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Comment by sashk | Hacker News Reader

Flash will die 10 years after this -- https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

I hadn't read this. The security and battery life arguments are the best imho. The last part about the apps make Apple look like they only want to protect their financial interests in a sort of sketchy monopolistic way.

The security argument was convincing.

The battery argument was weak and I'm sure Jobs knew. Video was a significant chunk of flash's use case, but not the only part, and flash was much more battery efficient than HTML5 at all the other stuff it did. Even today you can't do buttery smooth flash-style animations in javascript without some major hacks (like using webgl). Even simple effects like full-screen fade-in that flash could handle on a pentium can't be done smoothly at all in CSS.

The battery argument was not weak. It was actually one of the strongest arguments. Flash was a battery hog. Disabling flash on a laptop could double your battery life.

Do exactly the same animation with js or even css as you did with flash, and it will use more battery. Disabling flash turned off the animations, so obviously it saved on battery, but the reason for flash being a battery hog was how it was used, not an innate aspect of the technology.

Jobs' proposed alternative to flash, html5, did not solve the battery hogging problem, just made it move over to html5. If anything, it made it worse because you lost the quick fix of disabling flash (or rather click-to-play). That's why even iOS devices have ad blockers now, the mobile web is horrible without them.

Citation please? This is the first time I've ever heard anyone claim that flash uses less battery than html5 and I'm extremely skeptical.

Just try it out, especially at the time Job wrote his piece.

Of course your MBP would spin its fan and drain battery when playing a flash game. But it would do the same, and faster, when playing the same game implemented in Javascript, even more so at the time.

That's not actually evidence. I can't "just try it out", because I don't have a collection of flash games with html5 equivalents. And I still don't believe you.

Having my fans go on full blast because of Flash is something I remember happening quite often. Having my fans go on full blast because of html5 is not something I remember at all.

And your use of games here is a red herring. Nobody complained about games using up battery. The complaint was flash ads using up battery.

That's an outdated statistic. There's way too much javascript and unwanted video and other effects on the web today that your battery is still getting hammered. Turn off javascript today and you'll probably get huge battery savings.

Of course it's outdated. This post was from 2010. Flash was used everywhere in 2010, of course disabling it gave you more battery life.

There is a bunch of cruft on the web today but that doesn't change the fact that Flash ads suck up far more battery than any other ads.

Flash was efficient on Windows only. On OS X anything flash was sure way to make the fans spin.

Yeah, that last justification is one with which I wholeheartedly disagree. Cross-platform done right is a good thing, and yet here we have Apple explicitly describing how it wants app developers to not use cross-platform technologies and instead rely on Apple-specific interfaces. In other words: "screw developer productivity, if you're not exclusively targeting our platforms, you're doing it wrong".

Is there an example of "cross-platform done right"? I have yet to see a case where an app is able to both exploit the depth of every devices capability and the breadth of multiple hardware and software configurations, without becoming a platform unto itself. I'm not saying cross-platform isn't possible, but "done right" is a pretty vague target to hit.

Cross-platform done right is a unicorn that doesn't exist.

What's a good cross-platform toolkit that exists today?

Depends on your end goal. But I'd say Tk/Tcl and Qt have done alright for themselves. They'll never be confused for native, but for a solid GUI app, they're quite solid.

Then there's always Unity ...

I'm a Qt programmer. It's very very good because it attempts to look as much as possible like a native app rather than forcing a "cross-platform look and feel" like Google has been doing lately.

But it still feels wrong on the Mac. Little UI details which just "aren't done" on the Mac. Plus Qt is always a year or two behind on everything means that when MacOS alters or refines a UI element that Qt apps will still be doing things the old way.

Tcl/Tk. Yeah, I worked with it for several years. It was great to work with and highly underrated.

Safe to say I would never write a commercial consumer facing app with that.

libui looks amazing but it's not quite ready yet https://github.com/andlabs/libui

Definitely Unity.

Opengl

That’s pretty low level and I don’t think most people would consider that a toolkit.

wxWidgets

It always made me feel like the open web is implicitly viewed as competition as well, but it's just not as palatable to the public to bash it

I wish that people making this argument would learn how much of the modern web was first brought to public by Apple.

Worth noting that Adobe stopped distributing Flash Player for Android in 2012, and final update was in 2013.

Here's Jobs commenting on this:

https://youtu.be/EMXwa9EtehE

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