Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Adobe to remove Flash Player from web site after December 2020

adobe.com

906 pointsmichaelhoffman501 comments

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Newgrounds has done a lot of work on preserving old Flash content. Some standouts are their own Flash player and an SWF to MP4 converter, but what I find most interesting is Ruffle.

Ruffle is a Flash emulator written in Rust that can be used as a browser extension, a desktop client, or a website polyfill. It's still a work in progress, but eventually websites with heavy use of Flash content (like many late-2000s webcomics, or even Newgrounds itself) could use the polyfill to replace Flash content with WASM blobs.

The roadmap was updated recently, and provides a good overview of Ruffle's current capabilities. There's also a demo instance that can run arbitary SWFs, with a few examples available.

https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player

https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel

https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

Roadmap: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle/wiki/Roadmap

Demo: http://ruffle-rs.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/builds/w...

This guy is trying to emulate x86 in the browser and run the actual Flash player within that:

https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...

Here is 'this guy' :-). Feel free to drop any question on Twitter. https://twitter.com/alexpignotti

Hello! Big props for doing that!

Is any of this open source?

Just posted a new article about our tech, first demo of x86 python running in the browser is included (scroll to the bottom): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23538856

From the post:

    > The Flash plugin itself includes a JIT compiler that 
    > converts AS3 code to x86 code on the fly, which is then JIT 
    > compiled by CheerpX into WebAssembly.

And of course, the WebAssembly is then JIT compiled right back to x86, so it's actually three levels of JIT compilation. It's a wonder this runs with any acceptable performance at all.

I'm looking forward to seeing this as a dependency of any future Electron app too; Moore's law must be brought to use.

Some x86s further JIT compile x86 instructions to micro-operations.

(That isn’t normally called JITting, but I think one can view it as such, especially when the CPU caches the translation, as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBurst_(microarchitecture)#E... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_cache#UOP-CACHE)

> actually three levels of JIT compilation.

And that’s totally fine to support legacy code.

After all, it continues to put some tiny pixels on a screen, emit some light and gets interpreted by some huge neural networks that took decades to train and finally releases a small shot of endorphins.

Why not just start with the endorphins?

Here's a talk by the team as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JUs4c99-mo

And their website: https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpx.html

This is honestly one of the coolest things I've seen, and given the amount of Flex/Spark software for enterprise out there, it could drastically change the legacy software landscape.

It really sounds awesome, but I can't just download it and play with it.

I hope they release something usable that I can just download and play around with. I'm not a huge company which will create something really amazing and can pay royalties to them, I guess I am not interesting

Today I've seen win95 emulated on browser on x86 - is it the same library? I don't have link handy but if win95 runs fine then flash should as well.

I don't really understand why this isn't the migration path for any legacy tech... Just containerize and emulate it. If there is a security problem, it's only inside your container. No big deal.

It's not always possible to get that to work, depending on the tech. In the case of Flash one of the most annoying and difficult parts is that it requires access to the rest of the world on the internet to function properly a lot of the time. It's because of that lack of security that it was so useful and made a lot of good things possible back then (and also a lot of bad things too).

Is that a function of flash, or how the creator using Flash implements with it?

It's easy to make a mess in many things, and it's true Flash has it's share due to it's sheer ability to create beginners in the realm of digital experiences.

I have a hard time understanding why network access would be so annoying and difficult. It should be easy for an emulator to implement user-adjustable restrictions on that.

Because re-implementing Flash is an enormous amount of work. Back when Flash was popular there were numerous attempts to reimplement it for use on Linux. None of them really got beyond the proof of concept stage.

Based on that I'm pretty skeptical that Ruffle will succeed, although I guess it does have the huge advantage that Flash is no longer a moving target and they really only have to get it to work with existing Flash movies - nobody is creating new ones.

As far as I remember it was difficult to re-implement because the Flash player was backwards compatible with all Flash versions. And this was also why there were so many security issues.

Check out this: https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/73491/interview-poki-p...

Running AS3 games: https://poki.com.br/g/bad-ice-cream

https://poki.com/en/g/dino-run

> nobody is creating new ones.

I sure wish that were true, but it's almost certainly not.

Container escape vulnerabilities are always a concern. A nonzero amount of those have occurred.

In this area, spectre and meltdown have caused huge shockwaves (no pun intended) in terms of things commonly assumed to be safe turning out not to be.

That's not to say it's not a good approach, just that it doesn't bring security concerns to zero.

Because everyone wanted flash gone. If it was possible to just run it as a wasm blob at the time we would end up with a bunch of websites still using flash for menus and video. Now that it has been dead for years we can bring it back for the stuff that can't be ported like games.

Flash has been kept alive via AOT compilation to native code.

> Just containerize and emulate it.

Not trivial. You can put every assembly instruction inside its own container, yet still cause a huge security fail.

Ruffle is great! I just used it the other day to convert a flash website with a service manual for my outboard engine into a nice pdf. Each page was a swf file, so I only had to wget them all, convert them with ruffle, and at last convert the images into a complete pdf.

There's another flash preservation project called Flashpoint. It has it's own flash emulator, and a database of popular flash games/animations

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

I hope this gets to whoever was in the room when Charlie Rose's show [1] switched thousands of hours of content over to Flash back when it probably seemed like a good idea - a window of perhaps a year or two as Real player faded out and video streaming over the top was finally a little stable if your link was over 2-300kbps.

I was pissed when they switched to Flash but whatever you think of the tech, or Charlie for that matter, it would be a crying shame to loose so much content. He interviewed everyone who was anyone during some eventful times. That site is part of the rough first draft of history.

[1] https://charlierose.com/

Poki is also doing something similar together with Nitrome. They use technology from the guys of Away (the ones that initially brought 3D to flash). The product is called AwayFL.

https://www.pocketgamer.biz/interview/73491/interview-poki-p...

I think this is a useful cautionary tale.

Well that just ruffles my Jimmies... D: I'm sorry.

Flash became popular because of 2 things:

1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier

2/ it's API that provided things that were not possible when browsers had none of these API (video streaming, socket programming...). At some point you could even write 2D shaders or inject C/C++ code with something called Alchemy.

Point 2 is now largely covered by browser web API, although one might argue that the performances might not be always as good as they were in flash, especially when it comes to vector graphics or realtime audio processing. But 3D and webgl are more performant than flash in the browser.

Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent, and even Adobe Animate isn't really doing exactly what flash did when it comes to authoring content for browsers. So there is still a potential market here. I'd like to see something node based when it comes to coding. Artists love their nodes.

The real problem is obviously running old flash content like games. Some of these games were really good. I remember playing one which was a hotel management simulator and it was really really fun. But it's a bit like a these jar games in the 2000' one cannot run on modern mobile phones anymore. Without an effort to preserve these, they will all be lost.

1. If Macromedia was still the author of Flash/Dreamweaver/Fireworks through the html5 transition days, I imagine all of those products would still be providing big benefits to web content creators. I genuinely believe that Adobe never understood the value of these products and the communities that formed around them. Adobe as a company didn't know how to foster and grow this half developer / half designer user base.

Adobe failed exactly same way as tons of other proprietary software developers. Instead of embracing open source and leading the industry standard they wanted to keep tight control over everything: standard, runtime and toolset.

They was so over controlling so there was whole game development industry where literally every company used Flash for UI for decade, but with 3rd-party proprietary runtime simply because Adobe ignored that market completely.

If they only moved Flash into open source when it was on peak of it's popularity they would probably still sell their proprietary tools to so much larger audience.

In Adobe's defense, they kinda did try that: AS3 was supposed to become JS2/ES4 and they also released a bunch of somewhat-useful documentation on the SWF file format. They even released AVM2 as free software (called "Tamarin") with the idea that Firefox would replace SpiderMonkey with it. The web community stuck it's nose up at ES4 and the SWF documentation was kind of half-assed.

Adobe's idea at the time of the HTML5 transition was that they were going to completely replace Flash with the Edge Suite, while Flash Player became an expensive-to-license compilation target for Unity. Hence, the whole "premium licensing" debacle that smacked of "we don't know who our customers are, but some of them aren't using Creative Suite, so let's try and charge them lots of money for things the web can already do".

Who really killed flash, was Steve Jobs with his decision that flash gets kicked out of the IPad.

Adobes evangelists really started running in circles after that.

And adobe itself made one stupid management decision after the other. And after they realised they will not get back on the ipads, they abondoned flash.

And this, after AIR ((flash for desktop) and Flex (UI Libary) were on its way to become established. Flex was really powerful. I would have loved to still use it, with a open-source flashplayer as its base. But adobe could not get themself waging to do that, so they just let it die.

