
“Adobe Flash is no longer supported in Safari” - CharlesW
https://developer.apple.com/safari/technology-preview/release-notes/
======
apignotti
We are working to solve the Flash problem "the right way" with a WebAssembly
based virtualization solution, for more info:

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-
webassembly-...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-
using-cheerpx-an-update-d500b6fbc44e)

[https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-
with...](https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with-
webassembly-done-right-eb6838b7e36f)

Feel free to drop me questions:
[https://twitter.com/alexpignotti](https://twitter.com/alexpignotti)

~~~
unixhero
Just to be clear, who are "we" in this case? :-)

~~~
apignotti
Leaning Technologies (www.leaningtech.com), we make compilers that target
WebAssembly and JavaScript.

I am CTO of the company.

~~~
AlchemistCamp
Ah, it had appeared maybe you represented Apple or the Safari team in some way
with your top-level announcement.

~~~
Dylan16807
If Apple was going to bother with backwards compatibility, they would have it
done before shutting down the old version.

------
nbrempel
[https://www.newgrounds.com/](https://www.newgrounds.com/) has been around for
a long long time and has a wealth of old content built in flash.

Luckily they are creating [https://ruffle.rs](https://ruffle.rs) which is a
flash emulator written in rust. All of this fantastic media should be
preserved!

~~~
saluki
Is there any place you can play Desktop Tower Defense without flash?

[https://www.kongregate.com/games/preecep/desktop-tower-
defen...](https://www.kongregate.com/games/preecep/desktop-tower-defense)

~~~
OzzyB
Seconded, I missed that time-sink game so much, haven't been able to find a
replacement.

For some reason all the newer tower defense games use a fixed playing field
whereas the original DTD allowed you to build your own defensive walls.

Edit: We _really_ need a Flash Archive

~~~
sagarm
Building your own walls was very exploitable, so I can understand removing the
ability.

~~~
ilugaslifk
There are some fantastic TDs that allow you to build your own walls in an open
field, they just need to be explicitly balanced around that.

Besides Desktop TD, the other main classic of that subgenre is Bubble Tanks
TD: [https://armorgames.com/play/4962/bubble-tanks-tower-
defense](https://armorgames.com/play/4962/bubble-tanks-tower-defense)

------
tombert
I'm sure there are probably copyright or patent reasons that Adobe can't
easily release Flash's source code, but I really wish they would.

It's great that there are community projects to help recreate Flash, but it
would make those projects a lot simpler and less error-prone if Adobe would
simply provide the reference implementations.

~~~
maram
>I’m sure there are probably copyright or patent reasons that Adobe can’t
easily release flash’s source code, but I really wish they would.

Time to reread what Steve Jobs wrote about it a decade ago!
[https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

