Ask HN: Why doesn't Adobe just kill the Flash Player? - pier25
======
jordhy
Technical Reasons: Because Flash is more than an animation platform. Entire
applications have been developed in ActionScript (the platform's main
language), significant piping was deployed (mainly in the early 2000s) in
Adobe/Macromedia-based solutions where Flash played a key role as a
connector/target/control interface.

In other words, for many important websites, Flash was the JavaScript of today
(far reaching, with critical appearances in both the back and front-end).

Business Reasons: Adobe has had a rough decade. The Macromedia acquisition was
a red pill (IMHO) for many at the company. The company has been dramatically
slow in adapting to a new Web. Several major projects have failed or under-
performed. All and all, Adobe has bigger fish to fry than to procure their
developer base of a free/low-cost migration solution.

Other Reasons: 1)The nature of proprietary software - a lot has been written
about this so feel free to look it up on the Web but basically its hard to
just discontinue software without facing several non-trivial legal challenges.
2) The Steve Jobs Effect - or the curse of having a major figure accelerate
the demise of a product that should have evolved into an open standard. 3) The
Adobe Coldfusion Effect - Macromedia/Adobe has a product called ColdFusion
Server that used Flash technology A LOT to differentiate itself, however the
transition strategy adopted by Adobe didn't immediately discontinue Flash
support for ColdFusion generated reports (for example) and such a direction
made developers less likely to invest in a quicker migration to HTML5.

I feel your pain and, at this point, would also like to see Adobe pull the
plug once and for all. But we live in a complicated world, for better or
worse.

~~~
nkkollaw
I don't get it, aren't there free (and open source) Flash players besides
Adobe's?

Google Chrome doesn't use Adobe's Flash player, for instance, but a player
called PepperFlash.

Adobe could very well discontinue developing their player, and just tell
people to use an open source version. They could make it a marketing stunt by
open sourcing their player for user freedom or some stuff like that.

~~~
robinduckett
PepperFlash is made by Adobe, and is closed source, it's called "PepperFlash"
because it uses a different set of APIs, "PPAPI" vs "NPAPI". It's available to
download from their "other versions" download page, so I'm wondering what your
point is?

~~~
future1979
Pepper and Nacl seem to have an uncertain. I read that Google unstaffed some
teams. Anyone familiar with what is going on?

------
MaulingMonkey
Note that "kill" is just a _less_ ugly way of saying "stop providing security
updates for." It's not a SAAS, they can't just snap their fingers, shut down
the servers, and have flash actually go away. Even if Adobe actively tried to
murder Flash Player, people would still end up pirating copies of the
installer from shady sites for their legacy needs.

~~~
dispose13432
No. Kill is to _only_ add bugfixes for X years and then commit to shutting it
down, while creating a migration path (shumway, whatever) for existing code.

Windows XP is dead.

Windows 7 is dead.

~~~
cm2187
Win 7 is going to be an even bigger die hard than Win XP.

~~~
cpeterso
Yes. Windows 7, at 45%, is the most common operating system among Firefox
users. Only 26% run Windows 10.

[https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-report/#goto-
os...](https://metrics.mozilla.com/firefox-hardware-report/#goto-os-and-
architecture)

------
sullivanmatt
I work appsec for a company that provides a (primarily) flash-based web
platform - Apache Flex, specifically. What people don't realize is the extreme
cost of porting things like this to HTML5. We have nearly 1M lines of
ActionScript. The browser makers and Adobe are aware of deployments like us,
and that's why they can't just pull the plug. We don't need a few months to
fix this problem, we need _years_.

~~~
tinus_hn
Why would Adobe keep investing money in your problem? When there no longer is
a revenue stream that funds updates there will be no more updates.

If you need years to transition off Flash you should have started years ago
and if you haven't yet, you have a very big problem on your hands. And if you
think Adobe cares about that you are mistaken. They don't care unless they can
make money out of it. They are not a charity.

~~~
chris_wot
Which is precisely what Microsoft did with a raft of technologies that were
actually quite good. WPF, SilverLight and WCF all come to mind, and are all
reasons why I won't adopt a new Microsoft framework in future.

~~~
gaius
Or Apple with OpenDoc and a whole heap of others.

------
rincebrain
They tried, on a smaller scale, with dropping the Linux NPAPI plugin.

Unfortunately, they were unable to manage even that, and ended up resuming
updates to it after several years, since so many security vulns kept popping
up in it.

The major browsers are trying to leverage their forced-upgrade strategems to
increasingly isolate Flash content (click-to-play, locking it in increasingly-
harsh sandboxes and throwing away the keys...), because the problem was never
convincing _Adobe_ to kill Flash.

It was, is, and will remain convincing users who have run sites with it
forever to migrate off.

There are enterprise device web interfaces written in Java applets or Flash
(or, on rare occasion, both), that are past EOL but still in use in a great
number of locations. There are many "applications" that are just embedded web
browsers doing the above dance.

Flash has been around 20 years - it'll probably take at least another 10 after
Adobe absolutely stops any updates (which, I think, would take either a
transparent migration tool or a bankruptcy), if not more, before seeing Flash
becomes an abnormality.

