Hopefully the absence of Flash on both major mobile platforms will help speed its demise on non-mobile platforms as well.
On the other hand, this news might just precede another announcement from Google saying "don't worry, Adobe doesn't support it anymore, but we do", just as they did for Flash on Linux.
What is your problem with flash, really? I honestly can't think of a better platform for web games (and it's one of the easiest way to develop 2d games, regardless of web or not).
The only thing I can think of is people who don't care about games, in that case flash does seem like an annoyance more than anything (we can do without flash restaurant sites or punch the monkey banners, but i suspect html5/js will just take its place there).
But really, it's a great game development platform and mostly runs really well on windows and these days well enough on linux & mac (assuming the programmer isn't doing something dumb like a busy waiting loop, which would suck resources regardless of platform).
haxe+flash runtime is my favorite environment for developing (and playing) 2d games by a long shot, so I am always a bit puzzled by all the flack it's getting.
1. Ceaselessly the biggest security hole on desktop computers.
2. Proprietary.
3. The need to install it in the first place and keep updating it. (And, no, I don't want it to auto-update.)
4. Can't cut and paste text from it. It's ridiculous to have to manually write down an address or phone number from a Flash-based site.
5. Search engines don't properly index it.
6. A Flash developer can hold you hostage by not giving you the "source" (the FLA master file).
7. It's allegedly a major source of browser crashes (or so I've read though I can't prove this).
8. It's slow. A website is insanely bloated to use Flash when text and pictures could have communicated the same information.
9. It imposes DRM even when the content owner didn't intend it. Think of all the subterfuge and trickery necessary to download a Flash video even when the website owner wouldn't have minded.
10. Blatant inconsistency and poor design across the board.
This is the single most important reason. I say this as a 5-year veteran of Flash and Flex app development. Adobe has a poor compiler and VM with inconsistent specs and behavior, a poor set of libraries with myriad inconsistencies, a poorly designed UI library that's internally inconsistent, poor consulting that attempts to apply business logic on top of an inconsistent platform, and poor security that tries to patch holes at the wrong layer without thinking about them in any depth.
Computers and computer systems thrive on consistency and provability. Each layer depends on the ability of the layer under it to mathematically prove that it works. Without that, everything topples.
I was about to say that. Rights to source is determined by the contract. To my ear, someone who hates Flash because their devs won't cough up source is someone who (1) doesn't code (2) doesn't understand the law, and (3) made a bad contract and blamed the flash dev, and now is taking out his bitterness about the experience on Flash as a platform. Which is ridiculous.
As a coder who doesn't, and never will, sign works-for-hire agreements, I'm the model of a dev who won't give you the source if you fire me or treat me like shit. In one incident, a customer who paid $100k for me to develop a flash app, then sold it to News Corp without mentioning to them that they didn't actually own the source for it. News Corp had, legally, every right to reverse-engineer that app; moreover I actually gave them the source because I'm a nice guy, but I stipulated that they couldn't repackage it without my assent, and that the classes which had been developed outside the project at hand (some of which had been coded on other customers' dime) were not for resale at all; and that in no way could they claim ownership and try to prevent me from reusing any of it for my own purposes. News Corp then hired a team of coders, paid them in excess of $300k to try and reverse-engineer my code. When that failed, they called me and offered me $50 an hour, half my regular wage, to help them, if I would just sign their NDA, which happened to include handing them eternal rights to everything I'd ever done. I told them to fuck off, and the project died a week later.
But more importantly, anyone who knew what they were talking about and who wasn't just a frat boy shilling for HTML5 because that'as what douchebags talk about at Q's on Fridays would know that technically, there are 101 decompilers for Flash, and legally, you can decompile code you paid for and have someone else edit it as long as you aren't reselling it, even if you didn't have the coder under a works-for-hire agreement; and morally, if your coder is telling you to piss off and not giving you the source then you're probably an asshole who deserves it.
You're quite right. I was thinking of an unsophisticated site owner with simple requirements (like a restaurant site) who hires a designer. He wouldn't know to put into the contract that all source code must be delivered. In such a case, he'd be better off if the designer used straight HTML. At least then there's a chance that someone else could edit it or maintain it.
