Adobe Flash the design and animation tool.

Adobe's best course forward would probably be to rename Adobe Flash to something like Adobe Vectorshop, discontinue support for .swf and replace it with SVG animations. Adobe already owns Snap.svg (https://github.com/adobe-webplatform/Snap.svg) so there's definitely a lot of potential there.

arthurfm• 11 years ago

Adobe's best course forward would probably be to rename Adobe Flash to something like Adobe Vectorshop, discontinue support for .swf and replace it with SVG animations.

Why go to all that trouble when Adobe already have a web development tool that supports SVGs (Edge Animate)? [1][2]

[1] https://creative.adobe.com/products/animate

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Edge

Radle• 11 years ago

Currently developing a browser game, our goal is to take the market lead. We think we have a serious chance doing so, because the current market leader uses a full flash site. (A normal Websites would be totally sufficient for that kind of game)

Well, thanks flash.

vacri• 11 years ago

Jobs was able to nail the coffin shut because of market share, but he certainly wasn't the first to push for removing flash - that belongs to the open-source community. I remember fiddling with debian, trying to get flash installed, and getting the answer "flash is bad for a number of reasons" and given the idea to try to use non-flash sites. When Jobs made the step in 2010, it was not trivial, but he was joining an existing movement.

MBCook3• 11 years ago

I had been using a flash blocker for years. Not only did that block basically ALL of the most obnoxious ads, it made my laptop run significantly quieter and longer without every web page animating junky ads at as high a frame rate as possible.

stevenh• 11 years ago

I've noticed a strange habit in web journalism lately. If the author doesn't like something that's popular, they'll falsely claim it's on the verge of death and that nobody has willingly associated with it for months or years.

Flash and AIR are still flagship products at Adobe. These tools are actually updated more frequently than ever before, probably because developers using these platforms are reaching record numbers, and Adobe can see that in their Creative Cloud usage metrics. Their deliberate strategy of killing the plugin on mobile to pivot their focus into AIR must have paid off. Adobe's development process for Flash and AIR used to be a bit opaque, but they now release new public betas multiple times per month, listen to requests for changes, and disclose the projected development timeline for new features.

I'm sorry if the spirit of the article resonated with people here who hate Flash, but it is utterly vapid clickbait. It's a tired exercise in kludging together derogatory illustrative phrases to paint the chosen target in a bad light, with nothing driving the negativity other than the author's wishful thinking. The author actually admits he has nothing to support his title when he states "this story isn't about how or why Flash is dying: It's about why we have to remember it" and proceeds to spend the next 13 paragraphs whining about how sites like The Wayback Machine haven't archived enough SWF files.

The title (which the article does absolutely nothing to even attempt to support) implies an urgent and imminent threat to the existence of Flash, that perhaps major desktop browser vendors have unanimously agreed to ban the Flash plugin or that they decided to get rid of plugin support altogether. Of course, this is ridiculous, and as long as desktop browsers still support plugins, Flash is not going anywhere.

white-flame2• 11 years ago

Out of all the Facebook, King.com, & other social/casual web games I've seen my family play, 100% of them have been Flash. I think in years past some have been Java, but I've not yet seen a HTML5 game in use on the big sites as played here.

Since my family doesn't pay money into these games, their style involves playing broad coverage of games: They play each for a little bit until the life meter runs out, and often try new games. Again, 100% have been flash.

There are also tools & frameworks like Starling for converting either AS3 code, Flash assets, or full SWF files to other non-Flash platforms. For instance, I wrote the sorting algorithm in as3isolib, and noticed that Ubisoft ported one of their games using it to iOS, using Starling.

Flash is certainly alive and well.

krilnon2• 11 years ago

I wrote the sorting algorithm in as3isolib

Oh neat. I don't recognize your username, but I submitted the first entry in the logo contest for that library in 2008, which ended up being fairly close to the final logo.

Flash is certainly alive and well.

There's plenty of developer activity, but I'm pretty sure Adobe only has a life support team maintaining most things now.

AS4 was cancelled, so Falcon was the last notable language change. Most of the AoT iOS/Android targeting stuff was completed years ago, so now AFAICT it's just being kept compatible with new releases.

FP12 was supposed to be a huge jump, but now 12-17 (and the accompanying AIR APIs) have come and gone without pushing things forward meaningfully.

radley6• 11 years ago

AIR?? Really? Can you provide any stats to support that?

I'm not against AIR. On the contrary, I had high hopes that it would become the STANDARD for cross-platform desktop deployment. In a mobile-first world, desktop apps are lowest priority and last to be deployed to an ever shrinking base (ex. compare iOS quality to OSX).

A single code base such as AIR could be critical for smaller apps for OSX / Windows / Chrome.

MBCook3• 11 years ago

Outside of Flash games and one or two all flash websites (like HBO) what is it used for? Browsers can do HTML5 for YouTube and Safari can play Netflix without plugins.

I run a flash blocker and I don't remember the last time I had to enable a pee I run a flash blocker and I don't remember the last time I had to enable Flash on a page. Facebook games (if I were to use that kind of thing) would be the one exception I can think of.

Aoyagi• 11 years ago

I prefer Flash for videos and well...everything that can just start playing, take up bandwidth and make noise. Because it's easier to block that than an HTML5 content (without any specialized plug-ins in proper browsers, too).

tapirl• 11 years ago

I played many great html games. Seldom of them can run/load successfully in all mainstream browsers. Some run/load failed in IE, some failed in FireFox, etc. And the differences of fps between different browsers are very large. In some browsers, a game may run smoothly, but in another, it is very laggy.

Flash still has the advantage on the consistency.

But how long Flash will still keep the advantage is really a problem for Adobe.

Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet's Least Favorite Tool

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