~~~
gear54rus
Is he really whining about something being closed and proprietary? Can't
fucking believe it.

~~~
maram
>Is he really whining about something being closed and proprietary? Can't
fucking believe it.

"whining?" _Steve Jobs didn 't whine_...He built the greatest products in our
digital era.

He answered Mossberg and Swisher here at 2:00 on why he wrote Thoughts on
Flash.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=4177s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=4177s)

">Mossberg: you published thoughts on flash, is it fair to be abrupt?

Steve: Apple is a company that doesn’t have the most resources of everybody in
the world and the way we’ve succeeded is by choosing what horses to ride
carefully technically. We try to look for these technical vectors that have a
future and that are headed up and you technology..different pieces of
technology go in cycles. They have their Springs and summers and autumns and
then they you know go to the graveyard of technology. So we try to pick things
that are in there Springs and if you choose wisely you can save yourself an
enormous amount of work versus trying to do everything and you can really put
energy into making those new emerging technologies be great on your platform
rather than just okay because you’re spreading yourself too thin. So we have a
history of doing that that. As an example, we went from the 5 inch floppy disk
the 3.5 inch floppy disk with the Mac.

>Mossberg: before other people right?

Steve: We were the first to do that we made the 3.5 floppy disk this popular,
Sony invented it and we put it in the first products, and there some good
reasons we did that, we got rid of the floppy disk altogether in 1998, with
the first iMac. We also got rid of these things called serial and parallel
ports and we were the first to adopt USB, even though Intel had invented it.
You first saw it en mass on iMac. And so we have gotten rid of things, we were
one of the first to get rid of optical drives with a MacBook Air, I think
things are moving in that direction as well. And sometimes when we get rid of
things like the floppy disk drive on the original iMac people call us crazy.

>Mossberg interrupts: or at least premature maybe.

Steve: No! they call us crazy. But sometimes you just have to pick the things
that look like they’re gonna be the right horses to ride going forward and
flash looks like a technology that had its day but is really on is waning and
HTML5 looks like the technology that’s really on the ascendancy right now and
to incorporate flash into systems is a lot of work there’s not smartphone
shipping with flash on it now as you know.

>Mossberg: but you know that there will be right?

Steve: Well, you know there’s going to have been for the last two or three
years and every six months it gets updated, so I’m sure that eventually they
will and there is a lot of issues with that in terms of battery life and you
know security and other things, but more importantly, HTML5 is starting to
emerge. You know there’s been an avalanche of people that have said we’re
doing HTML5 video and the video looks better and it works better and you don’t
need a plug-in to run it, and so while 75% of the video in the web may be in
flash, you know 25% going to 50% very shortly is also available in HTML5.

>Kara: so do you say that to consumers, I mean besides the technologies?

Steve: I think consumers outside of the valley and our industry aren’t having
this issue…

>Mossberg interrupts: Except when they hold up their iPad and they go to a web
page and there’s like a hole there, where a video would be.

Steve: there are holes in some websites but those holes are getting plugged
real fast. The holes that exist now are our ads, and that’s the problem for
some people.

>Mossberg: Not entirely.

Steve: but that’s the number one holes that are there

>Mossberg: and what about the other community that I think is impacted by this
and that’s developers, because what I think a lot of the coverage of this
flash issue has overlooked is that yes, flash is a video container and there
are other video containers actually have a very rising share each to h.264 and
the native HTML5 but it’s also a development environment and there are entire
some of them quite beautiful written on a flash?

Steve: an even more popular development environment was hypercard and we were
okay to axe that!

>Mossberg: it wasn’t more popular than flash, was?!

Steve: in its day, sure it was.

>Mossberg: on your platform right?

Steve: no no no no. Hypercard was huge in its day because it was accessible to
anybody. You could be a hypercard developer. We have over 200,000 apps on the
App Store. So something must be going right in terms of attracting developers
to our platform!!

>Kara: so your goal your your ultimate goal is to get rid of flash or just to
how..

Steve: well, see our goal is really easy we didn’t start off to have a war
with flash or anything else we just made a technical decision that we weren’t
gonna put the energy into getting flash on our platform, we told Adobe if you
ever have this thing running fast come back and show us, which they never did
and/but we think we’re not gonna use it, and that was it. And we shipped the
iPhone and it doesn’t use flash and it wasn’t until we shipped the iPad and it
didn’t use flash that Adobe started to raise a stink about it. We didn’t raise
a stink about it, we never mentioned the word Adobe or flash or anything else.
We like Adobe we have a lot of common customers with CS you know their
Creative Suite software and things like that, so we weren’t trying to have a
fight. We just decided not to use one of their products in our platform and so
you know they started to say a lot of bad things about us in the press and
this and that and it went on for months and that’s why I wrote Thoughts on
Flash, because we were trying to be real professional about this and weren’t
talking to the press about it, we didn’t think it was a matter for the press
and we finally just said enough is enough! We’re tired of these guys trashing
us in the press over this and so we wrote down the reasons why technically we
didn’t use flash, and they are just as true today as they were when we wrote
it as they were six months or a year before that.

>Mossberg: What if people say you know the iPad is crippled in this respect.

Steve: This is America. Things are packages of emphasis, some things are
emphasize in a products , some things are not done as well in a product,
somethings are chosen not to be done at all in a product and so different
people make different choices and if the market tells us we’re making the
wrong choices we listen to the market! We’re just people running this company
we’re trying to make great products for people and so we have at least the
courage of our conventions to say we don’t think this is part of what makes a
great product, we are gonna leave it out, some people are gonna not like that,
they’re gonna call us names it’s not going to be in certain companies vested
interests that we do that but we’re gonna take the heat because we want to
make the best product in the world for customers. We’re gonna instead focus
our energy on these technologies, which we think are in their ascendency and
we think are gonna be the right technologies for customers and you know what?!
they are paying us to make those choices . That’s what a lot of customers pay
us to do, is to try to make the best products we can and if we succeed they’ll
buy them, and if we don’t they won’t! And it’ll all work itself out. So far
I’d have to say that people seem to be liking iPads. We’ve sold one every
three seconds since we launched it."

He wrote that post, and spoke for 10 minutes explaining all the reasons, and
you called him whining.. I will end with a quote from Steve Jobs email to a
journalist

"By the way, what have you done that's so great? Do you create anything, or
just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?"

what have you done that's so great to say that Steve Jobs was whining when he
put valid reasons for not going with flash?