~~~
vbezhenar
Yup. I have HP Microserver at my home and it has remote KVM feature powered by
Java webstart application. I expect this server to last for many years, so I
need access to Java. I'm Java developer myself, so I figured out how to start
it without installing Java plugin, but I don't think that there are many
people who would do that. So probably Flash or Java will exist for many years,
may be behind some obscure flags.

~~~
rincebrain
AFAICS every major vendor's KVM plugin is either the same stack with different
brandings or just multiple implementations of the same VNC+[secret
sauce]+[custom auth] concept in Java - Dell, HP, and Supermicro all do this,
at a minimum, as well as probably anyone (else) with an ASTxxxx-based BMC.

I'm hoping OpenBMC wins the day here, at least, so that's one less place with
Java or Flash.

------
ars
Go google for online kids games in the browser and you'll have your answer.

They are virtually all written in Flash, and it's a huge market.

You would have a lot of unhappy kids if it all just went away.

Some new games are HTML5, but most aren't - and the old games are still fun.

~~~
gaius
So the only argument for keeping it around is "won't somebody think of the
children"?

~~~
Applejinx
Rainbow Dash is in flash ;) (or to put it another way: the wildly popular gen
4 of My Little Pony, with a substantial adult audience, began as a TV series
authored in Flash for its animation, and AFAIK still authors most shots in it)

Vectors are scalable, you see… if you're good with an art style using puppeted
animation in vector graphics (which can be much quicker and still look good
and move well!) then Flash is right there, able to be used, flexible to any
screen size you like. Lines made with Bezier curves are appealing to the eye,
and the rendering is super clean (when it's not glitching out, see the MLP
cyclops horse glitch)

I've spent hours poking around on the web seeing if there were ways to render
Flash clips to, say, SVG: simply because I know Natron exists, is a WAY more
powerful compositor but much like Shake (and presumably Nuke, out of my pay
grade) can composite numbered image frames, including SVG. That means you can
zoom and scale SVG-based clips infinitely without losing clarity.

(I'm aware of Fusion and just learned of 'free Nuke' doing a lastminute google
check on this stuff, but I favor Natron because it's not restricted to
noncommercial/hobbyist purposes and as it's a opensource option, it should be
possible to keep a working version of it indefinitely so long as there's been
at least one working version on your system. The big commercial software
projects, I always worry they will forced upgrade you out of what you use)

~~~
Applejinx
…and the point is, you can create animations in Flash. It's a pretty damn
mature technology, familiar to many, has a whole infrastructure around
efficient use of it, and to replicate that in something like Natron from
scratch ain't gonna happen.

Even people talking about reimplementing Flash in open form seem to be talking
mostly about playback or web, not authoring.

Flash already exists and mostly works. It even exists in non-subscription form
and runs on older machines.

~~~
Tempest1981
...and use timelines and logic to sequence the animations, and combine them.
You can do quite a bit of programming with out "writing code".

------
snadal
We're here also maintaining some big platforms using Adobe Flash.

Even I mostly agree on the need to reduce unnecessary Flash usage on the
public web, there are some features Flash provides that can not still be
replaced by HTML5, like audio recording on browser which is not available on
some still widely used web browsers.

If there is a need of providing support for those features on relatively old
browsers in corporate environments then the best (the only?) choice is Flash
Player.

I can also argue on the far less number of development and testing hours
needed compared with HTML5 equivalent, where you know that content will render
perfectly on all browsers that include Flash Player.

IMO, before killing player itself we will should focus in killing all those
old browsers versions to provide developers a real alternative for these
features.

~~~
szastupov
> like audio recording on browser which is not available on some still widely
> used web browsers

Like Safari, and it's a modern browser, so much for the "Steve Jobs Effect"...

------
ksec
May be it is just me, but I actually like Flash for a lot of reasons. I hate
it as a web tech, but generally it is very good for games and animations.

Rather then killing it, I hope they just open source it. It is in some ways
better then what we have in HTML5, but being closed source and not able to
optimize enough for Mobile usage causes its death.

~~~
enobrev
I haven't worked with flash in at least five years, though I had worked on
quite a few decent sized projects with it before then. I became quite
competent with Actionscript 3 and absolutely enjoyed working with it. I'd
always hoped Javascript would lean in that general direction, as was generally
assumed early on (not that I dislike ES6).

I especially liked the potential for writing things dynamically and then
refactoring toward strictness over time while moving a project beyond the
prototype stage.

I'm surprised there's no AS3 => JS compiler.

