
“We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020” - mintplant
https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html
======
amitt
End of an era.

We built the FarmVille-engine using AS3 and I still think it's one of the best
programming languages I've ever used. Static typing, access modifiers, and
performant. Low friction for new users (most people had the plugin, we could
stream the main binary and assets)

0% chance we could have built the game using any other client-side tech stack
available at the time.

~~~
boubiyeah
Well, I used AS3 and Flex while it occupied a useful niche and at the time it
was SO much better than the web platform.

BUT, AS3 was not a great language. The VM was pretty slow (that GC! I'm sure
you game devs optimized the hell out of it with object pools and all, but
still, modern JS VMs could run circles around Flash's), the static typing was
extremely limited: you could only type "Function", not the actual arg and
return value types; type inference was non existant, Vector was invariant,
etc. Let's face it, Adobe wasn't the best at language design. Typescript is
today so much better than AS3 ever was.

~~~
slackingoff2017
God Typescript is glorious after dealing with JS for so long.

Just needed to say that.

~~~
penpapersw
I tried TypeScript yesterday and while I really love the language, the tooling
was wayyyy too complicated and confusing. All I wanted was to make a dead
simple hello-world node app that let me write it in VS Code, and recompile the
TS to JS every time I saved. Suddenly I had to learn about tsconfig.json, had
to install nodemon and have a process running in the background that I'm sure
to forget to kill later, and I have no idea how either tsc or ts-node plays
into any of this... in the end I just decided to go with ES2016 and be done
with it. Too bad, because I really like having type information available,
especially for catching bugs. I enabled VS's "pretend JS is TS" setting so it
catches some errors, but it's pretty hacky and not thorough, and I don't get
to specify types in my program. Really wish I could get a dead simple TS app
figured out.

~~~
evmar
1) tsc --init # creates a tsconfig.json, no need to edit it

2) tsc --watch # rebuilds every .ts file on save

There is no step 3.

~~~
penpapersw
Hey this is pretty great, thanks! Dunno why I didn't consider it to be that
simple. But it really is working. Well, along with `npm install @types/node
--save` which I found somewhere else, so it quits complaining about 'require'
not being found.

~~~
evmar
Glad it worked! I think it's a failure by the TypeScript team to not make this
flow more front and center.

You are right, I forgot about installing typings. Instead of require you
should use ES6 "import" (which TS compiles to require anyway) to get more type
checking. But when you do that you'll see more of my missed step, which is
`npm install @types/XYZ` for each XYZ package you use.

As soon as you start introducing a separate build tool (like gulp or whatever)
things get super messy super fast but not for any interesting reason. Using
`tsc --watch` also means it does caching across builds so it's faster than
using gulp unless you're careful to configure it.

~~~
penpapersw
This advice is gold, thanks. But what I'm finding is that it's too painful to
create a TypeScript project that has both a front-end and a back-end by
incrementally building it like this, unless the front-end is just a set of
static files with no compilation steps.

------
methodover
I say this every time someone brings up Flash's failure, but ... It's a tragic
failure on Adobe's part. The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are
far beyond anything else out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a
product on the market that comes even close. Everything now is too technical,
too specialized.

There are lots and lots of artists and developers out there who learned
Flash's toolset and got good at it -- and now all that knowledge is useless.
And there aren't even better tools to replace it.

It could have been different. Too bad they let it fail.

~~~
djsumdog
A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light
weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can
scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do
that with YouTube videos of older flash content.

Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos.

It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable web
app platform than Java applets.

Sure a lot of newer stuff uses cool Javascript frameworks for making games and
vector graphics, but there are a lot of old games people won't be able to play
anymore. There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that
can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash
player in Javascript O_o)

~~~
wlesieutre
I don't know about Linux, but back when Flash was relevant the Mac version
always felt like an inefficient crashy dumpster fire to me. I don't have a
source to back this up, but I always assumed that was a big part of why Jobs
was so uninterested in supporting it on iOS.

~~~
mrpippy
Exactly, and the Linux version was similarly bad and unmaintained. I don't
think they released a 64-bit x86 version until 2008/2009 when Linux on amd64
had been common since 2005 if not before. I remember having to either keep a
32-bit browser around just for Flash or use (impressive) hacks like
nspluginwrapper.

I suspect the crappiness of the Mac/Linux versions was not because of
developer incompetence, but a severe lack of developers/resources for those
teams. Hopefully there are some managers at Adobe who realize that, if they
hadn't shipped a crappy product for so many years used by _every_ Mac user,
they could have made an actual case for their ability to support high-quality
Flash on iOS.

~~~
kakwa_
I could not agree more.

The Linux version was really badly maintained for ages.

Circa 2014, I had to do weird stuff like sed on the .so flash plugin to bump
artificially its version string from 11 to 12

This was to work around a requirement for VMware VCenter UI which required
flash versions newer that the one available for Firefox at that time (11.2
IIRC).

I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code. It's
probably not the most beautiful code in the world, but at least, it would
provide a reference implementation and help other implementations a lot.