Although I agree with the problem of the developer not handing over the source files, the same problem potentially exists if the designer doesn't hand over the source Photoshop and/or Illustrator files. Granted, that's not as big a deal as withholding Flash files, but it's there.
I think the problem isnt flash itself but the fact that it's proprietary. This is the reason we have such news in the first place. If adobe drops support, it's dead. No such thing with open stuff. No one entity has all the control. This is where html5 upper leg, no one can suddenly start charging you for using it or dictate it's development.
Chrome for ICS doesn't support Flash and will presumably be the default browser for Jelly Bean. Google is unlikely to change their mind and add Flash support.
It appears that no one who has commented so far has used Flash on ICS.
I use Flash on my Galaxy Nexus, and it runs perfectly fine for everything I want to look at. Sure, it's rubbish for things like games and full-flash websites (the latter should be long gone by now anyway) but for watching Flash videos on news websites it's fantastic, and it works just as well as it does on the desktop.
I want Flash gone as much as the next guy, but video on HTML5 is no more usable.
Video on mobile browsers should launch a video player like YouTube does when you follow a link their site. But also there should exist an attribute to avoid this for some cases.
What's Adobe's long term strategy here? I'm happy to see it go, but this seems like it would just be hasten the demise of Flash on the internet. I haven't been following this, but assumed that Adobe benefited from the ubiquity Flash on the desktop. Have they just chosen to get out of this market altogether and concentrate their efforts elsewhere? Or is there a master plan I'm not seeing?
Adobe's core business is not developing platforms, but developing the editors and tools for designers. Graphic design, web design, vector, raster, doesn't matter.
They make money selling their software, not deploying flash all over the web.
I'll copy here some parts, so I can edit a little, mostly to adjust for current trends:
------------
Their business is to make and sell amazing Editors. CS is their main product. They bought Macromedia, just to own much of the market of Designer-oriented applications. And Macromedia filled a Gap.
But from now on, they are investing heavily in building tools for HTML5.
-You can see them building Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools. [1] (this link is almost a year old, so I'd expect them to have something much more advanced by now).
- They are building HTML5 Editors [2]
- They stopped developing Flash Player mobile. [3] In the same post where they state that they will stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, they state: Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5.
Ok, ok, they also state that they will keep working in Flash for desktop. But it's like when any software company says: "We'll drop X, Y, Z so we can focus on A". That's something said to please their shareholders, so it doesn't sounds like "As our products are no longer needed, we'll just kill them".
If you are a guest inside the browser, and the browser developer just throws you away (iOS, Windows 8 in Metro, only running in whitelist-pages), you have to move somewhere else.
Adobe just wants to keep selling their Creative Suite. So, the best thing for them to do, is to focus on HTML5, because they now know that Flash is doomed sooner or later. And they are doing it. I expect to see in the near future something like Adobe Flash Professional but designed for HTML5.
One more thing: Imagine for a moment that you are Adobe. You have an amazing suite of products, and a few of them are based on Flash. You realize that the browser developers have chosen to work and invest in something else. You go through all 5 stages of grief [4]. You deny it, you get angry, you bargain, you get depressed, but finally at least, you accept it. You HAVE to adapt and you have to work with them. But you won't have anything to sell for at least 1 or 2 years. And you still have this wonderful suite on the market.
What do you do? Do you go out and yell: DON'T BUY IT! WAIT UNTIL WE RELEASE OUR FUTURE-PROOF PRODUCT!!!
Of course not!!! You say We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences
But at the same time, in the same paragraph you say: We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders. And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.
Read it again: a smooth transition to HTML5.
TRANSITION.
That's their way to say: "Keep buying and using our products, while we develop our HTML5 editors. Then, you can buy our new products and move to HTML5 too."
They have went through the last phase. They have accepted it. And they are adapting, good for them :)
It's interesting how hard they are pushing this; there is still quite a lot of Flash on the web ... at least most smaller sites hosting / streaming video seem to still rely on it. I actually would have thought they could make a decent bit of revenue just by offering it to OEMs as a selling point. Perhaps they see even more revenue by forcing all the recalcitrant sites still using Flash to buy Adobe's tools as the easiest upgrade path to get onto HTML5.
