
Goodbye, Flash - tech234a
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/10/goodbye-flash.html
======
tabtab
Designers loved Flash because it was WYSIWYG. It's also why PDF lives. You
usually only had to test it on _one_ computer, not different versions of
different browser brands. The client-side "auto-flow" of HTML browser drives
designers batty. I can relate: I make CRUD GUI's and different browser
variations butcher their placement to hell and back, requiring me playing
Whack-A-Mole to fix it. The online forums say, "Shut up and learn layout
rocket science!" A few snotty Sheldons mastering auto-flow math doesn't scale
well.

The browser should have a WYSIWYG mode for when your application needs it. The
server could re-scale as needed for different devices based on a layout engine
of the designer's choosing. That way one is dealing with one layout engine
instead of say 50 (browser brand/version combos). Seems more logical to me. We
don't need auto-flow rocket science if we just partition layout engines
logically.

I believe Flash and Java Applets both made the same fatal mistake: tried to be
an _entire_ virtual OS. That made them too complicated, which invites hackers.
If they had focused on just UI "serving", they could have been small enough to
be manageable.

~~~
shadowgovt
WYSIWYG mode, unfortunately, ignores the needs of screen readers and other
methods of accessing content. The risk of WYSIWYG tools is they lie to you;
not all your users can actually see what you see. And that's to say nothing of
the less exotic scenarios like different screen sizes or devices.

... unless you're working in a space allowed to discriminate against users
that need assistive access to your content of course, in which case you can
spring for the WYSIWYG dream.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
One should not go using terms like "discriminate" against people who are
clearly not doing so.

Assistive access to content is an afterthought for almost everyone in
software, and that's perfectly fine. It's an extremely uncommon and
unnecessary use case for nearly the entire device-using population.

~~~
yellowapple
So by that logic we shouldn't bother with wheelchair ramps because nearly the
entire population has working legs. Nor should we bother with Braille on
signs, since nearly the entire population can see just fine.

~~~
AndrewUnmuted
Why the hell would you jump to this conclusion?

Any software professional knows just as well as I that these concerns are
_specialized_ and people with a particular interest in complying with these
special use cases are paid for their particular interest and capability in
worrying about, and complying with, regulations within the realm of assistive
access.

Most software developers think about getting their software to work correctly,
not about edge-cases dealing with the UI for tiny, specific disenfranchised
groups of people.

EDIT: Even if we were just to stick to the US, only 2.7 million people use a
wheelchair here. That's 0.9 percent of the US population. That's really,
REALLY freakin' specialized. Don't stoop to heaving virtue my way when the
facts hurt.

EDIT#2: Perhaps you can quantify your ridiculous statement by telling me how
the developer of this [0] application should be punished for not building
assistive access into his GPLv2 project, and how he should have & could have
actually done so.

[0] [https://github.com/falkTX/Carla](https://github.com/falkTX/Carla)

~~~
yellowapple
> Why the hell would you jump to this conclusion?

Why _wouldn 't_ I? Your argument appears to boil down to "well not caring
about blind users is the status quo, so no reason to change it". I can
guarantee you there were similar attitudes among construction workers and
architects before wheelchair ramps became mandatory in various jurisdictions
(and hell, even after): "well the vast majority of people wanting to enter
this building have working legs, so why should I be assed to build a ramp when
a staircase will do?".

If you can't be assed to write software that's accessible to blind people,
then that is - _by definition_ \- discrimination against them. It's not even
_hard_ to make a web page reasonably accessible; plain HTML (with or without
CSS) is typically perfectly usable with a screen reader, and it's only when
that gets mucked up by a tangled mess of DOM-mangling JS (or Flash or Java or
Silverlight once upon a time) that anyone needs to actually put any
significant effort into accessibility.

------
rchaud
10 years on after that Jobs letter, the market for WYSIWIG web animation is
nearly non-existent. All I want is a tool that lets me draw animations, allow
tweening controls and exports to HTML/JS, without needing to open a code
editor.

