The Slow Decline Of Adobe Flash Player | Hacker News Reader

The Slow Decline Of Adobe Flash Player

fastcompany.com

22 pointstechnologizer13 comments

Flash being a resource hog is down to bad coding of the flash applications rather than the runtime itself (the runtime isn't a masterpiece of efficiency or anything but it isnt intrinsically a resource hog).

All the crappy programmers making punch the monkey flash ads will just make punch the monkey html ads and you wont realise what it is consuming your battery.

Also, "Thoughts on Flash" is full of easily verifiable lies.

The runtime is pretty awesome as well. I remember the work of people like Joa Ebert exploiting the platform and the language to the max, really cool stuff. The world is barely coming closer to what Flash was capable to do... 8 years ago.

IMO Apple killed Flash not because of the "battery, security, etc..." "issues", but because they didn't want their devices to depend so heavily on another company. It was business, and strangely, Adobe didn't even put on a fight. And they just spread FUD and all the developers that didn't know better went with it, but I agree with you, shitty flash developers will now just be shitty HTML developers and everything will be the same in another 5-6 years or so.

There is probably business strategy in that, but I remember flash on my mac to be terrible (100% cpu, draining battery like crazy). While the same version on windows was running perfectly.

Apple wouldn't give access for some hardware apis to Adobeso stuff that was being done on the graphics hardware in windows had to be done 100% software on Mac. Then Jobs complained that Flash was slow.

And its pretty much the same thing now.

Try WebGL on any Mac (Safari is the worst performer of them all btw). You will see a bit of lag, frame drops, CPUs at 100%, a lot heat and your battery will die in two hours max.

Open the same site on a Chrome/Windows machine (with comparable specs of course) and you don't see any of that trouble.

Why? Because Apple wants everything done "The Apple Way®©™" and other people just don't care so they just create a substandard implementation and call it a day. And it's only going to get worse now that they want to push Metal everywhere.

Lies such as?

Lets start with the first one

"Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. . . By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system."

The Actionscript 3 virtual machine and compiler were both open source at the time that "Thoughts of Flash" was written. So a lie.

I don't have all night to go through lie-by-lie but here's another one "Flash was designed for PCs using mice, " No it wasn't, it was created to produce interfaces for touch screen kiosks.

It is astounding the amount of lies packed into "Thoughts on Flash" and how much was uncritically gobbled up by the tech press.

What I don't understand is why Adobe hasn't made HTML5 a supported compilation target for the existing Flash tools. Yes, tons of work. But a great way to stay relevant in the web app development space.

I do some Flex (Which is build on Flash) contracting, the money is crazy and there are some Flex/Flash applications out there that I don't see getting replaced by JS anytime soon.

Yeah there are massive internal applications inside Big Corps across the world in Flex that aren't/can't be replaed soon.

You are one of the brave few and I salute you! When flash fell out of favor I joined all the other devs who jumped ship. I really enjoyed application development with Flex/actionscript. It was a much saner ecosystem than client side javascript IMO.

I think it's a pity Adobe hasn't open sourced flash, I'm sure there are some rockstar developers out there who could help fix the bugs and boost the performance/efficiency of the runtime.

you have haxe (http://haxe.org/), open source and even better.

The flash language (Actionscript) was entirely open source from compiler up. The OP is talking about the Flash runtime.

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