~~~
jsjohnst
> I'm surprised there's no AS3 => JS compiler.

There sorta is. Checkout Haxe [0] sometime. Technically it's a superset of
AS3, but you can take most AS3 and use it as Haxe code. Then there are
numerous transpilers for converting Haxe => whatever (one of which being
JavaScript).

[0] [http://haxe.org](http://haxe.org)

------
minimaxir
There are _still_ parts of the internet developed in the 2000's which use
Flash. Even the magic of HTML5 will not allow those sites to easily make the
transition for free.

As long as there is Flash in this world, Flash will need to be supported to
fix the inevitable security vulnerabilities.

~~~
agumonkey
I wonder what's the state of HTML5 on older OS ... flash had acceptable
hardware access early on, html video didn't until recently.

------
sev
Encrypted video playback is/was a big reason as well. The browser wars for
HTML5 EME for playback of encrypted content is still crazy, but only very
recently been slightly manageable.

Safari - only FairPlay encryption through HLS, but only modern versions of
Safari; Chrome - Widevine Dash, IE - Playready Dash (and smooth), but only
recent versions, Firefox only after version 52 do they finally support
Widevine Dash, otherwise no EME prior to that.

~~~
hsivonen
> Firefox only after version 52 do they finally support Widevine Dash,
> otherwise no EME prior to that.

What's your source for this?

Firefox shipped EME support for Adobe Primetime on Windows in Firefox 38.
Firefox shipped EME support for Widevine on Windows and Mac in 47 and on Linux
in 49.

------
adzm
There are a surprising amount of applications built on Flash and still
running. I'd rather they open the source or donate the source to the community
than simply abandon it. The web ecosystem potentially could have ended up
drastically different if that was done back when Flash was ubiquitous. Who
knows, canvas and svg might not have had as much enthusiasm.

------
dispose13432
Because people/companies rely on it?

This is the sad issue with Web based tech. On desktop, you can run most
software from Windows 95 on natively on your modern Windows 10 computer.

Think about it.

That means that I wrote a small utility in 1996, you bought it in 1997, I went
out of business in 1998, and you can run it in 2017 (that's 20 years later).

How much of Websites/games/utilities from the 90s/2000(!)s are dead because
the #1 open language was found to have too many security holes (or more
precisely, couldn't update properly) and no ones around to re-write them in
HTML5.

\----

How much of current HTML5 javascript will be "turned off" in a few years?

What if browsers (read - Google) decide that "eval is evil" and ban it in JS?

~~~
icebraining
I don't see this as desktop vs web. Running a Flash-based site from 1995 still
works in IE, Chrome or Firefox, while running a Mac desktop application from
1995 doesn't.

~~~
dispose13432
That's true, Apple never really cared for backwards-compatibility.

------
CaliforniaKarl
If Flash was killed, then virtually all of Homestar Runner, and much of
Newgrounds, would stop working properly. That cannot be allowed.

------
milankragujevic
Because DRM, HLS, HW acceleration, H.264+MP3 (which is funny cause HTML5 can
play H.264 and MP3 separately, but not them together in any container), that's
what I can think of.

~~~
hsivonen
H.264+MP3 in MP4 in HTML5 tends to work in non-Apple browsers.

------
_nalply
There's still a killer feature which is only just now (autumn 2016) being
slowly supported by HTML5, and this only for some browsers: Client side video
recording and streaming to server. Another one is peer-to-peer. WebRTC is more
complicated than RTMFP and still not implemented for all browsers.

We have started to develop a replacement for our Flash app and are fighting a
lot with specified but not yet implemented features. Especially configuring
the webcam (resolution, frame rate) is still in a very sad state of
implementation.

An example is MediaTrackCapabilities:
[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/webrtc/issues/detail?id=4807](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/webrtc/issues/detail?id=4807)
and on MDN you get Not Found: [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/MediaTrackC...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/MediaTrackCapabilities)

In short, if you try to implement this: here be dragons! while this is working
in Flash for years.

~~~
fulafel
It's been supported by Chrome and Firefox on desktop and mobile for a few
years now. Since about mid-2013.

~~~
_nalply
MediaRecorder has only been implemented autumn 2016, and it's still
incomplete.