~~~
gmmeyer
Flash on Linux was discontinued in 2012:
[http://www.pcworld.com/article/250784/for_flash_on_linux_the...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/250784/for_flash_on_linux_there_are_open_player_alternatives.html)

Even back then you had to do hacks to get it to work. But after that it became
very hard to get anything to work. Eventually someone came out with a service
called pipelight that I used to use that would allow you to use windows only
plugins in Firefox:
[https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight](https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight).
It worked great until I didn't need it anymore.

~~~
yuhong
They still have it today (it was never truly "discontinued").

~~~
comex
The NPAPI version (i.e. all browsers but Chrome) was discontinued, but it was
un-discontinued last year (after four years of no updates).
[http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2016/08/beta-news-
flash-p...](http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2016/08/beta-news-flash-player-
npapi-for-linux.html)

~~~
yuhong
Yea, and they still had to do security updates for it in the meantime. I guess
that is part of why they "un-discontinued" it.

------
sashk
Flash will die 10 years after this -- [https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-
on-flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

~~~
make3
I hadn't read this. The security and battery life arguments are the best imho.
The last part about the apps make Apple look like they only want to protect
their financial interests in a sort of sketchy monopolistic way.

~~~
yellowapple
Yeah, that last justification is one with which I wholeheartedly disagree.
Cross-platform done right is a good thing, and yet here we have Apple
explicitly describing how it wants app developers to not use cross-platform
technologies and instead rely on Apple-specific interfaces. In other words:
"screw developer productivity, if you're not exclusively targeting our
platforms, you're doing it wrong".

~~~
melling
What's a good cross-platform toolkit that exists today?

~~~
secstate
Depends on your end goal. But I'd say Tk/Tcl and Qt have done alright for
themselves. They'll never be confused for native, but for a solid GUI app,
they're quite solid.

Then there's always Unity ...

~~~
cjensen
I'm a Qt programmer. It's very very good because it attempts to look as much
as possible like a native app rather than forcing a "cross-platform look and
feel" like Google has been doing lately.

But it still feels wrong on the Mac. Little UI details which just "aren't
done" on the Mac. Plus Qt is always a year or two behind on everything means
that when MacOS alters or refines a UI element that Qt apps will still be
doing things the old way.

------
baby
This makes me sad.

The internet used to be less "flat". Every website was interactive, animated,
had sound, had dimensions to it. Everything was a theme park. Maybe you had to
learn a new UI every time but I was amazed a lot back then.

I learned a lot of programming with Action Script, it wasn't the best, but it
was easy to get into.

I did my fare share of animating, just because it was so easy to get into.
Xiaoxiao was just amazing to me
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw4wzwYeZ0Y)).

I did my fair share of games as well, there were so many of them and
publishing a game on internet had never been so easy. Orisinal is beautiful
([http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/](http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/)).

Now where do people find such mini games? On mobile. The big mini-game market
has shifted and we now have to pay, we now have to download each game
individually.

I understand Flash has had a bad track of security vulnerability, but the
internet used to be magical, it's the end of an era.

As methodover says it here:

> The tools for 2D animations and games in Flash are far beyond anything else
> out there from a creative standpoint. There isn't a product on the market
> that comes even close. Everything now is too technical, too specialized.

~~~
deedubaya
> interactive, animated, had sound, had dimensions

Interaction, animation, sound, and dimensions have their place in the web.
That place is in a small percentage of websites. Very small. Flash was
possibly a better tool for that small percentage of websites (games and
something else I guess?).

I, for one, am glad I can read a fucking blog article these days without it
being rendered through an animated page flip which makes the shrill sound of
paper tearing each time a page is "turned" with no way to mute.

Yes, flat text suits me just fine.

~~~
GuB-42
Well, the new trend is to hijack your scrollbar. You scroll down and things
start go left and right. Not much better.

There will always be some retarded "UX" designers for breaking things that
work.

------
seanalltogether
> will be phased out by the end of 2020. At that point, Adobe will stop
> updating and distributing Flash.

Adobes stance on backwards compatibility in Flash has always been "Don't break
the web". Where does this leave all the existing flash content that still
exists around the web after 2020? As far as I know, those JS emulators are way
to slow for most content.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I assume they're giving everyone 2.5yrs advanced notice to port anything
considered important to something else.

~~~
azinman2
Important to what? Individuals? Digital historians? Those concerned with
abandonware? Companies that want people to pay for new porting work?

The majority of content that is still in flash and active use probably won’t
get ported... the iPhone 10 years ago set that trend.

~~~
richardwhiuk
The flash player won't stop working when Adobe declare it EOL....

