I suspect the crappiness of the Mac/Linux versions was not because of developer incompetence, but a severe lack of developers/resources for those teams. Hopefully there are some managers at Adobe who realize that, if they hadn't shipped a crappy product for so many years used by every Mac user, they could have made an actual case for their ability to support high-quality Flash on iOS.
The Linux version was really badly maintained for ages.
Circa 2014, I had to do weird stuff like sed on the .so flash plugin to bump artificially its version string from 11 to 12
This was to work around a requirement for VMware VCenter UI which required flash versions newer that the one available for Firefox at that time (11.2 IIRC).
I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code. It's probably not the most beautiful code in the world, but at least, it would provide a reference implementation and help other implementations a lot.
Even back then you had to do hacks to get it to work. But after that it became very hard to get anything to work. Eventually someone came out with a service called pipelight that I used to use that would allow you to use windows only plugins in Firefox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight. It worked great until I didn't need it anymore.
We can hope but there were big-ish campaigns to get them to open source Freehand and then Fireworks and they just don't care and would rather you keep their monthly CC cheques flowing.
Especially on the video side where people stared to pick FLV as a format, we'd have been much better off just getting an MPEG in the QuickTime plugin, probably with better frame rates and definitely not crashing my browser so often.
As a portable web application platform, I suppose it was better than Java and I'm glad to have gotten access to those. But honestly that was a pretty niche use case.
https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
"We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. "
All this means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep their OS from crashing. Sure, flash was crap, but keeping crap software from crashing your computer is one of the things the OS does.
Obviously a positive change in general, but the push to prioritize that and get it done must have been 99% aimed at problems caused by Flash.
And even after that was implemented, an ad crashing flash in one window would still bring down a video player in another, if I'm remembering right. Still a crappy user experience.
<rambling>
I really like that terminology though, it makes quite a bit of sense. When you witness a crash(you are not part of the crash, you were simply witnessing/interacting with the thing that crashed. You are not necessarily harmed), it is not like the whole world is falling apart. There was a crash, it is horrible and now you have to save what you can. This applies both digitally and in real life. Think crashing a drone or watching a plane crash. You rush to the scene and call for help, but you are not harmed.
Now when the OS fails, it stops everything and can potentially result in significantly more data loss than a standard application crash. Much like when a person is in an accident involving a vehicle. It is no longer just a crash, it is now a panic. When you end up in an accident you don't think "oh ya that crash" you think panic, not the word, the feeling.
</rambling>
Sorry for the rambling on, it kinda just happened. But ya that terminology is great.
As I said, I can't imagine that distinction having escaped notice in a PR piece such as this.
Yes, but he didn't say panic, he said crash. Crash is often used to refer to both application crashes, and os crashes, which are also often called kernel panics. Saying something causes "Macs to crash" when you mean applications running on a Mac, as people are suggesting, is very unclear.
"Sleep Wake Failure" comes to mind. When the 2016 MBP was new I'd get one literally every night that I left my computer asleep. It's now much less frequent (a couple a month, still more than it should be), but more often than panics (haven't had one yet).
To clarify, because I think people may be misinterpreting what I meant by that. I wasn't implying a definitive intent to the statement, but stating that the suggested interpretation is not what that statement means in English, as the the subject is a "Mac", which could logically be construed as the OS, the hardware, or both, but not an application running on a Mac. So either it means something other than the suggestions put forth (that he's referring to application crashes), or it's a misstatement, on purpose or not.
i invite you to learn about idioms! they're interesting.
equivocating over idiomatic language is basically a waste of time.
Then Jobs wrote "Thoughts on Flash" and magically a month or so later the Mac version ran a ton better and continued to get better for about a year.
Have little sympathy for such a reactionary approach to user experience when the majority of Flash authoring occurred in ad agencies running Macs.