They could have overshadowed the documents web. No need to extend text/html, let user agent run application/flash.

There would be causalities - accessibility, responsive design, ad block (cosmetic and network), personalization (stylus). Yet with still unmatched creativity, maybe with stronger case against native applications (like today fuchsia). World would be different and we would never know exactly how.

> and the communities that formed around them

The most important thing Adobe completely failed at. The Flash community was a fantastic thing that will never have any equivalent, ever. Macromedia understood the idea of ecosystem.

But what business survived being "Eloped"?

So now that we'll soon be moving back to opaque binary blobs with WASM, what exactly have we gained?

I know browsers have appeared to make enormous technical progress with all the new features - until you read stuff like this and realize most of it was already possible 20 years ago via Flash (Type-safe javascript as well, btw) - and partially in better quality and with less programming knowledge required than now.

So did we eventually come full circle?

Everything old is new again, and the more things change, the more they stay the same.

That said, the Flash client was closed-source, buggy, security-challenged, intrusive, and a memory/battery hog. All that contributed to its demise.

It also helped that it was denied access to what would become the world's largest consumer compute marketplace: the Apple App Store.

> 1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier

Why is it that with all our computer power, we somehow can't create authoring tools as good as we had in the past?

HyperCard, DreamWeaver, Visual Basic 6, etc. all seem to be dramatically better for common people (read: not career programmers) than any modern equivalent we have.

I'd say the difference in HyperCard and Visual Basic is that they also define their runtime environment. The IDE can grow with the runtime. Writing tooling against a vast runtime like the web is much more difficult and daunting.

A 1.0 would need to address a large enough surface area of the web to be useful. There's also a discordance between hand-coding "friendly" HTML/CSS and what would be exposed in a WYSIWYG tool. Further complications are all the new and old bugs in browsers.

That said, every day I was working on Hype 1.0 in early 2011, I would nervously check Hacker News for a "Show HN" post for a HTML5 animation app that would steal the thunder; luckily none came. This is even more surprising given Hype exports were mostly compatible with Internet Explorer 6 -- such an app could have been written long ago.

Your common people back then were far more computer-literate than most of career programmers today. Requirements for the entry into profession is so much lower from any point of view: time, difficulty and cost.

Another side is that programming and web is no longer novelty so common people prefer to just pay for someone else for their time rather than learn anything on their own.

Most people prefer to pay their auto mechanic, plumber or electrician even though most of people are capable of fixing many of their problems just by following simple tutorial and common sense. Programming is no different here: it's just easier or more time efficient to pay to someone else.

> Your common people back then were far more computer-literate than most of career programmers today.

I absolutely don't buy this.

My father, a high school English teacher, could barely run a spreadsheet that I set up for his grades--something that basically everyone can do today without blinking.

And even he could use Hypercard.

It's the tools, not the people.

Plus life is so much easier when you don’t have to worry about i18n, encryption of any kind, HiDPI displays, Unicode of any sort, really any of dozens of things that modern users expect to just work.

Because that kind of tooling doesn't go along with UNIX FOSS CLI culture, so only the ones comfortable in the graphical eco-systems of the like of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Qt masters and friends, get to enjoy them.

Likewise I rather spend my time in Unreal and Unity, than trying to feel superior while doing everything from scratch with SDL.

Developers decided that catering to text editor users was the only way forward, which killed most prospects of good authoring tools.

On point 2: socket programming hasn't caught up to the same level of performance as Flash had. Try sending or receiving gigabits per second with WebSockets. In my own tests last year on reasonably modern hardware with a 10Gbps Intel NIC, Chrome was the worst performer (around 3Gbps before the CPU was completely saturated), and Edge was the best at around 5.5Gbps. I didn't compare with Flash last year to be fair, but historically it was much better. A native app on the same hardware was generating 10Gbps over the network at <20% CPU usage.

This is the kind of stuff I find baffling. We killed off Flash, celebrated, and said that xyz will do the same thing as Flash did. Several years later xyz does not do what Flash did. We don't even have all the pieces to put the puzzle together, let alone have them come in one package.

I really hate that I can't do UDP properly in the browser. I've seen so many examples of people effectively sending protobufs over webrtc data channels. It's kinda hilarious.

That should be some implentation issue as websocket is just a very thin layer above TCP and it should add only a small overhead.

I find it more likely to be a security or battery performance related tweak. Most things just aren't going to generate peek bandwidth from within a web browser. Network testing tools (including bandwidth/latency testing) belong as native apps, probably precisely for the low level, high bandwidth access.

Let's not forget that Flash was the backbone of the ad industry back in the day as it was leveraged to produce rich media in the form of banners and interactive ads.

And pop-ups, flashing distractions, ads with sound, and zero user control of tracking.

And now seemingly every site out there has dozens of popovers, subscribe to a mailing list (amazed those still exist and are somehow pushed more than ever), cookie permission requests, "Like and retweet us!" banners that slowly scroll from the side, "It looks like you could use some help" clippy style bullshit that choppily moves on screen, autoplaying videos that seem to autoplay no matter how many times you try to disable it and no matter how many times browser developers say "Okay, we finally blocked autoplaying videos for real this time!", 15 megabyte gifs littered throughout random articles just to catch your eye or to be hip and radical and show the writer is the bee's knees and knows what the kids like, scroll hijacking that only serves to make it choppy and physically painful to scroll, back button hijacking that involves filling your past 100 pages with the current page and sometimes getting caught in a refresh loop so it's impossible to move, endlessly loading bullshit content whenever you think you've scrolled to the bottom... I can go on.

Dealing with the modern web is like reading an infinite run-on sentence because it absolutely overwhelms you with shit and it doesn't let up. It's not hard to go to any random site and find 75% of the above all at once.

Flash was bad. Somehow web developers took its demise as a challenge to make the web worse.

> Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent

The other day I was researching how to add simple procedural animations to some web-based interactive content for a museum.

This would have been a breeze with Flash. You just passed the .fla to the animator/illustrator and they would create the item in the library for you. Then you could simply animate that display object in your code and the artist would be able to modify it without breaking anything.

I came up with this solution using DragonBones[1] so that the artists could work on their own. And then I could render those animations with Pixi[3].

I agree an all-in-one solution would be much nicer but not sure there is a market for it.

[1] http://dragonbones.com/en/index.html

[2] https://pixijs.io/examples/#/plugin-dragonbones/eyetracking....

Wouldn't something like this work in a game engine that can export to Webassembly, like Godot?

Though in either case, you lose the web platform, with its accessibility (aria, screen readers) and forward compatibility (like the one we had with the move to smartphones, etc).

I'm unsure whether this applies to Godot, but usually game engines come with a lot of unnecessary baggage. I think UE4 at its smallest was still something like 20 MB despite you not needing almost any of it. A 2D engine or renderer like PIXI.js makes more sense in these cases.

Have you heard of Lottie?

https://airbnb.io/lottie/

Oh wow this looks great

Yeah, there are a few really good things that will soon be lost forever, for instance the classic National Lampoon "Rigging of a Ship" Flash movie. Also, I'm not sure, but I think the absolute Scott Adams classic story of how he passed as a-hole mission statement consultant "Ray Mebert" was posted in Flash at the San Jose Mercury News' site years ago. (This is literally live-action Dilbert trolling of teh Logitech exec tean that all think this guy is an idiot, but are afraid to say so because he was brought in by the CEO...) If exists on the net at all anymore, it's probably only at Archive.org.

What was the hotel sim called?

Went down the rabbit hole because of point 2 and ended up at some Chrome experiments. There is some amazing stuff like that out there. I can't believe there aren't more browser-based 3D games.

3. Compression. Since it's largely vector math it compressed pretty well, but that's also why it was CPU intensive.

Regarding point 1, I’m not super familiar with the flash IDE, but I would guess that the closest thing we have today are fantasy consoles like PICO-8 or TIC-80. Thinking about it, Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) also kind of fulfills the niche. Flash was obviously way more powerful, though.

If anyone knows anything current similar to the flash IDE, I’d be curious to hear about it.

I don't know if everyone here is familiar with this, but the decline of Flash began or was greatly influenced by Apple's decision to not let flash run on iPhones/iPads. Steve Jobs even wrote an open letter about it[1].

[1]https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

I think that's rewriting history a bit. The decline certainly didn't begin with Apple's decision. Apple saw where things were headed, and jumped on (an early) bandwagon. Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point. I hope in a few years people don't start saying that Apple killed Flash, as I remember specifically that was not what happened at that time.

Sorry, that is precisely what happened.

In the Linux / programming world Flash was a pariah that didn't conform to their standards. But it was booming for creatives and end-users. In 2010, almost all websites used Flash video and Flash gaming was exploding on Facebook. (Apple had to fake their Keynote to demonstrate the iPhone could view the "entire internet.")

