
Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet's Least Favorite Tool - ingve
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gone-in-a-flash-the-race-to-save-the-internets-least-favorite-tool
======
jedrek
It's amazing how quickly people forget why Flash became so popular: up until
Mozilla Navigator got up to around 0.6, all the browsers out there sucked.
Navigator 4.x had document.layers, pretty much every script had to be re-
written twice to work on NN and IE... that's when they didn't crash and burn.

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

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

~~~
seanp2k2
Flash was about 10 years ahead of its time.

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

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

~~~
frik
Flash was not 10 years ahead.

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

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

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

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

~~~
radley
Up through AS3 Flash was fantastic. We saw some of the most amazing animations
and multimedia up through that era, including H.264 video players.

But Flex. OMG Flex. Trying to bend 180° to serve developers was never going to
work. After that it was all downhill.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flash is certainly alive and well.

~~~
krilnon
> I wrote the sorting algorithm in as3isolib

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

> Flash is certainly alive and well.

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

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

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

------
bad_user
Jobs isn't the one that killed Flash.

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
schizoidboy
And ZeroClipboard

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

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

So I ended up turning Flash back on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
hiphopyo
Flash supports SVGs too (as of late 2014). Not sure about animations though.

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

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

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

Well, thanks flash.

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

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

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

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

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

~~~
sbuk
No. Fireworks _was_ a hybrid vector/bitmap editor specifically designed for
web design. Flash is a vector based animation suite that originally included a
javascript-based scripting language call actionscript.

See
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Fireworks)
and
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash)

~~~
krilnon
You're right about Fireworks. Some people do like to use the Flash authoring
environment for general web graphic work, even though that's not its primary
intent. A friend of mine still uses it for all of his web tutorials and book
diagrams. (Flash has tools for exporting single frames in a variety of
image/vector formats.)

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

Flash still has the advantage on the consistency.

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

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

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

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

~~~
frik
WYSIWYG HTML editors are dead, an incredible sad fact.

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

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

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

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

~~~
wx196
Dreamweaver CC uses WebKit-based rendering engine:
[http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2013/08/dwcc.html](http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2013/08/dwcc.html)

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

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

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

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

------
im3w1l
My theory is that Jobs killed Flash because it was too good. Would have been
able to compete with the appstore.

~~~
setpatchaddress
I love the sarcasm, keep it up.

~~~
im3w1l
The theory doesn't seem to fit with the facts in sibling comments, but it was
no sarcasm on my part.

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