~~~
gear54rus
Well that's a nice try but I don't have to create anything to see through the
BS. I just have to use some products this guy of yours created.

HTML5 was nowhere near the capability for interactive apps for a long time.
And flash was, just look at those flash game websites, 1000s of them there.
His attempt to make the whole argument about videos and not about preserving
his walled garden that is app store is as dishonest as the rest of their
typical marketing bullshit.

> He built the greatest products in our digital era.

Well maybe that's the problem right there. They were great from a business
standpoint (aka getting fat asses fatter), never from user standpoint. Those
products enslaved their users because they are closed down annoying i-know-
what-you-need-and-dont-need-better-than-you pieces of trash.

It's also ironic that you use this quote:

> Do you create anything

Did he? Or someone else did for him to sell with his holier-than-thou
marketing?

~~~
Terretta
“Holier than thou”:

Original iPhone supported offline HTML5 apps, with home screen icons and full
app saved to home screen ... and iOS still supports that. Yes, you can still
distribute purely open apps that work offline to iOS devices outside the app
store with zero approvals from Apple or anyone.

Developers preferred the app store even for “apps” that are nothing but a web
window, not just about APIs etc.

So Jobs is onto something with the “a product is a package of emphasis” and
the market decides.

Sounds like you don’t like the market, which as Jobs noted in that quote, is
everything outside the valley bubble.

------
js2
I haven't had the Adobe Flash plugin installed for several years now. I can't
even remember the last time I needed to use Chrome for Flash support.

My kids are in college and I don't think they've needed Flash even for the
variety of archaic sites they have to deal with.

~~~
reaperducer
_I can 't even remember the last time I needed touse Chrome for Flash
support._

My company's spam filter service requires Flash if you're on desktop. There's
a mobile version that's non-Flash, but it's feature limited.

The web site of one of the larger pre-FAANG online advertising companies is
all Flash. You can't even change your password without it.

~~~
gruez
What’s a “spam filter service” and why does it need flash to function?

~~~
bradstewart
A thing that holds incoming emails it thinks are spam and provides a web UI
(usually) allowing you to review and release messages to your actual inbox.

~~~
gruez
Isn't that typically handled in the same interface as your regular inbox? Or
is this some enterprisey service that forces you to go to their website to
review it?

~~~
bradstewart
Its an enterprisey service that forces you to go to their website to review
it.

------
abrowne
Adobe "will stop distributing and updating Flash Player after December 31,
2020" [https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-
life.html](https://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/end-of-life.html)

So for a browser version that will be released this fall as a non-preview, it
makes sense.

~~~
Mindless2112
Not only will Adobe stop distributing it, it will stop working.

> _Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player
> after the EOL Date._

~~~
emdax
Wow. Good catch. So if this wasn't anticipated or disclosed to their authoring
tool customers, would it be considered breach of service and qualify for a
refund?