The only tool that does this to my knowledge is Tumult's Hype:
[https://tumult.com/hype/](https://tumult.com/hype/). I'm glad it's using an
old-school pricing model of one-time payment and not the subscription model
that Adobe and everyone else switched to.

Adobe Animate used to be a thing, but that got sunset years ago. There is
Adobe After Effects + Lottie, but that assumes you are a front-end developer
and know how to integrate those tools together and use the resulting JSON.

No wonder then that the only visually interactive websites out there these
days are things like "Spotify Year in Music" stuff that probably takes an
entire team multiple sprints to build.

~~~
CharlesW
> _Adobe Animate used to be a thing, but that got sunset years ago._

Adobe Animate received two feature updates last year and at least one bug fix
update this year.

So, it's not dead yet. Maybe wait until after Adobe MAX (which starts in a few
days) to write its obit?

~~~
rchaud
My mistake, I was referring to Adobe Edge Animate, which was sunset in 2015.
Animate CC is still around and kicking. Unfortunately, it renders to HTML5
Canvas, which is bitmap-based and thus unreadable by screen readers. Hype is a
better option as it renders to SVG.

~~~
tracker1
Flash never rendered to anything but an output similar to canvas either.

------
irrational
I don't miss the vulnerabilities that came with Flash, but I do miss the ease
of creating animations, training, games, etc. that came with Flash.

Back in the day I worked with a team that created training modules for
products. We had a team of animators that was creating beautiful stuff. We had
a cast of characters, voice talent, the whole shebang. It was very popular,
especially in Asia where they loved the animated training.

Then the iPad came out. Our customers informed us that they were going to
adopt the iPad for their on the floor training. Well, the iPad didn't support
Flash so we had to rebuild everything to be HTML/CSS/JS only. It has been
nearly 10 years and we are still using plain text, images, and the occasional
video. We tried bringing back the interactive animations over the years, but
nothing has come out that comes anywhere close to working as well as Flash
did. It really sucks that despite nearly a decade no Flash replacement has
emerged. I really feel like we lost something when Flash died. Interactive
animations have been replaced with youtube videos and boring text and image
web pages.

~~~
tracker1
On the vulnerabilities... working with flash made me abandon it at home years
before the iPhone. Flash, Java and PDF are some of the biggest sources for
browser security flaws historically... and that doesn't even touch the
complexity of some nearer term flaws that would have been found eventually.

~~~
repolfx
One of the biggest sources of browser security flaws was browsers during that
era, also. Moreover browser makers had access to the Flash source code, and
Flash was an open spec anyone could implement.

I don't think it's as simple as "web secure, everything else bad". For the
very longest time only Chrome and Safari had working sandboxes, and there
wasn't a huge difference in the exploit stream between WebKit, Flash, Java and
Adobe Reader. They all had somewhat similar feature sets.

------
ben0x539
Oof. Organizing the world's information, except the information that's
unfortunately stuck in a file format we don't like anymore (for good reasons),
that knowledge clearly isn't worth anything. I get disabling Flash support in
browsers by default, but actively pretending Flash content doesn't exist so no
one can find it anymore seems unnecessarily destructive.

~~~
skybrian
It's kind of odd for a web search to index information that your browser can't
display. Although I suppose paywall sites and book search are similar.

~~~
jsploit
Google indexes plenty of other binary filetypes.

------
wooptoo
Flash tried to be everything to everyone. While it did some things very well
(like those amazing little games), it did other things very poorly (like
information websites and accessibility).

\- Every page had its own navigation style.

\- Every page had its own font which you could not change. Remember the trend
with 8px bitmap-like fonts where you used a special setting so they would
render very sharp?

\- Every page had its own scrolling style. Want to use the mouse wheel? Nope.

\- Caret navigation for the impaired or people who prefer keyboard navigation?
Forget about it.

\- Stop sound? Only if we give you a button for that.

\- Here's our looping video intro, you must watch it before accessing this
website.

\- Deep hyperlink to the next "page"? That came very very late. A bit too late
for Flash.

\- View on mobile? Even if you had the plugin somehow installed (some people
did back in the day on Android) pages would still be unusable.

\- An error has occurred within this SWF blob, good luck debugging.

\- Later came the exploits.

I was a fan for a while and used it since Macromedia Flash 4, but I'm glad
it's dead and buried. It was poor tech which subverted progress in the
HTML/CSS/JS space for many years.

