

Sunsetting Flash - robin_reala
http://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/04/23/sunsetting-flash/

======
rwmj
As someone who has not been following this very closely, why on earth did
Adobe abandon Flash? They had a reasonably capable plug-in shipped in just
about every browser, with a huge ecosystem around it, and then they just
chucked it all away. This seems to make no business sense at all to me.

~~~
camus
Because Adobe dont understand the web,it's not in their culture.

They never invented one successfull webdeveloper product, and those they
bought from Macromedia ( Dreamweaver , Fireworks , ColdFusion ,
Flash)...havent evolved a bit or are dead.

They fired most of the legacy Macromedia work force anyway. They should sell
all these tools or open-source them.

~~~
laumars
You've clearly never heard of Edge[1]. Adobe are now putting great strides in
providing HTML5 tools.

That said, I personally would still avoid Edge just because of Adobe's past
record. It might seem petty, but I've lost faith in the company so there's
little incentive to pay to join their HTML5 services.

[1] <http://html.adobe.com/edge/?promoid=KAGMS>

~~~
faboo
To be fair, if camus hasn't heard of Edge it isn't _his_ fault - it's Adobe's.
Which, in a way, helps to emphasize his point.

~~~
laumars
That would be fine if we were talking about some small hidden product, but
Edge has been well covered on HN and it's included with Adobe's Creative Cloud
- which has also been well advertised. Plus at some level you have to expect
people working in the industry to take responsibility for their own research
(assuming he does work in IT, rather than being one of those "arm chair
critics" that lesser forums are often plagued with).

------
dsirijus
To offer a business perspective on this, as opposed to widely spread tech-
centric comments...

Flash market is still there, and it's growing. Hard-on-3D browser based games
are _extremely_ sparse with business opportunities, as are HTML5 (WebGL,
Canvas, plain old school js) games.

Unity player is seeing huge growth, but that's peanuts in comparison to Flash
plugin availability. HTML5 games need monetization strategy that ain't just
"slap a multiplayer and process most of it on backend".

Thing is, Adobe is a corporation. They think business first, technology
second. Market is there. Plugin availability is there. Tools are there.
Developers are there. Wtf?

And that's why Adobe doesn't make sense to me with all they're doing with
Flash. _At all._

On a more personal note, another _wtf_! Flash enabled huge infusion of
creativity on web, way of expressing in much less contrived ways than
available. Made you experience web you remember fondly from not so far long
ago. Still does. Remember that. Only then move on.

~~~
cpleppert
I was going to use flash as a frontend for my startup's technology. The thing
is, I could already see the handwriting on the wall even a couple years ago.
Adobe was running around with their heads cut off trying to figure out how to
develop flash. They just had no idea what they were doing. The compiler wasn't
very good and simple performance problems with the VM and flash timeline
weren't fixed at all. Instead, we got immediately abandoned projects that just
sapped resources from more worthwhile endeavors. You basically had to use haxe
to get good performance for certain applications.

With all of these issues known to Adobe you might suspect that they would move
aggresively to increase the performance of Flash in general and Flex in
particular. More integrated tools would have also gone a long way in improving
the developer experience for flash/flex. Instead, Adobe went ahead with the
strange creation otherwise known as Flex 4. Adobe decided that the main issue
with Flex applications was their poor 'skinability.' Flash catalyst made no
sense, and was totally unusable for serious application development. It was
another tool (bringing the count to 3) for flash/flex authoring that did
nothing to solve the problems with the platform.

To sum up, if Adobe had: -aggressively targeted 3D gaming from the start
-built powerful authoring capabilities in the flash ide rather than supporting
multiple development environments -addressed performance, security and cpu
issues with the plugin -developed the as3 language -not wasted time on mobile
browser plugins -trust the flash ecosystem to fill in gaps as they worked on
the platform

the story might have turned out differently. Of course, they didn't do any of
those things when they had the chance

~~~
macspoofing
>You basically had to use haxe to get good performance for certain
applications.

Haxe did nothing you couldn't do with AS3 and Alchemy.

>With all of these issues known to Adobe you might suspect that they would
move aggressively to increase the performance of Flash in general and Flex in
particular

They did, by quite a bit. They also had parallel project for increasing
performance with Stage3D and Alchemy.

I get your point about Flex 4. It is a better UI framework than Flex 3, but
not significantly better, so the engineering effort that went toward it could
have been better spent doing something else.

I also mirror your thoughts about "what could have been". My pet theory is
that Stage3D should have been a FP10 feature (which would put it around the
beginning of 2009 timeframe) and Adobe should have had some sort of (optional)
browser-based app store to push Flash as a gaming platform. And since we're in
hypothetical scenarios, AS3 should have been better designed, and cross-
compilation to HTML/JS should have been there from the beginning. This may
have given Flash some legs. But the reality is that sooner or later it would
have been superseded by HTML anyway. Oh well, hindsight.

Furthermore, looking at the performance gains that Google, Microsoft and
Mozilla managed to squeeze out of a language like JS, one can't help but think
how much faster ABC and Flash Runtime could been.

~~~
pfedor
_Haxe did nothing you couldn't do with AS3 and Alchemy._

So, have they fixed this bug in Alchemy:
<http://forums.adobe.com/thread/487570>

It's kind of hard to use C++ when you're not allowed to make a copy of
std::string. Last I looked into this in May 2012 this was still not fixed
(reported in 2009.) There is a page on stackoverflow where someone explains
how to work around this problem by rebuilding a patched version of libstdc++.
But after applying that fix you hit other similar problems.

Also, the sztrace() function exists and is documented, but they forgot to add
it to the .h file, so if you want to log anything, you have to write:

    
    
      extern "C" {
      void sztrace(char*);
      }

------
Samuel_Michon
_”When we started working on a Flash deployment add-on some 18 months ago we
had high hopes for the future of Flash as a gaming platform.”_

That made me wonder whether they were paying attention. The writing has been
on the wall for quite some time.

Luckily, they have anticipated this and built a WebPlayer that does not
require Flash and works on all major browsers – it even supports Native
Client. <http://unity3d.com/unity/multiplatform/web>

~~~
camus
So you are saying using a plugin is better than another one ? Doesnt make
sense. How many users have the unity player deployed ? zip. And a plugin is
still a plugin , wether it is flash or not.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
I’d rather not use any plugins, but not all plugins are created equal. Flash
Player is a turd, from security to performance and power conservation. We
deserve better.