------
apocalyptic0n3
This makes me a little sad. I started my professional career as an AS3 dev
building apps in Adobe AIR with occasional work in Flash. I realize AIR is
still kinda supported, but the writing is on the wall. I've obviously moved
on, but it does feel like losing an old friend.

~~~
Aldipower
Same here, although I started my career with Perl 20 years ago and then
switched to AS3 and Air building a complete interactive museum with it, still
open and functioning. Probably some people want to kill me now for this combo.
:D My life was fun with those languages.

------
mrzool
I had no idea Flash was still supported.

~~~
geerlingguy
I honestly didn't realize there was a way you could use Flash in Safari for
the past few years. I just opened Chrome the last time (~2 years ago) I
encountered some Flash content.

~~~
saagarjha
You could install it as it was specifically whitelisted. But now you can’t.

------
m3nu
More excited about improved WebAuthn support. Time to finally add this as
login option.

------
DrSiemer
Steve Jobs killed it just as I had learned all about AS3, so that was a bit of
a bummer. But in the end it was the right thing to do.

The company I worked for at the time excelled in creating awful 20mb non-
indexable monstrosities, complete with auto playing music and all kinds of
other sins. We mutilated the most basic design patterns when the client or
bosses thought it would look interesting and even cut a shady deal with a
popular meme site to "make it go viral" at one point in time, which it
obviously didn't.

Shame about all the brilliant Newgrounds stuff though. I'm not talking about
the actual content, I just mean I've never seen such a concentrated outpoor of
interactive creativity since then. It felt like there was something amazingly
smart, creative or funny to discover every day back then.

~~~
Avamander
Nah, Adobe killed it.

~~~
DrSiemer
Nonsense. Adobe may have been the one to pull the plug, but the Flash era
would have been stretched by at least a couple of years if Steve Jobs hadn't
pitted the weight of the entire iPhone community against it.

------
hundchenkatze
Serious question - are they're any popular (define that how you like) sites
that prominently use / require Flash?

~~~
jessedhillon
Ikea has a closet planner[0] that is actually quite good. It lets you
visualize closet frames in 3D by placing them within a virtual bedroom, then
add shelves, drawers and other accessories inside of them. Then once you're
done, it can put all of your items into your cart or generate a shopping list.

It's probably ~10 years old at this point, so it would seem they've had long
enough to see the writing on the wall and port it to a newer technology. OTOH
I'm not sure that, even today, the stability or penetration of WebGL is
comparable to where Flash was at its height (to say nothing of the available
talent pool.)

I've taken a screenshot[1] so anyone who doesn't have Flash can take a look.

[0] [https://www.ikea.com/us/en/planner/pax-
planner/](https://www.ikea.com/us/en/planner/pax-planner/)

[1] [https://imgur.com/a/WW1lDCB](https://imgur.com/a/WW1lDCB)

~~~
logotype
13 years ago I was working on a project for IKEA, a room planner. We used
Flash and it was a seriously ambitious project. The level of interactivity
that was possible when using Flash was unrivalled for a long time. It appears
that most of these type of “sites” has been replaced by native apps, even
though the web platform has most of the required capabilities now. Flash was
fun to develop with, as everything was well integrated and just worked, and
pioneered many of the technologies we now see as part of the web platform
APIs. A lot of the criticisms of Flash is due to shitty timeline-based banners
which used up the CPU. You could definitively make efficient, fast performing
apps/sites using Flash/AS3 if you knew what you were doing. Of course I moved
on to JS/TS development, but it isn’t as fun.

------
smaili
I can imagine Steve Jobs is looking down smiling today.

~~~
bananamerica
What makes you think he’s looking down?

------
mrweasel
This concerns me a little. I won’t miss flash, but I still need it to access
vSphere on an old vmware installation the customer refuse to update.

~~~
sah2ed
Would you be interested in a solution that allows your access to the old
VMware stack to continue?

If yes, how much would you pay for such a product?

~~~
mrweasel
Hmm, interesting. Ideally I would like to just have vSphere upgraded, but
that’s also not my money.