~~~
realusername
I would also add to that list the awful CPU usage of Flash, every time you had
a page with Flash opening, the fan would start to spin and your computer just
became very slow...

------
floki999
Flash, ActionScript and the associated IDE were amazing web development tools
at the time (in the era of Macromedia) - way ahead of any competitors. No
one/nothing has really filled those shoes.

------
Brendinooo
At this point, the only thing I think about is Homestar Runner! Not sure I've
come across a Flash site in a long time otherwise.

~~~
wgerard
There's quite a few flash games/etc. that will be lost to the ages.

Quite interesting if you think about it! A bit of an antithesis to the idea
that what's on the web is preserved forever.

~~~
kgwxd
There's nothing to run Flash media outside a browser? Obviously that wouldn't
help anything dependent on proprietary server functionality, but that's true
of any software.

~~~
alisonatwork
I went through this a few weeks ago and found a site that explains how to run
Flash games standalone: [https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-
flash-swf...](https://www.howtogeek.com/438141/how-to-play-adobe-flash-swf-
files-outside-your-web-browser/)

Basically there is a program you can download from Adobe called Flash Player
Projector Content Debugger, then you just point that at the .swf and go.

An open source emulator would be better in the long term, but for now this is
easier than trying to find a browser that still supports Flash natively.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
You really don't need a tutorial to use Flash Projector. :)

• Windows:
[https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...](https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flashplayer_32_sa.exe)

• Mac:
[https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...](https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flashplayer_32_sa.dmg)

• Linux:
[https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...](https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/32/flash_player_sa_linux.x86_64.tar.gz)

Download the version for your platform and open the swf file you want to run.
That's it.

Linux users can also use the community-packaged Flatpak:
[https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-
Proj...](https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-Projector)
All other links come from
[https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...](https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.html)

------
thebouv
And yet, there's still no good replacement for building those types of Flash
games. HTML5 game development isn't close.

~~~
typon
We desperately need an HTML5 based game dev IDE with feature parity of Flash.
Is such a thing even possible?

~~~
darepublic
Wouldn't unity qualify? Personally I think the decline in browser based games
has more to do with a lack of interest in that gaming format, not the
limitations of current web technology.

~~~
tiborsaas
Complaining for lack of tooling and doing some research require different
efforts :)

Unity is just one example that can export to web. There's
[https://playcanvas.com/](https://playcanvas.com/) too and a plethora of other
stuff :)

Unity demo:
[https://wasm.bootcss.com/demo/Tanks/](https://wasm.bootcss.com/demo/Tanks/)

------
totaldude87
>>Flash, you inspired the web. Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to
continue your legacy.

remember that time when Steve jobs kept out flash from iPhone /iPad vs
Google's stance to go full on support for flash on mobile :)

~~~
scarface74
Adobe _claimed_ that it was Apple’s fault that Flash didn’t run on the
original iPhone. But even if Apple has allowed it. Adobe still wouldn’t have
been able to do it.

When Adobe finally did make it to Android, it required a gig of RAM and a 1Ghz
processor. The original iPhone had 256MB of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. An
iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.

One of the big selling points of the Motorola Xoom was that it would run
Flash. Adobe was six months late leaving the Xoom in the embarrassing position
that you couldn’t view its Flash enable home page from the device for at least
the first six months.

~~~
tinus_hn
Flash on mobile was always going to be shit because it was built without
mobile in mind. It doesn’t support touch, it doesn’t make controls big enough
to be usable by touch and it doesn’t implement the behavior people expect on a
touch device.

Just running the plugin on a phone isn’t the hard part.

~~~
scarface74
Not even referring to the interface. Adobe couldn’t get Flash performance,
memory footprint or energy usage acceptable for mobile.