Even if Unity’s WebPlayer were every bit as miserable as Flash, it would still
make web browsing better than having Flash installed, as few websites will
call the Unity WebPlayer.

~~~
_delirium
I wonder if detecting the Unity WebPlayer and using it to serve rich-media ads
when present is that far off...

~~~
__--__
It'll never happen. Flash is a lightweight rich media format designed for rich
media. Unity is a full blown 3d environment and is not lightweight and not 2d
friendly. That said, the only thing unity is really useful for is 3d
applications, which are very limited. It's not going to replace Flash for 2d
games.

------
kayoone
I am absolutely sure they work on something targeting ASM.JS. They already
support native client and for the rest there is the native Unity plugin.
Furthermore Flash is (and always has been) buggy, support by Adobe is lacking
and its future isnt looking good.

In that scenario flash seems pretty obsolete indeed.

~~~
Father
As long as there is fragmentation then flash will not be obsolete. For example
the lack of a common supported audio format or shader language in browsers to
name two.

~~~
kayoone
With ASM.JS and Native Client Unity can basically run their plugin without
needing a plugin :) For the rest of the browsers there is still ASM.JS (which
just runs slower on browsers not directly supporting it) or the native Unity
Plugin. So for Unity Technologies, Flash is pretty much obsolete.

~~~
troymc
Unity can target many platforms, including Native Client, but it's my
understanding that Unity can _not_ target asm.js. Of course, asm.js is quite
new…

~~~
kayoone
not yet, like i said i am sure they are working on this as it should be easier
as the flash deployment was.

------
davedx
I was at Unite last year in Amsterdam, and had a chat with the Adobe reps at
their booth. The first question I actually asked them was about the future of
Flash, because I'd heard that it was being phased out. But that was "only on
mobile" apparently.

Their demo was pretty impressive - lots of nice looking 3D graphics and so on
- but I have to admit I was skeptical even then.

------
timc3
The more that jump of the whole Flash/Flex nightmare the better off we will
all be as a wake up call to Adobe to either sort out the bugs that are quite
evident or to just accept that it should be put to rest.

~~~
camus
except Unity works with its own web player that is very far from being bug
free and secure.

~~~
kevingadd
How about instead of continuing to ramble on with poorly spelled and
grammatically flawed comments that claim all sorts of things about Unity (and
Flash, for that matter), you provide the vaguest amount of evidence or even
speculation to support your claims that Unity's web player is some sort of
security nightmare?

How about some CVEs? Or descriptions of botnets using Unity to infect end
users' machines? Or even descriptions of bugs in the web player that cause the
slightest discomfort to users?

I've played lots of Unity games in my browser and I know lots of developers
who use it. I've literally never heard complaints about security problems or
had the Unity plugin crash my browser, and I have to terminate plugin-
container all the time when Flash hangs, so I'm no stranger to plugin crashes.

~~~
pjonesdotca
Two following links should be sufficient to prove the point that just because
you have never head of any security issues with the Unity Web player does not
mean there are none.

------
waxzce
WebDev are sunsetting flash ! [2 years ago]

------
middayc
will unity (player at least) someday work on linux?

~~~
kevingadd
They already have Linux player support:
<http://unity3d.com/unity/multiplatform/desktop>

------
kostya-kow
This is good news. Flash is a dying technology, and HTML is the way forward.
Hopefully this means they will make a HTML5 version with WebGL of their
player.

~~~
troymc
The post says nothing about HTML5 or WebGL (or asm.js). They're all gung-ho
about their proprietary Unity Web Player (a plugin).

------
andyhmltn
It's a wonder anybody uses flash anymore

------
moneypenny
Flash Player not withstanding, the rest of the product line is very good IMHO.
ActionScript 3 is a decent language with great compiler support, three good
IDEs (FlashDevelop, FDT and Flex Builder) and libraries galore. Desktop
support with AIR (i.e. iPlayer) is right there too.

But the runtime, Flash Player, sucks. It pains me to see Adobe throw away
everything else just because the runtime is horrible. I would LOVE to see
ActionScript shift towards browser-native or HTML5 runtimes. Seriously. Flex
can go walk the plank along with the Flash VM, but please, Adobe, take the
maturity of that platform and make it do something useful. You managed to
compile to iOS, Android and Blackberry, so we know you are capable of really
good work, it just needs to be web right now.

~~~
troymc
I like where you're going with this. Adobe has shown that they can make great
tools for designers and developers. They're already big proponents of modern
web standards like HTML5 and CSS3, see:

<http://html.adobe.com/mission/>

I would be very happy to see Adobe release a competitor to Unity3D Editor that
can target all major platforms, including HTML5 (including WebGL and maybe
asm.js).

~~~
moneypenny
That's exactly why I thought Flash would be repurposed - especially as they
have a track record in making tools for creating (D)HTML and JS - anyone
remember GoLive? Maybe they're still working on it, it can't be an easy task.

Actionscript 4 -> Web, anyone?

------
workbench
Last nail in the coffin, the Unity Stage3D demos were easily the best examples
of what Stage3D was capable of. Made Adobes examples look like a joke.