------
yoodenvranx
Is there any attempt to save all the classic Flash animations and games like
they did with old arcade games? Any "emulators" which can be used to preserve
them?

~~~
larsiusprime
There are a lot of serious attempts underway, I've been involved with some of
those discussions.

Nothing perfect and turn key exists at the moment, but all the necessary
pieces are basically there.

It depends on what sort of preservation strategy you're going after.

1) "Emulation" style:

\-- Open source flash player (a la Shumway)

2) "Automated Conversion" style:

\-- Load-time conversion to a different format (ie, HTML5)-- Ahead-of-time
conversion to a different format

3) Convert by hand

\-- Rewrite in JS/HTML5

\-- Rewrite in Haxe using a library like OpenFL (Haxe compiles to JS/HTML5,
C++, also Flash)

There's a lot of options available, and a lot of useful primitives. Parsing
and rendering Flash (SWF) content is basically solved (OpenFL has made
particular strong strides in this area, Shumway is impressive too).

The really big missing piece is ActionScript execution. There are in fact
various open source ActionScript VM's out there, and there are ways to parse
ABC (Action Script Byte Code) and convert it -- either ahead of time or at
load-time -- to something else, whether that's directly to JS, or something
like Haxe (which then compiles it to JS or C++ or whatever), but to my
knowledge nobody has a working solution that as of today combines Rendering +
ActionScript Execution + RigorouslyTestedConvenientUX.

But all the pieces are there. You just need someone motivated enough and well
funded enough to put it all together. Hopefully this news spurs that fire.

~~~
colanderman
There's nothing stopping you from just running Flash itself… even in a Windows
XP VM if necessary.

~~~
drak0n1c
Some kind of conversion is needed to help hosts keep their flash content alive
- visitors will ignore what is not accessible.

~~~
colanderman
Yes, but that's not the problem the GP was addressing.

------
pier25
The Flash player (which is really what's being killed here) was piece of crap,
but the Flash ecosystem was amazing.

There is nothing today that offers a similar level of accessible crossplatform
development like Adobe Air. Qt is the only thing that comes close.

Sadly Adobe decided to kill the Flash platform. I wrote a long rant here a
couple of years back: [https://medium.com/@Pier/why-im-finally-breaking-up-
with-fla...](https://medium.com/@Pier/why-im-finally-breaking-up-with-flash-
for-good-cea84fe32393)

~~~
thebouv
Exactly! The type of stuff I built with Flex and Adobe Air was so great. I was
able to solve so many problems that I just couldn't have (easily) without it.
And for that brief moment when I could turn Flex code into iOS/Android apps?
Awesome.

~~~
reboog711
You still can turn Flex and Adobe AIR code into iOS / Android app...

~~~
thebouv
Really?

Once Flex went to Apache and FlexDeveloper was killed, I just stopped paying
attention.

~~~
reboog711
Yes, really. Adobe AIR has had supported for iOS and Android, practically
since the beginning.

There was a big stink around Jobs "Letters from Flash" and all AIR
applications were put on indefinite hold in the app store review queue with no
explanation. Adobe stopped development of their iOS stuff. Then after a few
months all the apps were approved, Adobe resumed development, and no one had a
problem since.

What is FlexDeveloper? Do you mean Flex Builder [now Flash Builder]? It wasn't
really killed, just abandoned, if there is a difference.

------
Marazan
Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of
corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by).

Dominating the Rich Internet Application space and poised to storm corporate
apps by levaraging all those Flex Devs via Adobe Air and they... just knife
them all in the back and abandon Flex totally.

Just jaw dropping. Inexplicable.

~~~
rhapsodic
_> Adobe abandonment of Flex has to be one of the most perplexing acts of
corporate self harm I have witnessed ( and been affected by)._

Flex is now an Apache open source project. It still has an active developer
community, some of whom are Adobe employees, and appear to work on Flex full-
time.

Unfortunately, it seems the developer community is focusing most of their
efforts on FlexJS, an HTML/JavaScript version of Flex. I could be wrong, but I
don't see them making a very big splash in the crowded JS app framework space.

~~~
Marazan
If this had been Adobe's focus rather than chucking it at Apache then Adobe
would be world leaders in JavaScript app development and we'd all be using
their tools.

------
amyjess
As much as I want people to stop using Flash for new projects, I'm worried
what this means for preservation. There are a lot of old Flash games and other
stuff out there that has never been ported to HTML5 and have been abandoned by
their creators. A decade from now, we're probably going to need to run an old
OS in a VM just to run this old content.

We're at risk of a digital dark age already, and this is just going to make it
worse.

~~~
andrioni
It's actually pretty weird that would stop distributing it, especially since
they still distribute a Shockwave Player, and well, Shockwave has been
completely dead for long time now.

~~~
xeeeeeeeeeeenu
Shockwave Player is still supported. The latest version was released ~40 days
ago[1]

[1] - [https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave/release-note/release-
notes...](https://helpx.adobe.com/shockwave/release-note/release-notes-
shockwave-12.html)

------
amelius
This is exactly why we shouldn't rely on closed standards and closed viewers:
at some point they stop to exist, and there will be content out there that we
can't view any longer.