~~~
tinus_hn
If the other problems would have been solved, the hardware has improved so
much the performance issues wouldn’t have been much of an issue anymore. A
modern phones performance can compete with a low end pc.

~~~
scarface74
It was five years before an iPhone met the minimum requirements that Adobe
gave for Flash on mobile. Even then, a VM based runtime per app would be more
memory intensive and more battery intensive. iOS devices just this year have
start coming with 3GB of RAM across the board. iOS was able to get away with
less RAM precisely because all code ran natively.

Apple is able to optimize its OS, compiler chain, and processor in sync.

Not to mention that an even more stripped down version of the core OS with
tighter constraints is running on the watch.

Not even mentioning that the average $250 Android device is much lower specced
than the average iPhone. It wasn’t until last year that even high end Android
phones were matching the performance of an iPhone 6s (released in 2015) in
single core performance.

------
typpo
Some folks are blowing this out of proportion:

1\. Adobe announced Flash's EOL by the end of 2020. Google isn't killing
Flash, it's already dead.

2\. Indexing Flash means parsing site structure embedded within SWF files.
When was the last time you saw a website with Flash navigation? Your SWF web
games are embedded in normal webpages that will still be searchable via H1
tags, backlinks, and so on.

Surprising number of Flash lovers coming out of the woodwork after nearly a
decade of Flash hate on HN (proprietary, security holes, etc).

------
salqadri
All credit for the demise of Flash belongs to Jobs:
[https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-
flash/](https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/)

~~~
buboard
OTOH, Apple could have bought flash and built their mobile platform on top of
it. It was arguably better than Obj-C

~~~
scarface74
iPhone apps were fast and responsive on low end hardware precisely because
apps were natively compiled and didn’t run in a VM. Did you ever try running
Flash on early high end Android phones?

~~~
buboard
I 'm sure they were slow. but i m talking about the authoring tool and
scripting language. I presume apple could optimize that to be fast natively.
Judging from how HTML UI frameworks evolved over time, it's as if we ended up
reinventing Actionscript

~~~
scarface74
So what was Apple going to do during the first 4 or 5 years? Every single
mobile platform that tried using HTML frameworks for their apps failed and
were slow.

Blackberry, Palm, and Microsoft all tried it. Android itself was slow as
molasses for years because of its dependence on a VM instead of a completely
native stack.

The last thing I want is Electron for mobile.

------
reaperducer
I hate Flash as much as the next guy who remembers web pages slowing to a
crawl or crashing because of Flash.

But I also think this is a bad idea, just from an information retention
scenario. What ever happened to "to organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible and useful?"

What will Google decide the world doesn't need to know about next? HTML2?
JPEGs? non-Google-hosted javascript?

This is what we get for allowing a private company to be the gatekeeper of our
culture.

~~~
Ajedi32
The gatekeeper here is Adobe, not Google. This is what you get when you store
information in a proprietary format with a single implementation controlled
and developed by a single private company. There's always the risk they'll
kill the product (like they're doing here) and your information will become
inaccessible.

Also, it's not just Google doing this. Pretty much _every_ major browser
vendor is dropping support for Flash in 2020.

~~~
agildehaus
Adobe didn't kill Flash, Apple killed Flash with Mobile Safari. Adobe is just
accepting Flash not having a future.

------
peferron
Flash was incredible. Not just for the animation and games, but also for the
audio and video streaming from a server to you, or from your mic/cam to a
server, or between you and other users via P2P, all of that live and with the
ability to embed arbitrary metadata as cue points at specific times in the
stream. The feature set and creativity it unlocked were out of this world.

------
windsurfer
One of the first "commercial" games I worked on was a Flash (Flex) game that I
licensed to a few of the big Flash games sites at the time. I haven't looked
at that stuff in years and years... I wonder how feasible it would be to port
those games to the modern web.

------
thrower123
The web was a much more interesting place when Flash was around. Browser
games, in particular, have never really recovered.