~~~
fulafel
Ah, I hadn't heard about that API. But audio/video encoding and streaming was
a basic use case from launch. I guess the new API lets you handle the encoded
data yourself, and not necessarily send it out over WebRTC.

~~~
_nalply
MediaRecorder is essential for video encoding. A friend of me had to implement
video encoding in JavaScript when he tried out uploading videos to the server.
He did something like this: write a video frame to a canvas element, then
encode it in JPG and upload that JPG to the server and then make a video out
of the JPG frames. Absolutely ludicrous.

------
Spirelock
It's not really Adobe's responsibilty to kill it. At this point in time
(2017ish), users have effectively killed it by removing it from their machine.

And if they really need it, Chrome is your best bet, since it handles Flash
plugin, security and updates for you.

So it is being killed (but by the users) and eventually die off like other old
software. Maybe running in an emulator in the future.

~~~
caidh
Removal of the plugin may be increasingly common among technical users, but I
don't think many average users are removing it. The thing that is really
killing it is deprecation by browsers (click-to-play initially).

------
Esau
I almost liked it better when we needed Flash for video and audio, because now
with HTML5, I continuously run into website abusing the feature for
advertising. (Whoever decided to use autoplay video and audio for web
advertising should be killed.)

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
We need Click-To-Play for web video. I'm not even kidding.

~~~
cpeterso
On Firefox, you can flip media.autoplay.enabled = false in about:config,
though this may confuse some JavaScript media players that think the video is
playing when it's not.

------
traverseda
What's stopping a flash implementation in asm.js or equivalents?

~~~
sparky_
Mozilla was actually working on exactly this, but seems to have stopped
without explanation.
[https://github.com/mozilla/shumway](https://github.com/mozilla/shumway)

~~~
thristian
I spent some time trying to figure out what happened to Shumway, a while ago.
As far as I can make out, Mozilla figured out that with the amount of
resources they could afford to put into Shumway, by the time it reached the
point where it could generally play most Flash content, nobody would be making
Flash content anymore so it wouldn't be a notable feature for Firefox.

There's definitely still value in something like Shumway for viewing legacy,
historical content, just like there's legacy in browsers being able to view
old Geocities pages. But it's never going to be a feature of significant
commercial value.

~~~
EvilTerran
It's possible archive.org might be interested in acting as patron for that/a
similar project. Seems to me it's more relevant to their mission than most
other groups'.

------
niftich
There is a good amount of existing Flash content on the web. Adobe has de-
emphasized the production of _new_ Flash content several years ago, and
pivoted its products (and customers) towards HTML5.

Killing Flash outright would do next to no good to Adobe. Google (and on their
heels, Mozilla) are well on their way in making accessing existing Flash
content more and more difficult [1], which probably appeals to people who
think Flash needs to be banished, but most likely frustrates people who want
continued to access to that content.

But that being said, in all likelihood, Adobe will eventually stop issuing
even security fixes to Flash Player, especially once Chrome and other browsers
have put that content behind click-to-plays, warnings, etc., or if Chrome and
Microsoft stop their bundling of updates.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403)

------
nitwit005
You could just read Adobe's blog posts on this. Not hard to find:
[https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-
html5-an...](https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2015/11/flash-html5-and-
open-web-standards.html)

------
aburan28
It feels like they have transformed their business model into becoming a zero-
day broker for their own software

------
pcr0
Aside from web games where Flash is still king for older titles, Adobe AIR is
a Flash platform that's still used widely in older projects.

By now, I'd say most new development in Flash has completely stopped, but it
will take another decade before Flash becomes completely irrelevant.

------
adolph
In terms of installed user base that isn't going anywhere, Computer Based
Training (CBT) embraced Flash deployment and as a result has tons of
conversion resistant legacy content.

------
tukelully
I'm curious how the ongoing support of Flash applications on the web compares
to the support of Java applets on the web. I don't know much about the latter,
but if anyone here is engaged in supporting a legacy Java applet I'd be
genuinely curious to hear about it.

------
senthilnayagam
Question should be "why Adobe does not open sources the SWF format and the
flash player"

~~~
Sanddancer
The SWF format's been open for the better part of a decade [1].

[http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/swf/p...](http://wwwimages.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/swf/pdf/swf-
file-format-spec.pdf)

~~~
dispose13432
How accurate is that document?

Windows API is open (you can get documentation for it) but it's known that "in
the real world" the API doesn't follow documentation, which causes problems
for Wine.

------
Qantourisc
Not really an answer to your question: but it's up to developers(of websites
and applications) and users to kill flash, by not using it any more.

------
x0ry
Google's new Developer software is pretty neat, reminds me of a really basic
adobe flash 4.0, converts everything to HTML5.

------
shmerl
The only promising replacement (Shumway) that could be suitable for legacy
applications was discontinued by Mozilla.

------
rbanffy
If Adobe kills it, malware makers will continue the development by patching
binaries.

------
expertentipp
They are not even able to update it, how would they be able to kill it?

------
firefoxd
What do they gain by killing it?

~~~
CalChris
The quickening.

------
crististm
I hope they don't. The html5 performance in Firefox compared to Flash is a
joke...