------
rocky1138
> Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the
> end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash
> content to these new open formats.

Why not open source it and make Flash the open format instead?

~~~
ivraatiems
That'd encourage people to use flash, which is the opposite of what most
everyone in web development (and possibly on the web, period) wants.

~~~
yellowapple
People mainly want Flash to die _because_ it's a closed standard/platform that
can't be improved by third parties and has lagged behind modern web standards
as a result. Opening up Flash would address that problem and make the idea of
Flash on a modern website significantly less horrid.

~~~
chrischen
Whatever flash is, it’s the opposite of “lagged behind modern web standards”.
If anything that was the one thing it didn’t do in its lifespan since it
enabled apps that are only now html5 achieving parity.

It enabled a consistent cross platform interpreter for javascript and xml
based apps.

------
dandare
> Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and
> Shockwave.

Cringe!

Adobe bought Flash and Shockwave along with Macromedia that invented them 10
year earlier.

~~~
favorited
But surely "we" includes Macromedia, if Adobe itself included Macromedia after
the acquisition?

~~~
mulmen
That's disingenuous. Adobe didn't invent Flash, they bought the company that
did. Adobe's strategy is based on them having resources to acquire, not
create.

~~~
baby
This letter might have been written by one of the guy in the original
Macromedia team.

------
Bahamut
I wonder how long will browsers keep Flash around though? I doubt sites like
Homestar Runner will just convert everything to HTML/CSS/JS.

~~~
bsmedberg
All of the browsers have published roadmap updates. Basically Flash will be
disabled by default in mid-2019:

Firefox:
[https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-r...](https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2017/07/25/firefox-
roadmap-flash-end-life/) and [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Plugins/Roadmap) Google:
[https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-
flash...](https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-
chrome/) and [https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/flash-
roadmap](https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/flash-roadmap) Microsoft
(Edge+IE): [https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-
wind...](https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-
timeline/)

~~~
eridius
That's not "all of the browsers", that's just most of them.

~~~
duskwuff
The only real* browser I can think of that isn't listed there is Opera, and
they're only barely hanging on. The numbers I've seen peg them at roughly 1%
of desktop browsers, mostly in Europe.

*: That is, one that isn't just a reskin of another browser on the list.

~~~
eridius
How about Safari?

~~~
duskwuff
Whoops, I totally didn't notice that was missing from the list.

That being said, while Apple hasn't explicitly _said_ they plan to remove
Flash from desktop Safari, they've implicitly signalled it -- they've already
got features in place which make it often only load on demand.

~~~
caryhartline
There's not much to remove. You install Flash on macOS separately and Safari
will load that in as a plugin. It seems obvious that Safari will remove that
plugin functionality on or before 2020.

------
hprotagonist
I disabled flash on my browsers in 2014, and I have had to manually reenable
it exactly twice in the last three years to get content I needed. Both times
were for restaurant menus, of all things.

I have fond memories of newgrounds and the real early explosion of browser
games, but I'm not going to miss the lag, memory overhead, and security hell
one iota.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Obligatory The Oatmeal:
[https://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website](https://theoatmeal.com/comics/restaurant_website)

------
cpncrunch
What about Adobe Connect? They have been talking about moving to HTML5 for
years, but nothing seems to happen. Then recently they announce that if you
don't have Flash you can instead download an executable:

[https://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2016/02/add-
in.html](https://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2016/02/add-in.html)

Could this be the end of AC, or will they pull something out of a hat at the
last minute?

~~~
vecinu
Connect is not going to die, is my understanding.

~~~
cpncrunch
Two options seem to be:

\- go to a downloadable .exe

\- move to HTML5

They appear to be moving towards the .exe path at the moment, which seems like
a bad idea.

~~~
cpncrunch
Update here:

[http://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2017/07/adobe-connect-
on...](http://blogs.adobe.com/adobeconnect/2017/07/adobe-connect-on-web-
conferencing-open-standards-and-the-end-of-the-flash-
player.html?scid=social_20170725_73428777&adbid=889951279211880452&adbpl=tw&adbpr=18230864)

------
ash_gti
I wonder what the major use cases are for Flash Player these days?

I assume some of the 'Farm Ville' style web games are probably in Flash still
these days.

~~~
gothroach
VMware vCenter's Web UI by default runs in Flash, even on the newest vCenter
6.5. There's an option for an HTML5 interface, but it's not feature-complete
and is far buggier and laggier than the already buggy Flash client. ESXi 6.5's
web interface is HTML5, and it appears to have a lot of common codebase with
vCenter's HTML5 interface, but is far more mature and accessible. I hope that
this gives VMware the kick in the pants to finally lose the Flash vCenter
client and finish up the HTML5 version.

~~~
empath75
Just a couple of years ago, someone from EMC came to our data storage team and
proudly announced their brand new interface, written in Flash. I laughed in
his face when he said that.

I guess it's a step up from java?