I'm afraid the reason Flash works poorly on platforms other than Win32 and Adobe is dropping the platform support is that they don't have the people that understand their code anymore, and there's noone to make it run (properly) on new platforms.
If you had a choice, would you work on a project like that? Some of these projects spell doom when they show up on a resume because they're already associated with badness. Once that happens, good luck getting any good people to work on it. As you can see, such a situation can sustain itself.
There is the downside to this, in that by forcing rapid adoption of web video via <video> they are going to force h.264 on everyone and if libavc ever gets attacked by mpeg open source video software is doomed. Why can't we just use ogv :(
On the contrary, Flash helped h.264 win in the first place. If Flash didn't always exist as a fallback, then sites might have actually needed to offer WebM as an alternative. But with Flash available, sites could just use H.264 and fall back to Flash for anyone without support for H.264 in <video>.
If Adobe allows Google to adopt flash and continue support to develop and support it then I don't see any problem. Android is Google's baby so they need to adopt the flash development. Adobe is fecked up if they don't allow it.
As far Flash being terrible. I have never had any negative experiences. This blanket negative view of flash is just hype. It is used all over the place. In the hands of a bad programmer, any application can be terrible.
Performance tests between flash and html5 don't show much advantage to using html5.
The PRIMARY and ONLY reason for moving to html5 is that it is not proprietary.
As far as security hole, it was put there intentionally. Windows OS is one big security hole so it is like pointing to a tree in a forest. Other reasons are frivolous.
So we should move towards html5 but keep flash player working on all platforms until full migration of internet occurs to html5. There is simply too much flash content so it will take a long time to migrate.
Seriously, Flash just needs to die and the sooner the better. It's horrible. I'm not even talking programming here (I know nothing about Flash programming). It's a horrible user experience.
One of the things I'm thankful to Apple for is in them taking a stand against this horrible experience and hastening its demise. Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature.
Flash isn't horrible per se. It's horrible because Adobe is completely incompetent in making it run stably and on platforms other than Windows (and even there it's a stretch). Were they competent and the Flash experience just worked, I'd be fine with it.
The suckiness of Flash is what's driving the adoption of HTML5/JS because, let's face it, HTML5/JS isn't exactly a mature platform yet.
I just wish there was a way I could run a browser with Flash even installed without being bugged by "You're missing plugins. Would you like to install them?" Flashblock, Click-to-Flash and the like help but I'd rather not have the software installed at all.
It makes me sad that Chrome bundles Flash and can't have it conveniently extracted either.
To be fair, Apple didn't kill Flash (much as I'd like to give them credit for it). Adobe did.
But what exactly are you basing the accusation of a horrible user experience on? Is it a matter of a Flash app that's badly designed? Because that's not Adobe's fault. If one were to duplicate the app's horrible user experience over to iOS does that mean the user experience for iOS apps can be considered as horrible? If I write some bad javascript that causes the browser to consistently crash does that mean that javascript or even the browser sucks?
Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature for you. Let's not assume what's good for you must be good for everyone else. I for one have never had much of a problem with Flash on the hardware that I use, but in some circles a negative opinion always outweighs a positive one.
The complaints about the problems you describe just running the Flash player on several different platforms are rather well deserved. It does seem that Adobe has decided at some point to drop the ball on the whole thing. But the player does support backwards compatibility all the way back to the beginning. I've always thought that possibly the majority of their problems relate to that. They should try just ripping out support for anything that uses versions less than actionscript 3 for a leaner plugin.
But, this statement does seem more about the Flash player itself in the browser. It doesn't necessarily mean that Flash, as in the platform, will die. It'll probably live on as its own platform that requires something like Adobe Air to run on some hardware.
Also, almost everything you hate about Flash's "user experience" will live on in the canvas tag. Unless I misunderstand what you mean by user experience.
>But what exactly are you basing the accusation of a horrible user experience on?