Let’s assume that it’s in the middle of the night in January 2021 and I really
need the access and I can’t be sure my employeer will pay and the solution is
available via Apple AppStore and works using SSH jump hosts. In that case I
would likely pay €100 - €150 without thinking twice about it.

------
AaronNewcomer
How can one access a flash site after this? I pretty much only use Safari now
when I have to use flash and chrome won’t let me. The French patent INPI
website uses it for zoomifying their old Scanned in patents.

~~~
err4nt
Perhaps a VM of an OS with an old copy of Flash, virtualbox.org might help. I
wonder if any of the Microsoft legacy VMs for web testing come with Flash
preinstalled: [https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/tools/v...](https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-
edge/tools/vms/)

------
dang
See also the big demise-of-Flash thread from 11 days ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23528182).

------
rafaelturk
WebAuthn support is the real worthy upgrade

------
ptlu
Totally naive question: Would Unity + WASM cover the game space Flash used to
well?

~~~
WorldMaker
There's certainly already Unity projects on the web in the space Flash used to
occupy.

Also, HTML5's CANVAS tag, and modern web platform tools like WebGL, mean that
you can do most of what Flash games did directly in HTML5 and JS. There's a
growing number of 2D and 3D game libraries written entirely in JS or TS.

The biggest missing piece that made Flash so ubiquitous for early web games is
the authoring experience. Unity is a lot more complicated than the Flash
designer was. I've seen several game editors for HTML+JS libraries, but also
nothing quite similar to how easy Flash was for early web designers. The
codebase that inherits and succeeds the original Flash IDE lives on in a new
name (Adobe Animate) and can directly target HTML+JS instead of Flash, but is
a part of Adobe Creative Cloud and so too expensive for many of the hobbyist
designers that made early web games what they were back when the DRM for the
Flash IDE was a lot easier to crack than a cloud subscription.

------
lameiam
Steve Jobs is (or at least would have been) jumping up and down with
happiness. Or more likely bitching about how long this took!

~~~
paultopia
Yeah, I'm actually surprised that this is only just now happening. Guess I'd
assumed he'd managed to bump it off on all Apple platforms before he died.

~~~
JiNCMG
Because it was not about going after Adobe or Flash. It was about the
performance of the iPhone. He detailed this in his public letter to Adobe
after he gave them 2 years to get it working and they failed. The letter was
public because Adobe was crying about being shutout and making shit up. The
fact is that Adobe never got Flash "working right" even on the Android
platform which they had full access to every part of the hardware. "Working
Right" means not draining the battery after a 30 minute video.

------
kgwxd
Probably not a good call to do this now while kids are still schooling from
home.

~~~
JiNCMG
Why? Flash is dead. Any "school" using Flash does not have anything worth
teaching since Adobe has been announcing it's death for years and this year is
it [[https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-
dead/](https://www.wired.com/story/adobe-finally-kills-flash-dead/)]

~~~
sp332
"Dead" only meaning new apps generally don't use Flash. Old content is still
not accessible without a Flash player.

~~~
JiNCMG
It's only been 10 years since its downfall was obvious to everyone. If any one
offers it as part of their service to you then just realize how little of a
crap they care about you.

~~~
sp332
You never read a book published more than 10 years before? Just because
something is old doesn't mean I never want to access it again. And 10 years
isn't even that old.

~~~
sosborn
Set up a VM with flash installed.

~~~
vardump
Done that, with a Linux VM. Works surprisingly badly. Flash becomes very slow.

Perhaps a Windows VM works better? Although Windows VMs tend to be pretty big,
hard to manage with less than 5 GB. Oh, and the licensing...

~~~
sosborn
> Flash becomes very slow.

No surprise there. Flash was never good on Linux (IME).

If the cost of the windows license is a barrier, then maybe the content isn't
worth that much to you? I truly don't mean that in a condescending way. I just
find that a lot of people like to data hoard without a real need for what they
are hoarding.