Security complaints are a weak argument: both Apple and Google have had security issues on their proprietary platforms. (I'll concede Adobe was a very poor steward.)

Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new platform to lock out competition. The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash and made Apple look weak. The iPhone business model depends on consumer lock-down, so making Flash compatible was counter-productive.

> Security complaints are a weak argument

Performance, performance, performance. Battery life matters. Smooth animations matter.

People seem awfully sure Apple's anti-Flash move was 100% motivated by platform-building and 0% by perf. I'm not so sure it was 100%/0%, because I actually saw how shockingly bad Flash perf was, and I saw how big Apple's perf push was at the time.

One time (2010-ish?) I accidentally left SpinControl.app open after a dev session for ~1 week. SpinControl was an app that would automatically dump a stack trace whenever any application failed to drain its event queue for more than a few seconds and beachballed. Super handy. In any case, when I came back to development and noticed SpinControl, I was surprised to find that 100% of the hundreds of stack traces collected after my development session involved flash. Not 99%, not N-1, literally 100%. WebKit was finding its way into different applications so the symptoms weren't limited to Safari, but I still suspected that I had a filter enabled or something. Surely Flash couldn't have accounted for 100% of my beachballs? I triggered a Mail.app reindex, and sure enough, a stack trace popped up in SpinControl, this time in sqlite, as expected. It wasn't an instrumentation problem. Flash had literally been 100% responsible for all of my beachballs over the past week. Crazy.

This was around the time that Apple started to push developers away from APIs that made it impossible for Apple to aggregate background thread wakeup events to save battery life. In other words: they were willing to sacrifice goodwill to obtain perf.

I'll grant you that platform considerations likely played a big role in Apple's decision, but also remember that Flash was literally the single largest performance-limiting factor when it came to desktop freezes and battery life at the time, and that probably played a role too.

> The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash and made Apple look weak

No. Flash was too resource intensive to work on any mobile devices. Flash on Android was an utter disaster. It ate through your battery life, was unusably slow and couldn't even properly format Flash content for mobile, touch-based devices. As the world moved to a primarily mobile-based computing environment, Flash's death was all but inevitable unless Adobe could do something to rectify these issues.

> The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash…

No, Flash Lite ran on significantly-less-powerful feature phones. (Remember, in the early days of the iPhone, Flash was desktop-only.[1])

> Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new platform to lock out competition.

You speak as if Jobs instigated this when in reality, this was a response to Adobe holding Jobs' platforms hostage for a long time, and in many ways. Flash's ongoing instability and inefficiency on MacOS was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/04/adobe-flash-jobs/: "Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the user experiences you want to create in these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS," Luh said. "It wasn't designed with that in mind at all."

It was a calculated sucker punch at a piece of software which was not designed with mobile or touch experiences in mind and was so tremendously buggy and unstable that it caused all sorts of issues on normal desktop browsers. A lot of people used Flash at the time, but a lot of people were also extremely frustrated with Adobe's apparent disinterest in making it a truly great piece of software. Steve Jobs wanted that mess kept as far away from Apple's shiny new platform as possible -- a completely justifiable stance.

Yep. I remember jailbreaking the original iPhone (or maybe the 3G) and installing some version of Flash on it for games. My friends all had Sony-Ericssons with some type of mobile Flash player. On the iPhone, Flash content sucked the battery to 0% in about 30 minutes, the phone would get super hot.

Edit: I guess the project to run Flash Lite on Sony-Ericsson was called Project Capuchin? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kn5He1Wxl-Q

I was a Flash developer at the time and this is exactly what happened. Flash development went from being highly in demand and the highest paying to basically dead with this announcement. I felt that if the rug could be pulled out that quickly, I'd just focus on design and that's where I've been ever since.

Flash was a resource hog in any platform. And worse: It made resource intensive something that should have been very efficient from the start.

How is that I could play videos smoothly in Windows 95 but ten years later the same video at a lower resolution made a newer computer crawl? The answer is Flash.

I don't care if other people wanted Flash games. I hated Flash video and celebrated every little bit of its demise.

Its a lot easier for Apple to fix security issues within the Apple ecosystem than it is for Apple to pressure Adobe to fix the problem, port it over to the suite iOS/iPadOS/macOS, and distribute the fix to whoever needs it, as well as communicating the gravity of the issue, post mortem, adjacent attack vectors and surface area, etc.

I'm not saying you are entirely wrong about consumer lock down, but for various reasons, consumer lock down can be objectively better for the developer and user experience, and it is easier to move fast when you have fewer dependencies at play.

I hadn't used flash on linux, my primary environment at work and home, for years at that point. Flash was already hated and widely criticized in developer circles. It was already on the way out. Apple jumped on the trend early, but they didn't start it.

Performance was the big issue. Not just on Apple devices but on all devices. Same laptop running Windows, same video from Youtube if you play and pause on both (SWF and HTML). The Flash video will keep the fans running at high speed. Remember the first few phones with Flash could play through a 2 hour movie without a charger. To optimize Flash, Adobe needed to cut off compatibility and they knew if they do that then why would anyone continue with Flash when HTML/JS was getting feature parity.

“Almost all websites used flash video” que? Most websites don’t use video at all, neither then or now.

As an AS3-focused developer in the years around 2010, this is too heavy-handed. The Apple announcement followed a youtube announcement in Jan 2010 of an experimental HTML5 video player. It took years for that player to become the standard. Apple may well have seen the writing on the wall, but to say "everyone hated or was avoiding flash" is objectively false.

This comports well with my memory of the time. I remember there being a lot of "Flash sucks" sentiment online, but no decent alternatives. The days of entire UIs done in Flash was largely over by 2010, IIRC, but there were still things like video playback that couldn't be handled easily without Flash. I remember explicitly installing Flash on Linux, simply so I could watch Youtube with relatively little friction. In my mind, by that time, that was the main purpose of having Flash around at all.

I am really glad HTML 5 has matured to the point that it has. Not having to have an entirely separate runtime environment running in the browser window makes things so much more stable than before. Now, if only we could figure out a way to make having lots of tabs not be painful, and maybe get a bit of a handle on memory usage, I think I might very well be out of things to complain about in terms of basic browser usability. ;)

I don't think anyone hated it, but it definitely wasn't in the "loved" category either - more of a "tolerated it as a necessary evil"

> Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point.

"Everyone"? I loved it. Kids loved it. The people who hated and killed it were programmers, and to this day they haven't created any alternative that kids would love as much.

It's similar to the murder of Dreamweaver. Actual designers who draw pixels on the screen loved it. Programmers hated it, pushed CSS instead, and visual editing of the web died.

Let's face reality here: Apple didn't care about the HTML5 standard, they just wanted games to go through their own app store instead of being freely available on the web.

To this day iPhone still doesn't fully support HTML5: you cannot put a game canvas into fullscreen mode on iPhone (all other devices, including iPad, do support this).

And when PWA's became available, they were very slow in supporting Add To HomeScreen. And when they did, nobody knew about it.

So yeah, don't think apple did it to support standards. They did it to keep control within their own appstore.

It was terrible on mobile and I also avoided it, but it seems naive to not consider that Apple were being protective of their new platform and didn't want any alternative application runtimes to take hold.

Remember that the entire reason Adobe bought Macromedia/Flash in the first place (besides sheer market dominance) was to provide themselves a technical path forward from most of their products' classic Mac OS roots into the 64-bit/mobile era we're currently in. It's very obvious when you go back and see that the first version of Photoshop with a Flash-based UI and the first (Windows) 64-bit version of Photoshop were both CS4. Compare that to Photoshop CS3 where you don't have to dig very deeply into the Windows version's files before you start hitting the layers of what are obviously classic-Mac-style Resources.

I think that's rewriting history a bit. Sure, many of us nerds knew that Flash was problematic abandonware and sort of wished it would go away long before Apple launched a nuke at it, but we were the exception. Most people then, as now, didn't really understand or care how damaging flash was to the tech ecosystem. Sure, they saw a few annoying ads and security warnings, but they broadly considered them "worth it" for the content. Apple not only spoke up about Flash being the industry limiting factor regarding device responsiveness, battery performance, and security, but they did something about it in the face of widespread condemnation and resentment that hasn't dissipated to this very day.