~~~
trentlott
Many phone games are (or were) browser games at heart. Just an app that served
a webpage.

The fact that they weren't very imaginative or fun or free is what the
hyperconnected mobile web brought us.

~~~
shadowgovt
To be fair, the absolute bulk of browser-based Flash games weren't imaginitive
or fun either (and I can assure you, would probably not have been free if
drop-in-and-use ad plugins for Flash had been around, if the ads that framed
those apps can be taken as any indication ;) ).

------
rvz
The only websites that I know off the top of my head that still use Flash are
Newgrounds and the BBC, for its iPlayer content.

It seems that Google is already using WebAssembly in its products, Google Keep
[0], so it is likely that they will continue to use this.

[0] - [https://webassembly-security.com/google-keep-webassembly-
mod...](https://webassembly-security.com/google-keep-webassembly-module-
analysis/)

~~~
Rebelgecko
Google basically killed off Google Finance last year because it was Flash
based. There's an HTML version of Google Finance but it doesn't have anything
close to feature parity with the Flash version.

------
tus88
> It's time to go to bed, son. Hey Flash, it's your turn to go to bed.

This is a rather creepy equivalence.

~~~
copperx
That is a terrible line indeed. Juxtaposing the picture of a child going to
bed with death is extremely jarring. Is the writer is a psychopath?

~~~
kwijibob
I thought it was a poetic and fun line!

------
imroot
Kronos (the timeclock company) still uses flash in the enterprise timeclock
application that my company uses for its hourly employees.

They've told us that replacing it is "on their roadmap," but haven't told us
when they plan on replacing it. (I also think that Verifone's vault for credit
cards was flash based until earlier this year!)

~~~
greggturkington
Same. They recommend opening the app in IE :(

They also told us that replacing it is "on their roadmap," so we replaced
Kronos.

------
rootusrootus
Now if only ADP would update their timesheet software so it did not rely on
Flash, that would be great. I'm going to have to install Flash manually once
Google drops it from Chrome.

~~~
Ajedi32
I don't think installing it manually will work. Support for NPAPI plugins in
Chrome was discontinued years ago:
[https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/npapi...](https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/npapi-
deprecation)

Same for Firefox: [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/npapi-
plugins](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/npapi-plugins)

Not 100% sure about IE, but it doesn't seem like you'll be able to make Flash
work there either: [https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-
wind...](https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2017/07/25/flash-on-windows-
timeline/#hWGAooLdKZmfbmcE.97)

I think Firefox ESR might still support Flash for a while, at least until the
next release.

~~~
rootusrootus
Well, that will get momentarily interesting, then. Perhaps our company will
finally abandon ADP for the last few services we still contract with them for.

------
NietTim
And not a single mention of Apple, Safari or iOS <which were instrumental to
the downfall of Flash>, funny Google.

~~~
slig
The flash player was awful on Macs back in the day. Adobe refused to support
OSX properly, and Steve rightfully did not trust them to make a decent job.

~~~
oscargrouch
Is up to the user to decide that, not the platform middle-man.

Its funny how many people are willing to give up their freedom to decide what
works best for them, and let others decide, in the name of "im doing all this
for your own good".

You should always have the right to decide what technology to use, what you
install and download on your device.

The whole app store deciding what they allow or not, not giving you any other
alternative, should be deemed inconstitutional in a society who knows whats
happening, when people have nowhere else to go because the digital
dictatorship is in control of your digital life.

This whole trend smells digital feudalism to me, and it was Jobs that started
this whole dangerous trend to the bottom of our civil liberties.

Why are you defending this new feudal lord who are mining your right to choose
what you do with your own property?

If after having bought a house, the guy(or company) who have selled to you,
had made some demands of how you could use the kitchen, or the bedroom, would
you think its within his right to do so?

~~~
slig
> Is up to the user to decide that, not the platform middle-man.

Each and every time a costumer buys an iPhone they're deciding.

Adobe decided to do a half-assed flash player for the Mac. That decision
proved to be wrong.