Can't speak for them, but yeah, I mean, in the end it is all subjective right? You can try to measure it, but sometimes Shit Just Doesn't Feel Right™. That's how I've ALWAYS felt about Flash. Before Steve Jobs said it, before Google was a company and I was little, and after I anxiously installed it on Android only to once again be sad by how awful it is.
Also developers at WWDC or Google I/O wouldn't cheer if either company said "We're going all in on Flash." they would look at their neighbor and say, "Wait...what? Why?"
But then I could make you a Flash app that does nothing but show a blank 640x480 stage with a simple button and then you would say "that just doesn't feel right"? But if I did the same thing in canvas you would react with "that's better"? That doesn't address my question about what is meant by "user experience". It is a tool, nothing else. Unless someone can show me a common trait across almost all Flash apps that is some sort of fail that can be directly tied to Flash then I attribute complaints of user experience to the developers of the app, not the tool.
Now, if you were to say that your experience with Flash in general on mobile devices is that it tends to crash and is slow; then that makes sense. That would be a user experience problem directed at Flash. It just seems to me most complaints of user experience with Flash is based on a misguided hatred of Flash itself.
The reason everyone would react that way with your hypothetical is because that would be stupid, that's not what Flash is for.
I have one concern with flash dying: It means that annoying, crappy ads will migrate to HTML5. Annoying HTML5 ads will not be as easy to selectively block. I suspect that the low quality UX will simply migrate and crash a bit less.
Flashblock was a great method of filtering annoying content.
I suspect that this problem will be resolved by using black lists to sites serving the js to create those ads. Just bocking those sites (the way we can black porn at work) would serve the purpose.
I agree that the majority of the blame for Flash dying is Adobe's fault but not for the reasons you outlined. Outside of security concerns everything bad about Flash can be accomplished with 'HTML5', <canvas>, SVG, and JavaScript if you throw the wrong developer at it.
Adobe's biggest mistake was not open sourcing Flash as HTML5's canvas and audio in one. It could have been rewritten to use JavaScript. Converting a game/app from AS3 to JS on 'Flash Canvas' would have been trivial.
I can live with Flash going away but there's a lot of good we're throwing out with the bath water. ActionScript 3 is a pretty nice language. It's basically a mix of Java or C# and JavaScript (it has events and callbacks but not scope issues). There was no need for an ActionScript the Good Parts book.
HTML5's canvas is very primitive compared to Flash's display list. With the display list you have a hierarchy of visual objects (Sprites) so objects can added as children of other objects and if the child dispatches an event it can bubble all the way up the list to the root parent.
Flash is a platform and it is very unique virtual machine. It has its own features. Since it is a virtual machine it has great potential. I think most problematic part that Adobe has to face is fragmentation. It is very complex task to maintain a complex VM ( which consists of very high level graphics capabilities) to run smoothly on every single hardware. Flash has provided lots of great stuff which is not provided by any platform before. Even now there is no any other choice for specific tasks like P2P video.
I can't understand why they haven't just made FP open source... Flash on the web is maybe dead, but it is still usable for kiosks, games and AIR-related stuff (AIR used to be a best idea for platform-independent wrapper of active PDFs, thus killing it is a strike into this technology). So it is possible to sustain the Flash market for years with minimal costs...
This is a good move. I'm glad Adobe is coming to terms with the end of Flash. Moving resources away from Flash to other areas where Adobe is successful is a win for everyone.
They're blocking installs after August 15th, so if you want it, you'd better hurry. Though it isn't clear what happens if you've installed Flash previously, but not on the particular device you want it on.
In an update on its official blog, Adobe said that there will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1 and beginning August 15, it will start limiting access to updates to only users that have Flash Player installed.
The company had already said that HTML5 was the way forward on phones and tablets -- now we know just how quickly it's backing up that claim.
Why don't we just move onto HTML5 now? I use iOS devices and completely removed Flash from my Mac months ago. There is a Safari plugin to force the use of the H264 stream from youtube.
I would like to do this but I've found that YouTube's HTML5 player is terrible. Buffering is always erratic and just loading the page causes my browser to freeze for 5-10 seconds (it usually starts working again once the video is loaded into the player). As much as I want to see Flash go away it's still the best choice for web video on a desktop machine (at least on YouTube).
