Comment by sippingabonedry
2 hours ago
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.
2 hours ago
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 and while 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. these could of all been solved and while I dislike Adobe with a passion, to refactor the software would of been an expensive take. Jobs + HTML5, WebGL, JS had all entered the ring and finished the blow. I miss it.
Growing up with the internet in 2005, 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, creativity is now wrung between Yes AI and No Ai.
Hopefully 2040 should bring world peace. One would hope.
[delayed]
html5 canvas and javascript advancements made flash obsolete, reminder that you used to be able to run java in the browser!