Flash went away because Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea to find a better way and follow their humble browser which only had single digit percentages of marketshare at the time.
Even for enthusiastic Android vendors who saw it as a differentiating feature from iPhone, Flash still took three years from the iPhone launch to have its first release. Adobe was really in poor shape to port Flash to a new platform. Waiting for them as a vendor to bump their proprietary platform vs integrating support for the features into the browser would have cost years for mobile adoption.
> Adobe was really in poor shape to port Flash to a new platform
I wouldn't say poor. Adobe had its own creative-software empire to up-keep. Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and its web-authoring products gave it enormous influence over creative professionals. Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Flash were serious competitors in web design and interactive media. Adobe needed the missing monopoly cards; Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver were them.
Flash was security ridden yes, Flash required a plugin, yes; I don't think supported AppleOS at the time. These could of all been solved but I would agree that to refactor the software would of been an expensive take.
Jobs + HTML5, WebGL, JS all had entered the ring and finished the blow.
I miss it. Growing up with the internet in 2003, 2010's was the end of the wild world web. 2020's was the era of walled gardens for which we now have LLM's for the theme park and we're now entering 2030 where the internet is on fire with creativity now wrung between Yes Ai and No Ai.
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Flash went away because Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea to find a better way and follow their humble browser which only had single digit percentages of marketshare at the time.
You're half right.
Yes, Jobs killed Flash. But he did it because Flash on mobile was a battery killer. And when the original iPhone came out (one of which I still have), battery technology wasn't as advanced as it is now.
Before I got my wife's hand-me-down iPhone, I had one of the few mobile phones that supported Flash. On the few occasions when I used the web browser, I lived in fear that I'd land on a web site that was using Flash because I knew it would tear through the phone's battery in less than 10 minutes.
Ever notice that the people on HN who pine for the good-ol'-days of Flash only remember games? Never the Flash ads and intrusive videos.
Yes and no, canvas was fine for replacing flash, and JS performance was good enough quickly.
Audio however was a crapshoot for years, especially for games.
Even basic WebAudio took until 2015, and the final piece to match Flash being AudioWorklet was only first available in 2018(Chrome) and took until April _2021_ land in Safari.
So before 2021 you needed to either write your own abstractions to support multiple API's with different execution models with so-so capabilties to be somewhat on-par with what Flash provided or even for years resort to simpler solutions (ie just samples).
Flash went away because Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea to find a better way and follow their humble browser which only had single digit percentages of marketshare at the time.
Even for enthusiastic Android vendors who saw it as a differentiating feature from iPhone, Flash still took three years from the iPhone launch to have its first release. Adobe was really in poor shape to port Flash to a new platform. Waiting for them as a vendor to bump their proprietary platform vs integrating support for the features into the browser would have cost years for mobile adoption.
> Adobe was really in poor shape to port Flash to a new platform
I wouldn't say poor. Adobe had its own creative-software empire to up-keep. Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, and its web-authoring products gave it enormous influence over creative professionals. Macromedia's Dreamweaver and Flash were serious competitors in web design and interactive media. Adobe needed the missing monopoly cards; Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver were them.
Flash was security ridden yes, Flash required a plugin, yes; I don't think supported AppleOS at the time. These could of all been solved but I would agree that to refactor the software would of been an expensive take.
Jobs + HTML5, WebGL, JS all had entered the ring and finished the blow.
I miss it. Growing up with the internet in 2003, 2010's was the end of the wild world web. 2020's was the era of walled gardens for which we now have LLM's for the theme park and we're now entering 2030 where the internet is on fire with creativity now wrung between Yes Ai and No Ai.
My first ever domain name, registered with my pocket money at the age of 13. Hopefully 2040 should bring world peace. One would hope.
3 replies →
Flash went away because Steve Jobs made an impassioned plea to find a better way and follow their humble browser which only had single digit percentages of marketshare at the time.
You're half right.
Yes, Jobs killed Flash. But he did it because Flash on mobile was a battery killer. And when the original iPhone came out (one of which I still have), battery technology wasn't as advanced as it is now.
Before I got my wife's hand-me-down iPhone, I had one of the few mobile phones that supported Flash. On the few occasions when I used the web browser, I lived in fear that I'd land on a web site that was using Flash because I knew it would tear through the phone's battery in less than 10 minutes.
Ever notice that the people on HN who pine for the good-ol'-days of Flash only remember games? Never the Flash ads and intrusive videos.
Jobs did the future a favor.
html5 canvas and javascript advancements made flash obsolete, reminder that you used to be able to run java in the browser!
Yes and no, canvas was fine for replacing flash, and JS performance was good enough quickly.
Audio however was a crapshoot for years, especially for games.
Even basic WebAudio took until 2015, and the final piece to match Flash being AudioWorklet was only first available in 2018(Chrome) and took until April _2021_ land in Safari.
So before 2021 you needed to either write your own abstractions to support multiple API's with different execution models with so-so capabilties to be somewhat on-par with what Flash provided or even for years resort to simpler solutions (ie just samples).
1 reply →