Or do you really expect that Adobe would do a decent job supporting an new
platform when they couldn't even bother supporting the big cash cow Apple had
at that time?

~~~
oscargrouch
> Each and every time a costumer buys an iPhone they're deciding.

You can buy the house from the company defining rules of how you should use
the house you bought from them and denying you access to the things they
forbid.

Lets suppose you have options to buy a house from the ones that does not do
this, ok.. until the company who are ruling over your property are making a
big buck, and they decide to play by the same rules..

so hey, where are your options to buy a house without vendor rules? thats
right, their gone..

Only that we are talking about something much more important here which has to
do with data..

Private companies should never be allowed to do this, unless they offer
options (other app stores should be possible), and have rules to filter who
can offer apps to your device that dont damage your freedom of choice (dont
forbid things on political views, taste, harassing competition, etc..).

Android is becoming more akin to Apple each day, and what you have in the end
is a false sense of choice.

This is why the rule of law and a functioning government is so important.

> Adobe decided to do a half-assed flash player for the Mac.

Than if it will deliver a crappy experience, let the user decide for his own.
Suppose the user agree with Apple/Jobs here and dont like to use it, but
theres that tool that are available only in Flash, you need it for your
mechanical enginnering job for instance.. You had a choice, a bad one, yes,
but now you have none. Just because 'simon says' so..

And we are not even thinking about the small players with less resources than
Adobe, that will not have the resources to make the "good experience" by
whatever standards imposed by the overlord dujour.

And thats because we are assuming good faith, because the ruler of your own
property, can even lie about be doing this for your own sake, and just use
this to bar the competition.

By the way i never touch anything Apple because of this, but because they were
the ones who leaded the smartphone industry, the rules they have specified in
the beggining tend to be copied by the competition, and to become the norm.

Its not the same as creating a new car company in the XXI century where we
have standards, good rules, etc..

The pioners have the power to define the reality of the industry in years to
come. And giving its about our digital life, its becoming more and more
important each day.

Data and digital platforms are in the XXI century what the oil was in the XX
century. Pervasive, powerful, defining everything else.

------
lucb1e
Last night I backed up some old swf games that I enjoy(ed) playing but wasn't
able to answer the question how to be able to run the files in the future.
Should I install a VM and never run updates, similar to my Windows XP VM for
games, or does anyone know of some (preferably open source) flash
implementation that I can run standalone?

Edit: I just found this subthread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388405](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21388405)
Quite a few alternative implementations are mentioned. Doesn't sound like
anything will be perfect, but this looks more future proof than I was afraid
it might be!

------
cookingrobot
My favorite new feature (by far) that Google has released recently is the
ability to insert images in cell of Google Sheets. It's a fantastic way to
keep track of anything visual: screenshots, bug notes, app walkthroughs, etc.

They even have a shortcut to create a snapshot and insert it directly in a
cell. Sadly, it requires Flash.

------
rkachowski
Is there any kind of effort to create a non crappy plugin that would support
the huge archive of flash content out there?

I understand the reasons behind this but it seems like over 15 years of flash
content is about to be rendered unaccessible.

~~~
Ajedi32
In theory I see no reason someone couldn't create a WASM implementation of
Flash. Flash is closed-source though so I imagine that would be rather
difficult to do without Adobe's cooperation.

------
sireat
I remember using Actionscript to build some UI widgets for embedded devices
and ... not hating it.

The devices used proprietary level 7 protocol sitting on top of regular TCP/IP
(could easily debug using netcat).

Actionscript made it easy to work with this proprietary protocol.

How would one do this with Javascript these days?

You probably couldn't do it with WebSockets since WebSockets are at the same
level 7 as the proprietary protocol, so you'd need to run some server to
translate.

Maybe, this [https://www.w3.org/TR/raw-sockets/](https://www.w3.org/TR/raw-
sockets/) ?

------
Causality1
I can't say I understand the decision to stop indexing SWF files. Does Google
stop indexing every obsolete file format? Do they not index .doc files, tiff
files, rtf files?