~~~
gothroach
That's amazing, I haven't used EMC much and didn't realize they used Flash for
their interface also.

I (with protest) use Java UIs so much for configuring various networking gear
(old Cisco MDS switches still in use, etc) that I have to have three Win7 VMs
with different Java versions and settings to make sure I can access them all.
At least using Flash for the UI makes it so I can access it on just about any
machine with Flash enabled so I don't have to have crazy configs to get things
working.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
Ah yes, good old Java. Write once, run everywhere, but only on the exact same
version of Java.

------
k__
End of an era...

I did my first project, when I was 14, with Flash, simple animated cartoon.
Was super easy and fun.

Today I read we would have Iron Man style UI if Steve Jobs didn't shot down
Flash with the iPhone. The reasoning was, nothing we have today had such easy
2D/3D animation features, yes WebGL can do everything Flash can, but it's
waaay more complicated.

When I started programming, I liked the idea of Flex, but somehow that never
cached on. Later in 2011, when I finished my CS degree, I moved to JavaScript
because it was open and rapidly catching up.

I liked the whole openness of JavaScript much more and like I said, the Web
platform can theoretically do everything Flash can, but we need better tools.
I can do rather much, because I'm a developer, but when I look at me 18 years
ago, I didn't know anything about programming and still got things done with
Flash.

I also met a few people who build their whole career on Flash. Some media
degrees here were basically 80% Flash content creation and I'm still working
with people who got into IT by doing Flash, they miss it pretty much...

------
kensey
I remember in 1993-1994 playing Cosmic Osmo on a Mac. All the old pre-Myst
Cyan games (Manhole, Osmo, Spelunx) were basically HyperCard stacks, which
didn't directly allow for any but the crudest animation. But Cyan had
integrated MacroMind VideoWorks, which later became Macromedia Director, into
Osmo. The effect over other HyperCard stacks was striking. You could actually
play little minigames in the Osmo world.

Then I went off to college the next year and found out about the whole "web"
thing, and again everything was flat and mostly static. Then Macromedia
Shockwave and Flash and Java came along, and it was just like Osmo vs.
Manhole, only more so. For a long time, your browser install wasn't complete
till you had Java, RealPlayer, Shockwave and Flash installed (and later,
QuickTime).

(For nostalgia purposes, Steam has all the Cyan games from Manhole on up as a
bundle; you can also play the original Manhole/Osmo/Spelunx in the SheepShaver
emulator if you can get hold of firmware plus OS and game discs.)

------
sqeaky
I have seen a massive downtrend in flash use already. Is there anyone building
building new and serious projects in it now?

~~~
syshum
Sadly yes...

VMWare is one large one.

I know of a very large company that has been over the last couple of years
moving from Java to Flash, so it will be amusing to what their reaction will
be to this news.

~~~
Karunamon
Supposedly upgrading the vSphere web interface to HTML5 is on the roadmap, but
I'm not sure when. I'm just happy that they give you an external console app
now.

~~~
vsphereclientpm
We've been working on it publicly for over a year now. Have you had a chance
to try the new HTML5 based #vsphereclient? 6.5.0b:
[https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/03/first-vsphere-
clien...](https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2017/03/first-vsphere-client-
html5-update-vsphere-6-5-b.html) or the Fling:
[https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vsphere-html5-web-
client](https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vsphere-html5-web-client)

------
msla
There seems to be more discussion here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848840](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848840)

------
stevenh
Most actual developers currently using Adobe's products will only want to know
whether Adobe AIR is safe. It is.

[https://forums.adobe.com/message/9723772](https://forums.adobe.com/message/9723772)

------
dalbasal
What an epic case study.

How hard it is to EOL anything. How non-standard standards can play a giant
role. How important deign/dev tools can be. How hard it is to get designers to
accept limits (there were all flash websites just for minor design
capabilities)..

~~~
tete
Yes and no. I agree that standards make things easier, but standards probably
make it harder or at least not easier to really come to an EOL for dated
technology.

See how browsers still have to support non CSS styling and similar.

What I meant with standards making it harder to EOL technologies is that a
standard leads to more implementations, which is a good thing, but certainly
not for EOLing a technology.

------
camus2
This is Adobe's fault. They could have open-sourced the player anytime they
wanted, they didn't. I don't blame Apple, or Flash-haters or anybody else but
Adobe and all its stupid policies. Adobe killed Flash. Nobody else did.

~~~
theandrewbailey
I bet there's lots of third party tech in Flash that prevents them from open
sourcing it.

------
qxxx
I installed Adobe Animate last week, it looks really similar to flash, they
even use very similar concepts. I didn't try to write some code yet, but it
looks like they use some kind of an action script.

~~~
barbaricmelons
It's basically Flash, it just exports differently. Same program, different
name to avoid confusion with the Flash platform. Basically the only thing
that's going away for the typical Animate user is the swf, everything else
will remain as Animate exports to html5 and js while using as3.