The iPhone did two amazing things:

1) it offered full web browser experience. No one had done this in a phone yet. They also banned flash from day 1 and favoured development using standard web technologies. The side benefit from all of this is that the data demands crippled our cellular networks and forced major infrastructure upgrades :)

2) Apple took control out of the carriers hands. By standardizing on the web, no more special+favoured applications! Just load a web page :)

Definitely rewriting history to say they started it, but it was the nail in the coffin for Flash. Many developers hated Flash by then and were advocating against it. Although it was starting to decline, the marketing people and some wannabe UX types were still pushing it. The Steve Jobs essay is when the anti-Flash movement went mainstream and it was awesome. Prior to that, there was a question of whether Apple would support it. Once it was definitive that they wouldn't, the writing was on the wall that Flash would not survive. It validated what many of us had been saying for at least a couple years and made it easy for us to dismiss Flash.

And yet the lack of flash was generally in the top 3 reasons iPhone would never be a success(along with lack of copy/paste).

If apple had rolled out support for flash, the native app boom probably would have looked a lot different as company’s wouldn’t have felt as much pressure to modernize their whole customer facing digital strategy.

Flash became a mobile web non-citizen when the first iPhone released, back in 2008 when Flash was still popular enough for people to complain about it not being on the iPhone rather than to be happy that it was gone. "Thoughts on Flash" was published a few years later, in 2011, when Adobe wanted to add iOS app export to Flash - Apple responded by banning literally all third-party development tools. It was definitely a kick in the teeth to Adobe's attempts to pivot the product.

Android continued to tout their ability to utilize Flash as a competitive edge long after Jobs’ letter.

There was already a strong decline underway, but there were plenty of people who were convinced it would stick around. Apple's decision was the nail in the coffin.

It absolutely did. I was a Adobe Flex developer when Adobe handed over Flex to Apache and watched the whole thing crumble. Jobs definitely led the way on that.

There was no decline. I very distinctly remember laughing that iPhone couldn't support flash because so many websites were based on flash.

I was a Blackberry user at the time and the best hope for a standard website was that it had some watered down "mobile website" with the same important info because nearly every local business that had a website with hours/location/contact info had it done in flash.

People said at the time and for years aferwards that it would cause the iphone to fail. Multiple companies made 'supports Flash' a major part of the marketing.

> https://techpinions.com/apple-claim-chowder-product/34156

Flash was not hated. It was at its peak during 2008 when Flash games were making millions on Facebook and every media-related site used Flash interfaces. I remember being on Flashkit.com back then, and watching design houses like 2advanced.com release their next project.

Apple's decision was a major factor, along with HTML5 finally being supported by browsers with native functionality for animations and video support that had vastly superior performance. In the next 4 years, mobile took off like crazy beyond anyone's expectations and by the time the legendary iPhone 4 was released, Flash was at the beginning of the end.

Is it? I remember that even a similar pocket device such as PSP was able to play flash at the time, despite it being a huge memory hog. Until iPhone, any similar device that couldn't run flash was perceived as, simply, buggy.

> Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point.

Which point do you mean? 2007 or 2010? Flash was more popular than it had ever been when the iPhone was released, and the iPhone had been without Flash for three years when Jobs wrote his letter.

Apple might not have aimed the gun, but they pulled the trigger.

Jobs did this so that Apple could get the 30% cut on apps downloaded from the App Store. Otherwise everyone would just play Flash games that Apple got no cut of. Follow the money!

They 100% killed flash, and thankfully so.

The rest, as happened many times, followed Apple.

The reasons for banning flash were totally on point.

They actually tried to get Flash running on Android for a while

Not sure what came of that. I will probably need to google more

No, it was literally Steve Jobs in 2010 saying he didn't want flash on mobile. Then it collapsed quite quickly after that as the barriers went up. 10 years later and mobile games still need to be made in Unity or Unreal. The new Meatboy won't come from HTML5, even if development was as easy. All the 3d engines you have in HTML5 owe a debt to actionscript and flash and still don't perform as well.

People don't realise how liberating and easy the multimedia of the flash years were. You could literally make a animated film and show it globally in an hour. Nothing comes close, still. Maybe we'll get a Web Assembly flash tool, when we all have 8Ghz PCs.

It also signaled the end of the golden era of amateur 2D games and drawn movies (i.e. what Newgrounds was famous for).

I feel like the modern creativity has been channeled into YouTube, IG, and TikTok. Not as much interactive content, unfortunately.

Flash sucked for a lot of things but what it was an unsung hero for was actually being an outlet and onramp for adolescent creativity.

Children online during that era were not just staring into YouTube videos served up by the algorithm they were clicking around Flash compilation sites with animations, games etc and many would eventually pirate a copy of Flash.

The beauty of the tool, especially in the AS2 era was you could open it up and start animating straight away but then to add sounds or loops you had to add little bits of code into the timeline. This was a perfect way for many to start dabbling with and understanding coding.

Yeah, back in the days Flash was fun for creating simple interactive animations. I yet haven't found a good alternative.

HTML+SVG+CSS+JS+Canvas+WegGL+... can do all the things, but there's no good and simple to use editor.

For pure animations I recently found Synfig, which to me has a steeper learning curve and misses the interactivity Flash provided.

In a way similar to the missing replacement of Delphi in the Web - simple tools for creating quite acceptable results quickly.

All the tools I found till today either produces only crap, which falls apart quickly or one has to make it a real project with proper coding and everything.

I got into programming via Macromedia Flash, which was then purchased by Adobe and integrated into Creative Suite. It was pretty empowering to be able to quickly draw graphics on the stage, animate them with tweening, and then have the ability to add an identifier to an object to reference it with code. I could easily switch from visually animating something, to then trigger animations with code and callbacks, to getting more advanced and making full blown interfaces, games, and interactive content.

Additionally, it was amazing that whatever you created in Flash could be exported and published to the web relatively easily. And it would look the same on all browsers. This was during the time where browser CSS support was abysmal and most web developers would spend their time exporting 9-slice images from Photoshop to be used as background images in tables to get rounded corners.

> I feel like the modern creativity has been channeled into YouTube, IG, and TikTok. Not as much interactive content, unfortunately.

Furthermore, all of these are privately controlled platforms. The notion of a web presence on today's web is dominated by behemoth social sites and their EULAs. Even if we create interesting interactive things, they're excluded from the primary modes of engagement.

In some ways, I think the interactive component has migrated to Unity. It’s in no way a direct successor, to be sure; even with the Unity web player there’s nothing approaching the immediacy of Flash's authoring and playing experience. Browsing Itch.io does channel some of those early-2000s Newgrounds vibes, though.

Yup, the advent of Flash animations was the one time that almost all of my friends and I were able to produce _some_ kind of animation. We all had silly little things we put on Newgrounds, when none of us (well, except me) had any prior animation experience. It was a pretty empowering experience and I remember the relative ease with which we could produce some pretty nice-looking stuff. Of course, that's about all I miss about Flash, but it was a really great time while it lasted. :)

Flash did not run on every possible platform that web browsers ran on. Flash was a 2nd class citizen on Linux.

Flash needed to move aside so that the web standards could advance to the point where Flash was no longer necessary.

Not only did Flash need to die, but all browser plug ins: Flash, Java Applets, ActiveX and Silverlight.

Now we have powerful browsers, web standards, and you can do amazing things in them, confident that it works on any client without 3rd party extensions.

Flash (and Applets, ActiveX) served a short term purpose. Silverlight was an attempt, too late, to capture Flash's success.

> Now we have powerful browsers, web standards, and you can do amazing things in them

Flash had it's flaws, but it was a much more coherent interface for users and developers than what has become of the web. The mish-mash of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with all of the different styles of API) is really unappealing to me. It's rare, but when I do make an application out of a web page, I gravitate towards making a large canvas in the middle of a static page. This is exactly like having a Flash applet except the programming experience is worse, and animation is more complicated.

Also note that Flash was usable standalone, and in addition to having much better development tools, giving someone a .swf file was much lighter weight than the Electron stuff. Moreover, Flash had an onramp for non-programmers which is pretty sorely lacking in the web world.

I'll agree that modern web standards can do everything that Flash did, but only in that "Turing Complete" kind of way where you can do everything with Brainfuck but you'd be happier in a different languge.

> confident that it works on any client

LOL, I think you mean: on Chrome (and if we're lucky, Firefox).

> Flash was a 2nd class citizen on Linux.

Get the point you are making, but it was more that Linux was a 2nd class citizen for Adobe than flash was a 2nd class citizen on linux (though people would have still wanted a free/libre alternative even if Adobe fully supported linux)

IMO it's almost certainly not the "open letter"; Flash was Adobe's effort of having a runtime that they controlled, to enable authoring rich content - you need to understand that Adobe didn't directly make money from the player, and the publicity it got from it was increasingly negative due to the usage in ads (which were often not very carefully programmed, if I may add so).