------
mooman219
One part of flash that's definitely appreciated in the artist/animator
community is the editor. It's surprisingly simple and intuitive, while still
being powerful for power users. Some of the features made it into after
effects, but at least currently nothing really compares. Lots of YT/NG
animators are still using flash. Newgrounds has an open source utility that
can convert flash animations into HTML5 for the sake of preservation iirc.

------
100-xyz
I am a techie and love working with graphics. Any other techies interested in
cooperating and creating a Flash substitute? My linkedin here
[https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridhar-
ramasami-76a226117/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sridhar-ramasami-76a226117/)

Please write to leisenming AT protonmail DOT com

------
finchisko
Considering it appeared on google webmaster blog, the argument about "Flash
going to bed" is very childish and juvenile. When your son is not willing to
go bed, you probably insists, because he will have problems with focus in
school next day, but that doesn't really apply to Flash. Article should
clearly state why Flash should be gone.

------
droobles
One of my favorite sites was Newgrounds. Haven't visited in a while, how will
they fare after this?

~~~
giancarlostoro
They have an offline player as mentioned but also a community member was
working on a WebAssembly based player.

~~~
shadowgovt
Is that going to run afoul of IP ownership? To my knowledge, Flash was never
open-sourced, and Oracle v. Google casts shadows on API-compatible reverse
engineering.

~~~
monocasa
Oracle v. Google is still working it's way through the courts, and those
decisions were openly in conflict with normal precedent.

------
Wowfunhappy
> Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files.

Does Google no longer index .zip files and the like? Obviously they can't
process any content in those formats, but if the file name contains the right
keywords... shouldn't search be file type agnostic?

~~~
giancarlostoro
If the zip files not password protected I dont see why they cant crawl the
filenames inside zip files. They probably keep all crawl info cause you are
able to do Google searches for specific file extensions and I wouldnt be
surprised if you could for specific file mime types too.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Okay, poor example on my part.

I've had .exe's show up in Google results. It was a _long_ time ago—so maybe
things don't work like that anymore—and it was never _common_ , but I know
I've seen it happen. I'm sure Google _could_ look inside the binary for text
strings, but I can't imagine they do.

There is perhaps an argument that standalone exe's shouldn't turn up in
results for security reasons (how can you possibly verify its safety without
some context?), but I liked to think that search results could at least
theoretically include any file type at all.

------
sk84life
After all.. I did like more flash than html5 .. browser APIs for videos and
audios are really ruined. It's like chrome wanted build fast something to kill
flash.. but now we have Totally ruined webrtc left. Thanks Google. Just what
we want :)

------
enriquto
Google: > Flash was the answer to the boring static web

so much is said and implied in those sad, sad words

------
PhasmaFelis
I know there were a lot of good reasons to deprecate Flash, especially as a
web design tool.

I've never understood why it was necessary to ban it from browsers and
practically kill nearly 20 years of games and animations.

------
baby
> Now, there are web standards like HTML5 to continue your legacy.

Let’s be honest. It is not going to replace flash. It’s a real shame that
flash couldn’t make it. Perhaps for good reasons. But it’s a real shame.

------
droobles
Also, would there not be a way to save Flash sites/games with WASM?

~~~
macspoofing
Sure you could, but you need to build a swf runtime first ... There were a few
projects (one from Mozilla - Shumway), but nothing really great. SWF is a
complicated format.

~~~
shadowgovt
It's one of those specs where the standard is "Whatever the engine does,"
right?

That runtime is likely to end up looking a lot more like a console hardware
emulator than a data parser.

~~~
macspoofing
I'm not intimately familiar with the SWF standard but I think it's well
defined, just complicated (because Flash did a lot) and with potential patent
and licensing minefields.

~~~
monocasa
Oh, it's not. Adobe themselves were too scared to change anything, and just
shipped multiple versions of their runtime under the hood to account for all
the different versions.

~~~
shadowgovt
Hah, that's amazing. So even Adobe was solving the problem by treating it like
a console emulator. :-p

------
dsego
I guess "don't break the web" doesn't apply here.