~~~
JiNCMG
"Flash was never good on Linux (IME)." It was never good on anything! You can
half a laptop's battery by watching videos during a 30 minute break.

------
chadlavi
it still was?

------
crimsonalucard5
Got a question for any front end devs who were experts in Flash and AS but now
experts in React.

Qualitatively speaking what was the development experience like for Flash
websites or animations vs. HTML 5 + react OR JS?

Can you say definitively one experience was better than the other or is it a
more complicated story?

I know there's a lot of hate for flash but I'm specifically asking about the
developer experience here.

~~~
tomgp
It's a mixed bag. The ideal usecase for Flash vs React is very different. 10
years ago with AS3 I could put together a graphically rich game with decent
sound or an intercative graphic very quickly, it would be performant and
available as a small download -- much easier than doing similar today though
libraries like phaser have certainly helped the situation a great deal. It
just wouldn't make sense to try to make a sprite based platform game in React.
On the other hand, complex forms, modular UIs and dynamically loading content
-- areas where React (etc) excel were possible in Flash (espescially with
adobe's Flex UI framework) but never looked any good or behaved in a
satisfying way (my feeling is that pursuing this kind of thing as a kind of
'look at us we can do serious software' move caused adobe to take their eye
off the ball wrt where they could provide real advantages over web-standards
based solutions). Further, colaborating across teams of any size on AS3 based
products was hard -- you'd have to pretty much roll your own CI/ deployment
stuff (which I guess was the case with JS at the time too).

In summary: Horses for courses.

As a language I really enjoyed AS3; solid class system, strongly typed, good
refactoring tools and crucially a decent and standard library.

~~~
HeckFeck
Thanks for sharing.

I may be old or disconnected, but it seems like the like of the flash animator
community won't be seen again. Where will we find another Homestar Runner or
Weebl?

It was the right tool at just the right time. It was well able to deliver
animations and interactive multimedia with the one tool and ecosystem. While
the JS/HTML5 tools can manage animations and multimedia, it seems like the
environment, libraries and tools are much more spread out... which perhaps
discourages animators, while developers are used to working in such a way.

~~~
leephillips
No matter the disadvantages of a medium or technology, there will be somebody
making something amazing with it. Homestar is a work of creative genius. It's
good in a way to be rid of Flash, but something is always lost.

------
calebclark
It’s still around?!? I thought Steve Jobs killed Flash years ago.

------
benologist
The way Apple treated Adobe might have been their very first platform abuse on
the iPhone. Flash was huge at the time, but more importantly it was software
being actively developed which means it was software that would have improved
even as the hardware also improved. At one point Apple even prohibited cross-
compilation just to fuck with Adobe, who had adapted Flash at great expense to
produce native iOS apps. They had to recant that when they realized they'd
also banned Unity3d and many more technologies.

If Apple hadn't contrived their little vendetta, killing someone else's multi-
billion dollar piece of software, today Flash would be a flagship IDE on the
iPad Pro continuing its then-two-decade legacy as a creativity powerhouse that
helped fuel innovation online and in games, media and software.

The worst thing about this sad period of Apple history is today they aspire to
kill Electron in the same way.

[https://www.macstories.net/news/new-iphone-dev-agreement-
ban...](https://www.macstories.net/news/new-iphone-dev-agreement-bans-the-use-
of-3rd-party-services-and-analytics/)

[https://onezero.medium.com/apple-is-trying-to-kill-web-
techn...](https://onezero.medium.com/apple-is-trying-to-kill-web-
technology-a274237c174d)

~~~
kstrauser
> today Flash would be a flagship IDE on the iPad Pro continuing its then-two-
> decade legacy as a

...resource-hogging security nightmare. You described my nightmare scenario.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> ...resource-hogging security nightmare.

Oh, you mean like a web browser?

~~~
solarkraft
> resource hogging

Completely true.

> security nightmare

Really? All serious browsers are open source and the major ones seem decently
well audited, considering the relatively low amount of exploits being
published. IIRC Flash was a bit different in that regard.

~~~
GoblinSlayer
FISHING SITES AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