So you have this combination where Flash Player was costing Adobe lots of money to maintain, while not contributing too much to the topline; and on top of it, we made a prototype of CSS regions (basically reflowing text inside/outside arbitrary shapes) that was met with a lot of initial enthusiasm by all browser vendors/ they all seemed eager to adopt it. So the executive that was in charge of the digital media division just saw the opportunity to cut huge costs, and put Flash on life support basically overnight - by basically outsourcing the runtime work to the browser community, and contributing as Adobe in the points where we felt it was essential. There's stuff that I'm not sure I can tell even now even though it's old news... but let's just say that there were very big industry players that were taken by surprise and would've otherwise supported Flash; the death of Flash on mobile and on the web at that point was far from being a foregone conclusion (in fact, Flash support was being touted at the time by Samsung as one of the reasons why Android is better than iOS).

Now - don't get me wrong, I was not in any way among the decision makers. But I was in the development team - both for Flash player and for the prototype that I believe sealed Flash's fate. I may be wrong; but OTOH there's a good chance my recollection of the events is far closer to the truth than the random internet narrative.

Did you happen to be there for Adobe's "premium licensing" debacle? I'd like to know exactly what the execs were thinking trying to charge Unity developers for something the web could already do (WebGL + emscripten).

That was a big deal at the time, but Flash was on the decline well before then and it was obvious where things were headed. You could technically run Flash on early Android phones, but it was horribly slow and barely functional. Too processor intensive, too hard to make responsive content, and that's on top of all the security and other concerns. Flash was never going to survive the shift to mobile.

Apple made a similar decision in the late 90s when they didn't ship a floppy drive in the iMac. Perhaps they hastened its demise, but not by much.

> Apple made a similar decision in the late 90s when they didn't ship a floppy drive in the iMac. Perhaps they hastened its demise, but not by much.

To be fair, Apple's influence was far greater in the smart phone space than the PC space.

Another sign of the tech regression is that we don't have a robust alternative that does the things Flash did. No easy-to-use and publish editor, no robust video/audio streaming server/client combo. Today's HTML alternatives are so convoluted and bad to integrate that we need to use proprietary/closed platforms (e.g. Unity, youtube)

Apple never really loved the web. Web animation and gaming are still behind what you could very easily do with flash, webrtc+video are horrible battery drains etc. Ironic, considering that one of the reasons that Jobs bashed flash was that it drained the battery. And that he replaced "not open" flash games with his own Closed Platform and App Store garden. The whole reasoning in that letter reeks of hypocrisy , it should be obvious in retrospect.

On top of that , modern "HTML sites" are much worse performance-wise than the equivalent flash. Abandon flash : sure, it's old and unsafe and nobody wants browser plugins. But make sure you have a decent alternative first. We don't.

That is one of the more well-reasoned and thoroughly explained pieces of corporate communication I’ve read. I wonder if the “Jobs style” has been widely adopted in the corporate world; I feel like I see it more and more often these days.

Would this be considered anti-competitive today?

Let's say you control a major internet browser (or have good knowledge to believe that your iPhone's Safari will become a major internet browser) and specifically exclude support for a competitor's platform (forcing people to the App Store/Apple ecosystem to create similar experiences). On its face, and outside the technical considerations of Flash as a platform, it seems like a move to directly subsume a huge market share.

I'm surprised this angle hasn't gotten more discussion. Personally, I think the bar for anti-trust in tech is very, very high and this doesn't meet it (and neither would current shenanigans du jour) but interested to hear what others think, or how they think it's different. It's kind of nuanced since it's more like one vendor not developing support for a competitor, rather than impeding them after-the-fact.

> Would this be considered anti-competitive today?

I think it would have been different if they were allowing other plug-ins to work on mobile Safari. They weren't anti Adobe, they were anti plugins. Flash just happened to be the most visible one in addition to being the most egregious example of what can go wrong with plugins.

> Would this be considered anti-competitive today?

Disallowing a technology that is controlled by one company in favor of a technology that is standardized and can be and is implemented by many companies? I can't see how you even begin to think this is anti-competitive.

(I do think that there's a lot problematic about apple's lockdown approach to devices. I think you can make an argument that the whole approach of device lockdown is problematic and should face some regulation. But picking out the flash deprecation seems like an odd way to highlight that.)

it's clearly anti-competitive, then and now.

whether it's an abuse of monopoly power or an anti-trust violation is open for debate (particularly, how you define markets for analytical purposes).

>Would this be considered anti-competitive today?

No. Apple STILL has insane restrictions on creating your own HTML rendering engine. That is, neither Mozilla, nor Google, nor Microsoft can ship their browsers on iOS. Apple is still getting away with it, and that's probably because they aren't seen as a monopoly by regulators.

On the other hand, are you going to say that creating a new platform gave them the obligation to design its browser in a way that allowed plug-ins?

That open letter is dated 2010. Flash was dead-man-walking for years before that insofar as new development was concerned. I was there.

I would propose that any serious web app development team grouped Flash on the client in the same "basket of deplorables" as the JRE, ActiveX and Silverlight long before 2010. Just a headache waiting to cause you compatibility support calls. Client plugins were to be avoided at all costs if possible.

I agree with other comments that Apple was killing flash only in the sense of putting it out of its misery - like a bullet for lame horse - and only waited as long as it did for compatibility reasons.

There is a lot more to the story. Adobe claimed that it could get Flash working on the first iPhone if Apple had allowed it.

However, when Adobe did finally get Flash working on Android (barely) it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz processor. The original iPhone had 128Mb RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until five years later that the first iPhone had those specks.

Not to mention that Adobe said they would have Flash working in the Motorola Xoom on day 1. It wasn’t. Leaving the Xoom in the embarrassing position where you couldn’t view the Xoom home page on the Xoom.

> However, when Adobe did finally get Flash working on Android (barely) it required 1GB of RAM and a 1Ghz processor. The original iPhone had 128Mb RAM and a 400Mhz processor. It wasn’t until five years later that the first iPhone had those specks.

OTOH, the Wii's web browser supported Flash and it had only 88 MB of RAM, so I'm not sure what was going on with Android.

IMO Flash was already languishing and Steve's criticisms were valid.

It was a big deal when Steve made the call, but I'm not sure the call was a random act of Steve as much as, Flash was hardly in great shape.

It was home to a lot of content you couldn't find elsewhere, but Apple not supporting flash didn't happen in a vacuum.

On the contrary, people thought the iPhone not supporting Flash would make it a non-starter and give Android a huge leg up. Flash was viewed not as languishing but as a fundamental requirement.

The other thing that was always notable about this letter is Jobs's own use of the term "PCs" to refer generically to a form factor (that would include Macs), and not the long-dead trademark for IBM's product line of home computers from the 1980s.

Prior to the IBM PC, ironically, Steve Jobs had coined the term "personal" computer. Prior to this term, they were called "micro" computers "home brew", "toy", "small", etc.

The idea of one man, one machine. A computer that is personal -- like a toothbrush is personal.

It is irony that IBM used the term on its microcomputer.

Yep. At the time, it was kind of a controversial decision. Now it seems obvious.

That Flash should be deprecated wasn't controversial (at least amongst tech savvy people). What was controversial was not supporting it at all, because doing so locked out a lot of the web of the time. Especially certain enterprise sites but also a lot of video sites or even ordering a taxi in some cases.

That said, the iPhone was in a particularly unique position to push through a change like this and force websites to adapt. iPhones were becoming popular with upper management so a website that didn't work for them was actually considered an issue worth addressing.

Nowadays Chrome would also have a good chance of forcing similar changes.

The writing was on the wall already, but Apple definitely put the final nail in its coffin.

Just think about what might have happened though. Suppose the iPhone would have supported Flash, and supported it without performance or battery issues (a big if!). This would have allowed rich application development with a very mature toolchain for the pre-app store iPhone. How different things might have played out. That whole first wave of iPhone apps and games (air hockey, light saber, flash light, angry birds)? Flash!

Who knows what the impact might have been on the App Store and the demise of Flash.

Use of Flash was antithetical to the Open Web.

So instead we get propriety apps. Good job.

The decline of Flash did not begin with Steve Jobs. Maybe accelerated, but definitely not started. Flash was already long on its way out due to many of the reasons Jobs listed.

Essentially, the web migrated to the mobile format and Flash was extremely ill-prepared to make that jump, inside and out.

Flash didn't die a natural death, it was murdered by companies that resent any loss of control over their users. Complaints by Jobs weren't in good faith overall - Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day. Jobs was just a control freak along with wanting to keep games/interactive content in the walled-off app store (plain web capability wasn't there yet at the time), Google can't collect data from Flash content as easily and wants its developers more focused on advertising than supporting the ever-dwindling feature list of Chrome (who cares about features like extension capability or viewing flash content when we already captured a ton of users bundling the browser with random installers and we can advertise on the google home page), and Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of blindly following everything Chrome does. We could still be in that brief utopia of new HTML5 capability coexisting with first-class Flash support if the politics played out differently.

> Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of blindly following everything Chrome does.

I think Mozilla's incentives for minimizing Flash were relatively aligned with their principles: Flash is a proprietary technology from a single company, not an open standard. I also think that's a valid criticism, and why a lot of other tech enthusiasts didn't mind seeing Flash die, either.

I largely agree with you though—Flash was a good technology, and the clear line in the sand it created between "web pages as documents" and "interactive content" had a lot of advantages. I also don't think it was any more bloated than modern HTML web apps, although it felt heavier at the time due to our more limited hardware capabilities.

My experience with Flash was that it was a nightmare of crashes and cpu usage on anything but Windows (i.e. Linux desktop, MacOS).

I feel like a lot of people have a very rosy "nothing was wrong" view of Flash that I don't share. Jobs' letter was pretty welcome to anyone using a Mac, for one.

> Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day.

It absolutely did not. It was a huge battery drain and super unintuitive to navigate with touch.

Flash did not "work perfectly fine" on Android.

Arguably Flash never worked perfectly fine anywhere it ran. It was notorious for high CPU loads and security vulnerabilities. Putting it on a power-constrained mobile phone platform just emphasized these shortcomings.

You can add these to the list of selfish parties:

Developers wanting full scripting support; this is what lead to all the security problems.

Advertisers that turned an amazing animation system into a thing everyone hated.

Macromedia and then (to a much larger degree) Adobe that took every possible wrong turn imaginable. What started as a system that allowed interactive vector animation to play from a floppy (native player AND media) turned into a bloated mess with features no one wanted or people wanted for only selfish reasons.

You make valid points. But for years malicious Flash applets were one of the primary ways malware was delivered over the web. For IT departments, unless a user absolutely needed it, it was removed from their system. There was a time where it seemed like there were new critical vulnerabilities in Flash every week, and it was a nightmare to keep up with. Security, or lack thereof, contributed greatly to its demise.

i don't remember flash ever being very good at its job. the best there was at the time, but slow/buggy/crashing. i remember being very excited for html5 being able to replace it.

Flash also didn't live a natural life. In an ecosystem of incresingly open web standards and interoperation, it was a closed-source single-owner multimedia time-synchronized event-driven content engine embedded in what increasingly became an ecosystem of open-source multiemdia time-synchronized event-driven content engines owned by multiple companies.

Flash ended up with a closed-source economic model of "Maintain a bunch of forks of our engine for every platform, hope people keep paying us for the dev tools" and it became a losing gamble.

If Adobe would have invested reasonably in security (timely fixes, code quality reviews, silent auto-update by default, general attitude towards code quality in hiring/development) Flash might have had a chance. They didn't.

Flash didn't work "perfectly fine" on Android - basically every product shipped with Flash was vulnerable at almost any point in time.

> Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day

This is absolutely false. It was not fine, much less "perfectly fine".

It was slow to touch respond, super laggy. You couldn't hover. Scrolling and tapping wasn't supported right. It broke browser navigation when you weren't expecting it.

Flash never worked on Android fully.

Someone please give this memo to Citibank which still uses Flash for their virtual credit card number feature! [1]

[1] https://www.cardbenefits.citi.com/Products/Virtual-Account-N...

Not to mention Trustwave, which requires a Flash plugin to load their PCI compliance interface. The irony is deafening.

That made me laugh out loud, but it's somewhat on part with that circus.

I ran in to some hassles just last week with some online proxy voting site for some shares I hold. I couldn't see the document they were asking me to vote on because this well known proxy vote site "securely" hosts the content using Flash. Of all the ridiculous things to use. I'd be willing to bet the document was a PDF underneath it. My only option was to request a paper copy of the document so that I could make the right decision which is an utterly absurd waste of ink and paper.

I tweeted at @AskCiti last weekend and their response was underwhelming.

I recommend everyone that uses Citi's virtual CC's to do the same. They need to get off their ass and fix this.

I dunno, maybe it's better if no one does. I expect they'd just remove the feature instead of rewriting it.

Funny part: they provide a binary for offline usage, but it is Windows only. MacOS doesn't exist for them!

Does the binary not use Flash internally?

They'll lose me as a customer if they do. I suspect there are lots of other people in the same boat.

Yeah, I'm not sure they'll care. Bank of America did exactly this. :\ Maybe Citi will feel differently but I wouldn't keep my hopes up.

CapitalOne also offers virtual numbers but only from a browser extension called Eno

“Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site and Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.”

This blocking seems really dumb to me. At least throw up a warning. It will cause old web content to be completely inaccessible, throwing away years of human creativity. Most likely there will be some legacy systems somewhere that will then use a hacked version of flash laden with malware because it’s the only thing available so some legacy system written by long gone people can be used.

I think hacked versions of Flash are statistically more likely to be secure than the official version, though.

Why do you think that the official Flash player would provide a secure environment going forward? It never has, and so without Adobe's active support, I imagine it would get even worse. Official Flash has always been a security nightmare.

> I think hacked versions of Flash are statistically more likely to be secure than the official version, though.

I would think exactly the opposite, primarily because you have no idea who put together that hacked copy. God knows there is already enough malware that pretends to be an update to Adobe Flash.

> It will cause old web content to be completely inaccessible, throwing away years of human creativity.

Good. It's great lesson for content creators and consumers about relying on proprietary formats.

> Good. It's great lesson for content creators and consumers about relying on proprietary formats.

How old are you? There is nothing wrong using proprietary formats and at the time there were no other alternatives. Macromedia were the pioneers of internet animation.

Even with HTML5 today there still isn't anything that allows me to produce a quick web animation with the likes of the Macromedia Flash. Adding that Flash would always produce the same result on any device that could support it. Mobile Phones, Symbian and even Palm tablets all supported it at one point.

Proprietary isn't the issue here, it's the monopoly that Adobe is. Adobe could of more and happy propped this up but no; like all major buyouts, bleed the product out to die. If it wasn't for Macromedia, Adobe wouldn't be what it is today.

Proprietary is exactly the problem here. Your work can die at the whim of a corporation.

It gets even worse with product activation.

Even if something is proprietary but without activation, you can sort of preserve it. I can spin up an old version of WordStar in MS-DOS on my computer, and open up old WordStar documents. I can start up Windows 3.1 if I want in a VM. It's not as good as something open like LaTeX, but it's not completely useless.

If you use Adobe CS, and Adobe goes under, changes business models, or takes down its activation servers for any reasons, your life's work might be dead. Few corporations survive forever. Even fewer products do. That's why a lot of us avoid rights-managed or some types of cloud-based software for critical work (although a lot of cloud-based has very good export options, so I don't hesitate to use e.g. Google Docs).

You say Adobe being a monopoly is the problem, but you don't realize the proprietary format of Adobe allows it to be a monopoly. If flash source code was open, there would be alternative flash implementations.

I didn’t have Flash on my computer for several years, but I installed it last week. I'm planning to take the GRE, which is being given remotely due to Covid. A proctor watches you through your webcam, which I find this completely creepy, but what can I do?

Anyway, this system apparently requires Flash.

This level of incompetence is exactly what I expect from the college board.

They have no incentive to improve. They are a government funded "non profit" monopoly.

Well, they're using some larger system called "ProctorU", so it's not just the college board.

I took the GRE in 2011 and I recall driving to a strip mall in rural Seattle and sitting in front of a Dell PC, underneath moldy ceiling tiles, and doing the test on some kind of virtualized, _greyscale_ Windows 3.1 environment. My memory may be exaggerating at this point, but it was shockingly old.

Was the UX bad or just different than you expected?

My wife is currently in didactic year of PA school. When they went remote, there was a period of about half a day when they told all of the students they had to turn on their cameras (but not their mic) via Zoom during every test the rest of the year. They changed their minds quickly when they realized most of the students were not on board with it and most of the faculty didn't want to have to 'proctor' over Zoom.

If you took it at a testing center they would have a camera on you too.

The camera in the testing center can't see in your house.

What is a GRE ?

A Graduate Record Examination; a standardized admission test.

If you hope to be admitted to grad school in the US (and Canada, methinks), the GRE is mandatory at many, if not most, establishments.

https://www.kaptest.com/gre/what-is-the-gre

A standard test for applying to grad schools.

I'm still confused by the statement 'Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.' are they literally going to stop the flash player loading SWF files on the 1st of January?

Browsers will prevent from loading all flash content?

They already block flash by default. The next step must be to remove the "run anyway" button and ignore the flash plugin.