~~~
Ajedi32
Flash was arguably never part of "The Web" in the first place. Not the open
web anyway. It's a proprietary technology with a single implementation
controlled and developed by a single company (Adobe) which is now ending
support for it.

~~~
rchaud
The difference is that with Flash, you could write once and run it everywhere.
This was huge at a time when cross-browser differences were major enough to
require something like jQuery.

~~~
Ajedi32
Sure, that's the advantage of having a single implementation. The disadvantage
is what we're experiencing right now: once that implementation is no longer
maintained you're left with no alternative.

~~~
rchaud
That's true. My point was that even with Flash announcing several years ago
that it would be sunset, nobody stepped up to build tools that worked with the
open technologies of CSS, SVG and JS.

Instead, what we have is a situation where pretty much only corporations with
designers and devs on staff (Stripe and Spotify being the major examples) are
building the types of sites that used to be doable by a single person using
Flash.

------
j45
Can 2019 HTML/JS run identical on all browsers and platforms yet to replace
2013 flash in every use case?

Here’s to hoping the future comes back a little sooner, rather than later.

------
musicale
If people love flash so much, I'm surprised that it hasn't been reborn in a
javascript/webasm form.

Same thing with hypercard and other cool-but-abandoned platforms.

------
macspoofing
Is Silverlight also going to be removed from IE by Dec 2020?

~~~
Ajedi32
2021: [https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/4511036/silverlight...](https://support.microsoft.com/en-
us/help/4511036/silverlight-end-of-support)

------
tobr
What is the preservation status of the decade+ of Shockwave/Flash games and
websites? Can they run emulated?

------
monocasa
Isn't HBO Go still flash? It broke with a "we need adobe flash" screen maybe
six months ago.

------
shultays
Flash also came with a pretty good documentation, which was how I learned
programming. Thanks flash!

------
ganitarashid
Great, now google just has to re-enable adblockers and chrome will be usable
again

------
marban
So Google is basically denying that the Web's '80s era ever existed.

~~~
Xophmeister
The web wasn't invented until 1989 and not made public until 1991. The
precursor of Flash wasn't until a few years later.

~~~
marban
Metaphor?

------
gowld
What are the options for playing old Flash apps - on desktop and on mobile?

------
robertoandred
Steve was right.

~~~
benologist
Steve was right very briefly but in hindsight it's pretty irrational to expect
a piece of software to not run on a powerful CPU without contrived
restrictions like being "banned". We'd have the full Adobe Flash IDE on the
iPad next year if Jobs had no grudge and we just waited for the software and
hardware to improve. Photoshop's halfway there and SQL Server made it to Linux
and Windows made it to ARM.

~~~
slig
Flash did not run properly on powerful desktop Macs back in the day, how could
he expect that Adobe would sort it out for the iPhone?

~~~
benologist
The solution was to wait for the software to get better, the hardware to get
better, the batteries to get better - today the Flash IDE could run on Windows
tablets not much bigger than the iPad Mini, authoring content where before it
couldn't even play it back.

~~~
slig
Why should Apple wait for some other company when they were perfectly capable
of shipping something way better? Adobe had the opportunity, and they missed.

~~~
benologist
I think a better question is why should Apple _persecute_ anybody's software?
Especially just because it's not yet performing well on a new, power-sipping
processor and architecture. It will be years before anything complex runs well
on their watches, that's a stupid reason to sabotage anyone's efforts.

~~~
slig
Adobe could have made a great player for the Mac, but they deliberately chose
not to. It was awful, power hungry and laggy on Apple desktops and Macbooks.
Adobe didn't care about the Mac ecosystem, the player was/is closed source and
Apple couldn't not do anything. Why on Earth should Apple invest on a tech
that is _proven_ to not work reliably on their platform. Adobe blew it, Apple
just made the right decision.

------
rado
Angular is the new Flash.

------
leowoo91
Hello OpenFL.