------
thekevan
I wonder what will happen to large Flash games sites like Kongregate.

~~~
flohofwoe
Here's a recent Kongregate blog post about the topic. HTML5 game uploads have
been growing steadily, and there are now more new HTML5 games uploaded than
Flash games:

[http://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-
here/](http://blog.kongregate.com/html5-is-here/)

~~~
thekevan
I should have done some more research before commenting. Also, there is the
new effort to open source Flash.

------
mfabbri77
It would be cool to see the Adobe Flash 2D vector graphics engine opensourced,
to perform comparisons with similar engine all around: Agg, AmanithVG,
Blend2d, Cairo, NanoVg, Skia, ...

------
senthilnayagam
I still don't understand why don't adobe open source the flash player, so that
security team and browser teams can look into it and maintain a secure
runtime.

------
j45
While Flash Player is meeting it's end, the transferability of existing
investments in AS3 to a new endpoint is tough not to imagine due to the
kinship of ECMAscript with both JS and AS3.

If AS3 could compile to HTML5/JS endpoints, existing, or archival can in some
part live on or be repurposed. The question will be how close it can get
compared to existing solutions. There is likely several billions of dollars
(likely more) of content that will need to be recreated, and not all of it
will, or can be.

With Flash Professional becoming Adobe Animate CC, it wouldn't be surprising
if this transferability becomes more of a prominent format. Adobe has been at
the core of a lot of rich media formats both online and files with PDF and
Flash, and I expect them not to disappear in the world of the tooling to
create such experiences.

There is some stewardship and timing on this announcement from Adobe that says
the right things to those those who are quietly very excited by WebAssembly,
and now have Adobe and others starting to look at it the same way.

------
guessmyname
I have a bad experience every time I have to declare taxes because the
interface was built on top of Flash; many parts of the platform are broken
(missing images, inconsistent styling in sub-pages, JavaScript exceptions) and
I wonder what the government will do to overcome this change, three years is
not much time by government standards.

------
cestith
Flash Player is not Flash. Flash was the name of the media creation software.
Flash Player is not end-of-life because it sucks (which it does) but because
in the days of HTML 5, CSS 3, ECMAScript 6/7, Canvas, WebGL, etc a plugin to
show that sort of media is redundant to the browser.

The creation tool lives on, although rebranded.

------
jordache
I would wager flash can still be used to develop movie set UIs, and other
internalized use cases. However those can also be utilized outside the realm
of web browsers.

It's benefit is a powerful full featured scripting language, in conjunction
with a canvas that is easy to achieve pixel accuracy.

------
exodust
Funny how they spruik their Creative Cloud applications in a message about EOL
Flash. I'm guessing their marketing managers signed off on the message... "End
with a positive note about how awesome we are, and how everyone can subscribe
to our products and give us money on a regular basis no matter how
infrequently they use the product."

Adobe are so... creepy. I won't miss the pre-ticked "you want McAfee fries
with that" box when updating Flash. I wonder how many people didn't see the
checkbox and ended up installing McAfee unintentionally.

I still use a browser extension to force Flash player on Youtube simply
because it performs better than the HTML player, and provides more
flexibility.

------
cjensen
I feel so bad for the Scratch language, which converted to Flash at exactly
the wrong time.

~~~
marcins
Scratch is in the process of a HTML5 rewrite with the help of Google, which
makes sense given that it's the key component of their CS First program.

[https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_3.0](https://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Scratch_3.0)

Sounds like it should be ready by 2020!

~~~
NoGravitas
Honestly, I need it now. I tried to pull up Scratch for my child, and the
"create" link went to a blank page without even an error message. Given that
_no_ browsers on my platform still support NSAPI plugins, there is literally
no way for my child to use Scratch, and they are the perfect age for it.

------
smaili
For fun, here's the famous letter from Jobs himself on Flash -
[https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

------
wooptoo
That's quite a commitment for a company, to maintain a piece of software for
25-ish years.

I have fond memories of using Macromedia Flash 4 and 5 many years ago to
create animations and simple scripted pages. I loved how well integrated
everything was. But I still believe that things are better as they are today:
we have more choices in frameworks, better standards, and some great web
services which work well on both mobile and desktop.

That being said today I uninstalled the Flash plugin preemptively on my
machines just because I am not needing it for any website I commonly use.

------
FRex
This is absolutely awful. There are thousands of great games on ArmorGames and
Kongregate that are in Flash. I they consider open sourcing it or at least
allowing open source alternatives to grow.

------
cbhl
Rather than blaming Adobe, I hope some of you will be inspired to go out and
build the next vector animation format/authoring tool for the web.

------
eadmund
I miss Flash; it was nice to be able to browse the web normally, with Flash
disabled, and then to enable it only for a single function on a single page.
It was relatively rare, and it didn't destroy the web.