What are we to do about all the useful tools, pages and games that were either written in or utilized Flash? I realize some of this stuff will be rewritten in HTML5, but what about the things that are not?

How will we preserve all those classic flash games that we wasted our time playing in the early 2000s?

shrug Never build a towering edifice on a closed-source, closed-protocol, single-company-owned engine and infrastructure ever again, because there is no solution to this problem?

You're right, we should all write software exclusively for Linux, and then only on RISC-V CPUs! :)

This but unironically. I can get C code from the 70s to compile in GCC but I can't get Windows programs released twenty or so years ago to run in Win10. Open software will always be easier to support and always be more stable than proprietary software, because one invites a free community of maintainers and the other one tells them that they aren't welcome. In the short-term, writing for proprietary systems is fine, but if you want your application to be use-able after you die you should probably open-source your stuff and make it compatible with free platforms.

A better way of looking at this is from the perspective of where they make money: targeting Windows makes sense because it's core to Microsoft's business, their reputation is heavily linked to it via all of those enterprise contracts, and their revenue scales directly with the number of people using Windows.

In contrast, Flash was an Adobe acquisition which they never had a clear vision for and the model of selling tools but giving away the runtime for free meant that your app being popular didn't make more money for them. Anything security-exposed like this needs substantial amounts of ongoing maintenance funding but from Adobe's perspective that was mostly overhead or something Google would subsidize for them.

I mean, you joke, but that would make you immune to this kind of problem.

Not necessarily, WebAssembly is a potential viable host for implementing/emulating Flash. See here: https://medium.com/leaningtech/preserving-flash-content-with...

Absolutely.

And that was a bit obvious in the late 80's. Somewhat obvious in the 90's. Very obvious in the early 2000's.

millions of app stores developers cover their ears

> How will we preserve all those classic flash games that we wasted our time playing in the early 2000s?

I assume the same way we preserve long dead consoles. Emulation. It isn't difficult to set up a VM with older copies of windows.

Well, for the games and animations this exists:

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

Got mentioned on this site a few times too.

Why should they be preserved? Why should it stick around forever?

The "useful tools" have been replaced with better tools available today. It's the same reason why most people don't use a rock and chisel to build a house - better tools exist and older tools have been abandoned or mentioned in history books.

Plenty of games, musical bands, and artwork over the last century have been lost to time and forgotten. There's plenty of Jazz music in the 1930's and 40's that was never recorded to paper or vinyl. And that's OK. People moved on to other forms of art.

If you bought a board game in the 1930:s, chances are you can still play it if you've been careful when handling it.

If you bought a cast iron skillet in the 1940:s, chances are you can still cook with it if you've treated it right.

If your favorite game is a Flash game bought in 2010, you will not be able to play it anymore.

Is it because software is not as tangible that we accept just how fleeting its permanence is?

> If you bought a board game in the 1930:s, chances are you can still play it if you've been careful when handling it.

You can play a game of Monopoly, but it's not going to make you any friends.

I think most people would agree that it's worthwhile (for various reasons) to preserve art if there are reasonable means to do so. Obviously there is a lot of artwork we've managed to preserve for centuries or millennia. There's no reason we need to wistfully resign ourselves to "the way of the world" here.

This isn't about losing the copies of the art itself. Imagine if all chisels in the world stopped working. That would not be okay.

But I think you can use the standalone flash player?

Why can't Adobe open source flash? It would be a massive help to people trying to create alternative implementations of flash to keep legacy websites working

The compiler to generate SWF files is open source I believe.

Not the player. I imagine it's burdened with licensed software and patents of all kind. Or they just don't want to do anything with it anymore, which is equally valid.

It was terribly insecure throughout its life. I can only imagine how many more security vulnerabilities would be exposed once it goes open source.

Does it really matter now? Pretty sure only nostalgic web users use flash to view old games, clips and such

There's a fairly popular open source letter to petition to open source flash: https://github.com/open-source-flash/open-source-flash

But it doesn't look like it made Adobe change it's mind...

I have http://www.vatican.va/various/cappelle/sistina_vr/index.html in my bookmarks. A really beautiful depiction of the Sixtine Chapel. But I have no Idea how to load it on a modern OS. I have also no idea if the vatican has plans to update ist for more modern technologies.

There are even more http://www.vatican.va/various/basiliche/index_en.html if you dig around a little, but I have no clue how to preserve them...

Installing Flash used to be one of the very first things I did when configuring a new system. Now? I can't even remember the last time I actually used it.

Because it is bundled in with most OSs now. You have it without even realizing it. ... For now ...

Considering how often Flash was found to have a security bug, I've been actively avoiding it for years.

Is there a standalone player for old flash content? If people wanted to still view old things created in it.

Yes, Adobe makes Flash Projector:

• Windows: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...

• Mac: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...

• Linux: https://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/flashplayer/updaters/3...

You can just open the swf file you want and run it directly. It's great.

Linux users might alternately want to use the community-packaged Flatpak: https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.adobe.Flash-Player-Proj... All other links come from https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...

Kind of stupid that these will also presumably be removed from Adobe's official download page, since this is exactly how Flash content ought to be run going forwards: as individual legacy files you've downloaded and inspected. I would advise downloading and backing up a copy now.

This won't work in practice for most Flash games. They're almost all "site-locked", so they refuse to execute anywhere except in a browser on the domain where they came from.

Well, most of the ones I've tried have worked. There was one swf that had to be put in a folder with the name of the domain it came from.

I know SWFs can be decompiled -- can they be modified? Can the sitelock code be disabled or altered?

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

Flashpoint is an archival project

You might take a look at Flashpoint: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

As well as the underlying Flash Projector:

https://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/debug_downloads.ht...

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/How_Flashpoint_Wor...

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/datahub/Extracting_Flash_G...

Flash was a dumpster fire of performance and security issues and being a closed platform in direct competition with the web we have today, I won’t shed a tear over this.

What will be sorely missed though, are the brilliant authoring tools that Flash came with. For a very short time in history there was one tool that allowed designers and developers to truly collaborate on rich interactive experiences. It was amazing what that unlocked.

I don't get it why my Windows 10 installation is still downloading updates for Flash Player. I deselected it in some setting which was to be found somewhere (Windows 10 settings are a horrible maze), but for some reason it still thinks it needs to protect me from this deactivated piece of malware.

I think I can speak for millions of security-minded folks: Well, it’s about time.

This has been a looooooong time coming. Very few websites still use flash.

The only sad thing about it is that it'll become much harder to play thousands of old-school flash games.

https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player

Newgrounds, at least, will never have its players lose the ability to play its old Flash games.

Gosh, I always think the websites in the FLASH era is the most versatile and really have no limitations, just see today's websites, all plain, simple, and boring as hell. Yeah I can understand the vulnerabilities and slowdown of Flash, but it really shines at that golden age! R.I.P

It was so simple to create 2D games. Is there some comparable engine/tool nowadays?

I am not an expert in the gaming field, but you can check Godot engine for 2D games, people say it is a really amazing tool. Of course you can choose Unity, but many people now prefer Godot for 2D games.

I mean, the Flash maybe not the best option for creating a game, but for Flash website era, I think those weird, funny, and highly interactive websites are really shining at the age, I miss that time!

Just to share this archival project:

https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

Basically it's a massive bundle of flash (and other plugins) together with a curated list of games and animations. It spawns a local web server to trick the games into "thinking" they are still being run on their original servers (this doesn't work for games that required a multiplayer server obviously, it's only to workaround the common portal exclusivity rights that were common in the golden era of Flash games).

It's really a labor of love and an incredible window into a slice of web history from the early 2000's

If it's of such low value that it's being discontinued and all the browser vendors are blocking it; why not open source?

Flash evolved into Adobe Animate, which is used today for many television shows:

https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...

Disclaimer: I work for Adobe, but not on Animate.

I doubt open sourcing the player would hurt that revenue stream.

Good question. Why not open source?

All it takes is someone (or group) interested enough to expend the resources necessary to re-implement it. But browsers are not going to support binary extensions. So an implementation might be in WebAssembly / JavaScript -- but then Flash becomes just a translation or transpile layer onto existing web technology.

If nobody implements an open source Flash, that is the proof that it is not sufficiently interesting to anyone with resources to build it.

I suspect the Flash runtime has a bunch of patent-encumbered, licensed software and codecs and the effort to secure those licenses for open-source release is too much effort/money.

I suspect something like that. The video codecs it uses are Sorenson Spark (ancient), VP6 (google opened this), and h264 (certainly encumbered for a while longer). Though, patents haven't stopped open source projects like LAME or x264. At the very least, they could release the source for the code from 2000 which is now past the patent expiration dates.