But it does show you can get on just fine without Flash. There is no equivalent Chrome extension. I don't know why. A completely Flash free experience is the reason I use Safari.
Flash is not used just for video, there are a huge number of games that use it and HTML5 is not ready for prime time there. (Not enough browser support, and coding a game in HTML5 is much harder.)
There are several reasons, audio in html5 is not ready at this point. Also, 3d in javascript is miles away from being a reality (actual 3d, like in x,y,z referenced points, not the anaglyphic 3d kind) and Mr. Doob with his fantastic three.js is still a distance away from what can be done in flash/actionscript now.
Those are some of the reason actionscript, air and flex are going to be around for a long time, even on mobile. If you "miss it" or you don't miss it, that is your own constructed opinion and it won't make flash go away sooner/later or ever for that matter
Flash simply outputs to ios executables now and you don't have a clue you are running it anymore, so, maybe that is part of why you don't miss it.
You don't seem to miss the know how of why it is necessary still, so that kind of loops to the point you don't know why we can't "just move onto HTML5 now?" Weird huh. How did that come about.
Picking camps is not the same as having a valid opinion based on objective reason, in your case it makes you stand out like a meme based "are we there yet" user. Cheerleading is awesome. But it really doesn't make the players score on its own.
Last reason why it won't "go away", flash developers get paid to make chart topping games that run on ios, while apple takes a store app cut from it.
Because gaming. Pretty much any graphics operation you can do in Flash can be done with Javascript and Canvas. But it requires writing several times as much code, runs about 20% of the speed and consumes most of the CPU to do simple tasks.
For example, lets say you want to create a little green radar HUD map for where enemies are on a battlefield in front of you. In AS3 you can make each enemy dot be a sprite, and move them individually when necessary. You can mask them when they reach the edge of the HUD, fade them out when they disappear. When you turn left or right, they all turn together. Because of how Flash's graphics engine works, only the graphical areas that are changed in each frame are actually redrawn; this is all handled at a very low level and the speed is close to native; it can also be coded to take advantage of a GPU.
To accomplish the same thing in Javascript and Canvas, you have to write an engine that tracks where each of those things is in global space. To draw little rectangles at different rotations within the same canvas, you actually have to rotate the canvas, draw the rectangle, then unrotate the canvas. Once you've got this engine written, you still have to redraw the entire canvas with your engine deciding how to draw each pixel, square or circle, one by one, with every single frame. To get around that, you write another engine that determines which areas are changing and only redraws those. But then you have to decide what to do when overlapping objects are in front of or behind that area, so now you've written a scene graph, z-order and a traverser, and possibly parent-child relationships, from scratch. Fine, but you realize that the traverser, running as it is in untyped javascript without the benefit of typed iterators like vectors, can't handle more than a dozen objects before it's hogging up even more of the CPU than if you just redrew the whole stupid canvas every single frame.
So, all this behavior is necessary for any game. Good coders are struggling to make these things playable in HTML5 to keep the mobile market happy, but to do that you have to cut a lot of corners. The game quality's obviously lower, and the games are slower than they would be in AS3. It's just unavoidable. People who don't know how computers work then complain that Flash is so slow, etc. because of the perception of sloppily coded banners and stuff. But when the same exact things are written in Javascript and Canvas they are much, much slower.
We still need a nice editor to let designers handle HTML5 nicely. Adobe is making progress, but until them or somebody else releases a fully functional product ready for designers, well... it won't be that easy....
Edit: why would someone downvote this? Do you really believe that designers (not developers) should handle canvas and Javascript directly instead of using an editor?
Google will not do that. Chrome doesn't support Flash at all on Android, and since Adobe plans on stopping support for mobile forever, I don't see why they would go back to supporting it in the future, unless Android becomes some sort of mega-successful desktop OS by then, and somehow Flash is still popular on the desktop by then.
On the other hand, this news might just precede another announcement from Google saying "don't worry, Adobe doesn't support it anymore, but we do", just as they did for Flash on Linux.