With JavaScript, I basically have to enable it everywhere, as the web has been
destroyed and I must now grant practically every site execute permissions on
my computer in order to read content.

~~~
rayvd
This.

That and HTML5 autoplay is super annoying and there doesn't seem to be a
bulletproof way to stop it (at least the various plugins I've tried).

------
asavadatti
I remember the Nike website being all flash even as late as 2009-2010. I'm
glad this abomination is finally done with

------
otterpro
Does this mean an end of all things related to Flash ecosystem or just Flash
itself? I still have Adobe Air apps (as rare as it may seem) that I use
regularly. Does anybody know the best way to migrate Adobe Air apps to HTML5?
My guess is to use Adobe Animate CC, but it is not free..

------
samfisher83
It seems like instead of programming for flash player you have to program for
each browsers HTML/JS quirks. People trash flash, but these browsers also have
security holes. Its hard to make any really complex piece of software
completely secure.

------
dave5104
Anyone know of any command line tools available out there that can convert
Flash assets to PNG assets? I have a large number of Flash assets that I will
eventually need to (finally) convert over. Hoping there are some easy tools
out there available.

~~~
jle17
swfextract from the swftools package should be able to do it.

`swfextract file.swf` should list resources in it, then `swfextract -p 12
file.swf` will get the PNG with id 12.

------
edko
Does anybody know if this includes Adobe Air? There is nothing said in the
press release.

------
humptechtips
Too bad. Mozzilla will not ask me to update flash player as it is literally
gone now. I must there are too much memories with flash player as there was a
time when you couldn't play a video on youtube without it.
#ripadobeflashplayer

------
oblib
The only people who care about the life of this product are those who invested
in buying and learning how to use it. I can understand why they care, but I
don't.

I decided not to invest in it back when Macromedia bought it because I knew it
would be expensive and subjected me to their whims. I thought "Futuresplash"
was great and had high hopes for it but I'd already been burned by Adobe's
planned obsolescence and I hated the way Macromedia designed their UIs and
thought they charged way too much for their products.

I stopped using Adobe's plug-in on my Mac even before Jobs came out and
complained about Flash. I considered it a form "spyware" and even if it wasn't
it was constantly pestering me to update it and I seldom ever visited a site
that used it. As I recall it was a bit of a pain to get rid of it too.

~~~
tambourine_man
>The only people who care about the life of this product are those who
invested in buying and learning how to use it.

And the ones that have content currently deployed on the platform. A few of my
clients still have sites in Flash that I wrote for them in the early 2000s.
Every year I try to convince them that they need to switch, but they can't
justify the cost.

~~~
omg_ketchup
Nobody "learned" Flash. You opened it up and you already knew what to do.

That's the real value it provided.

~~~
oblib
That's a pretty big leap to make.

------
LyalinDotCom
As things like Flash and Silverlight due i can't help but think that there
will be another one of these in-browser techs that is just bound to come back
around. What's new is old and what's old is new :D

------
meerita
I made a living with Flash. In fact, I first made Flash before making HTML,
CSS.

------
betatest
Of course not. It was planed originally in 2012 to happen in 2015. HTML5 is
STILL not ready. And it STILL won't be in 2025. All you haters can downvote me
to oblivion new for saying THE TRUTH (drops mic)

------
komali2
>Adobe also notes that it plans to be more aggressive about ending support for
Flash “in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash
Player are being distributed.”

What did they mean by this line?

~~~
gpawl
China.

~~~
komali2
Why would China be interested in distributing out of date versions of Flash?
And how would Adobe more aggressively ending life for these regions affect
them if they're already out of date and unlicensed anyway?

------
marban
Thumbs up if you have jaw-dropping memories of this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c)

------
blondie9x
RIP Steve Jobs [https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

------
xupybd
Flash ads were terrible, a blight on the web. But Flex is so much more
structured than any JS framework I've used. It wasn't super pretty but it did
the job.

RIP a major Flex project I support :(

------
baalimago
I'm foreseeing someone finding a hole in flash security around 2022 forcing
adobe to update it again anyway, sorta like wannadecryptor

but rip all the flashgame websites (if there even is any left)

------
tapsboy
Interesting, that it will still survive in browsers till 2020. Co-
incidentally, today at A+E Networks, we finally migrated all our web
properties to HTML5 video playback.

------
Itzcoatl
The cross platform apps arguments can easily being applied to all the {"React
native", "Xamarin", etc} bullshit. IMHO.

------
TekMol
I wonder if WebAssembly is facing a similar fate. Somehow, I always have a
"flashy" feeling when reading about it.

------
BatFastard
Flash is not dead, only the browser plug in is going away. AIR is still alive
and well, for both desktop and Mobile

------
gumby
What a shame. Not installing flash used to be an excellent way of blocking
shitty websites and annoying ads.

------
tomc1985
What about Flash proper? I imagine sunsetting that would be devastating for
the animation industry.

------
mmmnt
Noooo, whats next? The real player?

------
WalterBright
Since Flash and MS-Paint are going to be dumped, why not open source them?