Flash Player itself has a lot of security vulnerabilities but Adobe Flash as IDE still has no competitor even today IMHO. There is no such tool that combines code and graphics with ease like Adobe Flash. You can use it as an animator, you can use it as graphic designer, you can use it as developer. All these features just came together perfectly and it made sense. I am still missing this usability.

The internet would be a lot duller without some of the creativity Flash animations allowed, imagine a world without Cirno's Perfect Math Class.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_bQNPG2OyE&

Good thing Haxe[1] and OpenFl[2] are around and doing well.

[1] - https://haxe.org/

[2] - https://www.openfl.org/

In other words, they are implicitly telling us that we should archive their entire site... although I suspect the IA has already done so.

The only thing really bad about Flash was the security, but otherwise it is an extremely efficient vector/animation format that AFAIK none of the "open standards" have managed to come close to. Seeing Flash disappear, only to be replaced by SVG (yuck!), JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, was extremely disturbing.

(I have written a SWF to PDF converter. Parsing the format itself is quite straightforward, I could've probably written most of a player if I went further and added the interactive stuff too.)

Security, the fact that it was a closed standard, touchscreen support, battery life... most of the issues brought up by Steve Jobs are still valid: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

the fact that it was a closed standard

The standard has been freely available for over a decade now.

touchscreen support

That's an implementation issue.

battery life

Also an implementation issue. Jobs was talking only about video, but I bet the "instruction path length" from reading a file to rendering a vector graphic is probably an order of magnitude if not more for a browser reading an SVG than Flash reading a SWF.

Those who have played Flash games will likely remember its very acceptable performance on a sub-GHz processor with 128MB of RAM or less. I don't think the HTML5 equivalent in a modern browser would even work on such a system.

That said, it was much better when it was Macromedia Flash, i.e. after Adobe bought it they bloated it greatly (which is where most of the security problems came from.)

Kongregate's John Cooney did a flash games postmortem @ GDC which seems appropriate here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65crLKNQR0E

Genuine question: if Flash weren't a security nightmare, would it be a better environment for producing games and dynamic content than what we have today? I've never done anything in Flash.

Add-on question: what do we have today? Has anything filled this void?

HTML5, the canvas API and all the new browser APIs right after it.

How about Godot?

I never played any flash games and I never really understood the difference between the flash and shockwave plugins for games, but , I always installed flash because it was a wonderful video player. Before flash video was common most things were quicktime and the quicktime plugin was SLOW.

The other nice thing about flash is unlike quicktime there was a linux version.

Sure, flash is obsolete and unloved now, but it really was better than what came before it.

I just came here to say the Flash IDE was the best vector graphics editor I knew and I have not find a replacement. The way the color of two objects was used to determine the boolean operation between them was brilliant. You could add a bezier point by dragging a selection through a surface, you could remove a bezier point by narrowing the surface. The aligning gizmo always worked the way you needed it to work.

I wonder how much this will enable another wave of "Adobo Flash Player Browser Toolbar"-like adware since the official source will be removed.

Flash is a good candidate for webassembly as target.

Add updated controls for touch, discourage usage of hover, and compile the flash player to web assembly, targeting animations, ads, etc. Then provide a paid cdn for deliveeing content.

I remember using flash a long time ago, and what i loved most is the way you could do complex animations with such little effort.

If Adobe could re-release the flash IDE but make it target webassembly, it would probably be a hit if they marketed it right. I don't think there's anything since that has surpassed the flash development experience

I won't say it's not about time, but the decision to block the execution of flash content after said date and the removal of the downloads, complicates matters for system administrators.

We have a legacy blade enclosure at the office that needs an old version of flash for configuration, and also our vSphere web interface is flash based.

One of my fave Flash animations was a Stick Figure Animation, called "Time to Die."

I don't know if it can still be found anywhere, but it was a riot (and rather bloody).

You would pick which weapon they would "test," and one of the choices would result in a Snake Pliskin-type of character getting loose, and slaughtering everyone.

TIL Flash still exists on other platforms.

Flash was dropped around 10 years ago for Linux, and never existed on iOS.

I'd no idea it was still a thing on other platforms.

I do feel bad in that we've lost the ability to run lots of games, but most of them were to trivial to download/redistribute anyway, regrettably. Their fate was kinda already sealed.

Welcome news!

This guy is trying to emulate x86 in the browser and run the actual Flash player within that:

https://medium.com/leaningtech/running-flash-in-webassembly-...

Discussion from 2017 when Adobe released the end-of-life information: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14848786 - “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020”

I’ve got flashbacks to the time when I started creating my first website at a young age in the 2000s. Flash was this unreachable height for me and I just started testing HTML and how the internet even works. Now I’m a full time software engineer and happy on how far the web has gone until today :)

Happy Tree Friends, Weebls' Stuff, z0r.de - the internet would be - will be! - different without Flash.

I miss Flash. It was fun. The web was fun. We got paid to make stuff move around and come up with crazy image masking animations and just experiment. The product had to go, but sadly, it would have no place in today’s much more serious web anyway.

Long live Macromedia and (F)uture Sp(lash) Animator.

I hoped to live to the day when Flash is dead, so at least something good has happened in my life (a few years ago already).

Now, looking forward to PDF being abandoned for scientific publication and ‘white papers’.

I remember around 2007 a tower defense came - desktop tower defense by hand drawn games... I guess that flash version is long gone but did find it nice wish someone would build an html5 version

Steve Jobs on Flash 10 years ago:

https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

The little HN reader in me thinks this is great news, but the other part of me is worried because %DAYJOB% is providing support for a product that depends majorly on Adobe Flash (and IE11).

It would be nice if Adobe could release some of Flash player as open source, or at least help document the format to help preserve the content that made Adobe so much money in the past.

We still don’t have an easy way to make Flash-like games that work in the browser across platform.

Shame on Adobe for killing all Macromedia products. Fireworks, Macromedia, and Flash.

I still use Fireworks every day. It's the best graphic design tool ever created in my opinion. Everything else has become so complicated. With my Adobe Cloud subscription they still let me download it thankfully, but I'm a little worried that in 5 years, when I upgrade my PC, I'll never be able to install it again.

End of an era. I grew up learning how to use Flash and did little animations and even some websites in it. It was a lovely platform for non-programmer types.

Probably because no one uses it since most of the world is on Chrome. If G is maintaining the Pepper flash player for free, why would Adobe need to bother.

my biggest hope is that government entities stop making training content in flash. the freaking DISA cybersecurity training is in flash for crying out loud

Yet, somehow, Flash Player updates are now being distributed through Windows Update (to systems where Flash was never purposefully installed).

Looks like we only have a short time left to sit the younger generation down and force them to sit through all of Strong Bad's emails.

Don't worry, there will still be thousands of sites hosting flash player update exes just waiting for you to download

So, there have been a pile of open source Flash emulation efforts - gnash, Shumway ...

They all seem to get half way then flounder.

What's up with that?

So, while it's still easily available, are there any particular flash games or content I should check out?

Interestingly clicking on the link in Safari prompts a "Would you like to use Flash?" user dialog...

I feel like I'm going to make a a VirtualBox image dedicated purely for Flash viewing.

Does this mean we won't be able to access zombo.com anymore ?

Truly an end of an era :(

Welcome to HTML5 Zombo Com! The only limit is yourself. https://html5zombo.com/

Adobe announced it in 2017.

That's how it's done, Apple.

Wait... this didn't happen like 5 years ago?

It's time to go lol

why did Adobe not open source core flash technology?

RIP

Good news

Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out

This was announced in 2017. It's already removed from all browsers already.

I knew Flash would not be supported further, but did not know that Adobe planned on totally removing even the old versions from their web site at that point. It seems like an unusual approach to the end of life for previously gratis software, even if there are special reasons for it in this case.

Not only that, it sounds like the latest version(s) might already have a timebomb in them to prevent playback of content after the sunset date, and they seem to be aggressively pressuring everyone to stop using it:

>Q: Will Adobe make previous versions of Adobe Flash Player available for download after 2020?

>A: No. Adobe will be removing Flash Player download pages from its site and Flash-based content will be blocked from running in Adobe Flash Player after the EOL Date.

>Q: If I find Flash Player available for download on a third-party website, can I use it?

>A: No, these versions of Flash Player are not authorized by Adobe. Customers should not use unauthorized versions of Flash Player.

Can someone test and share on which version time bomb was introduced?

Still works fine for me in Chrome 83.

Apparently it's being removed in January 2021.

https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Flash-Support-Rem...

Not by default, it doesn't

The EOL was announced back then, with the same date of december 2020, as far as I recall.

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