~~~
macspoofing
I don't know about MS-Paint, but there are a number of licensing issues with
simply open sourcing Flash.

~~~
WalterBright
If the product is dead, that means the licencors are likely to no longer make
any money off it it. This means they will likely be open to open sourcing the
code for free or next to free.

Open sourcing dead projects do have advantages for the licencors:

1\. nobody likes the code they worked hard on to be dead

2\. it's valuable free marketing for their brand name

3\. they can charge for support

~~~
pm215
Flash player might be dead, but that doesn't mean $THIRD_PARTY_LIBRARY that it
uses isn't still being profitably licensed by its original developers. Or
maybe the player uses a library that Adobe have a perpetual binary license to,
but the original company that owned that library went bust a decade ago and
nobody knows who owns the copyright on it now to allow a relicense. Open
sourcing things does have a cost, and a big chunk of that is in running down
these legalities.

------
TallGuyShort
Long live Homestar Runner!

------
digi_owl
Now if only there were not a war of streaming protocols going on...

------
therethenthat
up in heaven, Steve Jobs is smiling a bit more than usual today :)

------
partycoder
The irony is that AS3 felt more Java-esque than JavaScript.

------
AaronMT
How is Shumway doing?

~~~
bsmedberg
Shumway is not under active development. The actionscript runtime itself is
pretty good, but getting compatibility with the Flash API surface turned out
to be practically unachievable.

------
VicYu
I see, you already have Animate CC.

------
geekamongus
And there was much rejoicing.

------
ipstas
somebody still using this outdated pos? can they kill pdf too?

------
tandav
It was EOL in 2010

------
Kenji
Hate flash however much you want. I learned to program with old ActionScript
and wrote my first game as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good
foundations for JavaScript which is almost identical). To this day, all the
applications I wrote still work perfectly. That's an _achievement_. Not to
mention, Macromedia (later: Adobe) Flash was a fantastic environment for
minigames and I haven't yet seen anything replace it properly. I weep for
today's children, is there a good alternative? I mean, a program where you can
scribble, make a movie clip out of it and make it move with code, just like
that. And then publish it on the internet effortlessly.

~~~
dandare
Same here. "I learned to program with old ActionScript and wrote my first game
as a kid (that actually taught me OOP and laid good foundations for JavaScript
which" ... was way inferior to AS3. AS3 was based on ECMAScript 4 that was
later abandoned by JS vendors. Until TypeScript came along JS was horribly
inferior to AS3.

I will be forever glad for AS3 and the Flash ecosystem.

~~~
Kenji
I started to learn AS3 but quickly transitioned to other technologies because
even back then, the end of flash was forseeable. I liked AS3 but it was time
to move on for a variety of reasons, among them a desire to have more control
over hardware accelerated rendering and general performance concerns.

Fun fact: At university, a teaching assistant at "Introduction to programming"
asked in which languages we've programmed before and I said ActionScript and
he said that is not a programming language :)

------
misticdeveloper
Yes! HBO's lazy ass will finally be forced to get rid of their horrible Flash
web player

------
Samuray
Good thing I spent so much time learning and using Flash. Never again, Adobe.

~~~
j45
Actionscript is nearly identical to forms of Javascript, so I'm not sure what
you find about learning your time with Flash that wouldn't be transferrable.

Adobe Animate CC is the new version of Flash Pro that builds for HTML5, and if
that doesn't float your boat, there's a wealth of JS libraries like pixi and
p5.js that look extremely inviting.

------
givinguflac
Good riddance.

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
Good.

------
samstave
heh -- I read that as "Flash ___memory_ __will be EOL by 2020 "

------
kfk
I had my 10 seconds of panic today with this title as I misread Flash into
Flask. Anywy, now I that I know it's Flash I am perfectly fine.

------
TheRoccoB
I made a celebration post! [https://medium.com/@theroccob/in-honor-of-the-end-
of-flash-8...](https://medium.com/@theroccob/in-honor-of-the-end-of-
flash-8a683767607f)

------
drewlander
What about homestarrunner? Will somebody think about homestarrunner!?

------
codedokode
Without Flash live streams on Youtube cannot be played in Firefox 45 on
Windows XP. So Flash is still useful.

And by the way videos in Twitter and Vimeo don't work in both Chromium and
Firefox on Windows XP. Because HTML5 video cross-platform compatibility is not
perfect and developers have chosen not to encode videos in formats supported
on this platform.

~~~
TheKarateKid
Anyone who still uses XP doesn't deserve to have compatibility. The time to
move on was years ago.

~~~
codedokode
XP is still more popular than many Linux distributions. Should Youtube stop
supporting them too?

~~~
ConfucianNardin
Important difference: you will get support for most of those Linux
distributions "for free" just by targeting modern web standards.

