Apple Was Right To Kill Flash | Hacker News Reader

Apple Was Right To Kill Flash

postersigns.com

44 pointsJudson45 comments

Just think: Someday soon people will be doing all of that with glorious HTML5. Only then you won't have your precious FlashBlock to save you.

The one nice thing about Flash is that it might as well be an <annoyance> tag. Makes blocking annoying stuff easier.

That being said, I can't wait for Flash to die. If you have an Android device, do us all a favor and don't install Flash on it.

This is dumb but not really relevant to anything.

A real problem is that there is currently no up-to-date Flash available for any 64-bit platform. Linux had 64-bit support around 2003. Win XP 64-bit was released in 2006. Full 64-bit support in OSX was available in 2007. A vital web plugin with no fully usable alternatives cannot keep up with basic OS advancements.

If Adobe really wanted to deliver 100% coverage they could compile for all the 64 bit architectures today. I can't imagine it is more than setting a switch or swapping a library, but I guess Adobe doesn't feel the need.

The entire event model has been shifted from Carbon to Cocoa, which means a huge headache for their code. Not to mention a horrendous mess of new drawing models. The NPAPI is a dated, ancient, neglected API that gets more difficult to work with the longer it exists.

Having said that, Adobe is a billion dollar company with a team of engineers working on Flash. There's no real excuse why they can't deliver on this.

64-bit Flash Player needs an x86-64 JIT, which isn't just setting a switch.

I don't doubt you (you surely know more about this than I do), but I would think that most of Flash's actual horsepower usage would go straight into the low level graphics engine - tweens, displaying sprites, boundary boxes. Is there really so much complex ActionScript out there that a JIT is needed on absolutely all platforms?

I think that's a good reason to all start using and improving the Gnash plugin. I use it for my work and it's enough for what I need it for, and one of the most overseen GNU efforts to make things free.

I don't think it comes anywhere close to this old classic

http://www.richswebdesign.com/flashintro.htm

Arguably still the world heavyweight champion of terrible flash.

McAfee SiteAdvisor:

"www.richswebdesign.com/flashintro.htm may cause a breach of browser security.

Why were you redirected to this page?

When we tested www.richswebdesign.com/flashintro.htm, it attempted to make unauthorized changes to our test computer by exploiting a browser security vulnerability. This is a serious security threat which could lead to an infection of your computer."

Wow. For the first part of that I was thinking "this actually is fine", because it is for a web design firm. There ARE clients for which Flash animation makes sense, and the intro was doing a good job of showing the range of skill of Rich in that area.

Then it got to the rapidly flashing background colors, which showed that I was wrong and Rich is just an idiot.

I think I had a damn seizure. I could understand this if this was 1997 and he was 11 years old. But geez- isn't he paying attention to the web? Furthermore, he can't seem to figure out how to make an é symbol...

A true master doesn't need Flash to make an astonishingly terrible site: http://yvettesbridalformal.com/

Yeah, it isn't about the tool. It's about the person using the tool.

Yea… Those with epilepsy are advised NOT to click through the link.

Or intact retinas.

http://iccmworldwide.org/index2.htm

Ah I was looking for that, to add as a runner-up but couldn't quite google my way there. It's extra-disturbing that it's some company that churns out these church sites along variations of the same lighting-and-lasers template.

Looks like an old SNES game.

I like 'C.S.S' and 'Javascripts'.

wow, thanks for giving me a headache.

I'm lost for words.

Don't blame a tool for being misused.

This isn't actually that bad anyway... the animations suit the business. I've seen far worse HTML.

It's not just misused, it's prone to misuse, it enables, encourages, and celebrates misuse. Flash deserves blame for many of same reasons PHP historically has and more (proprietary, not cross platform).

We blame crap physical products (in fact have laws against them, warranties and recalls to protect us from them). Crap software products certainly deserve blame.

If a car accelerates when the brakes are applied I'm blaming the car not the the user. When someone just wants to make an attractive website flash says lays on the "accelerator" and says throw some sound on that bitch, ya make it autoplay on pageload. What volume? ELEVEN of course! Blinking text? Ha! We can make animated graphics fly around the entire browser, spinning and flashing. Fuck yeah!

Flash sucks. And it deserving of all the scorn it receives.

You mean it allows people to anything they want, and people tend to then use it to do more than they should?

Are you really saying that offering people too much power is a bad thing?

400 hp and no steering. Sure, that's OK, but muscle cars went away.

The real problem was that developers didn't yet fully understand the medium. For example the very idea of most sites needing a flash intro went away quickly. And we still don't understand the web fully. The medium keeps changing: download speed, platform speed, size of the computer, location of the users all make it a moving target. Part of the fun I guess.

What happens in my web-browser should be subject to my control, not the hosting site. Power is weird that way.

"Are you really saying that offering people too much power is a bad thing?"

History has shown exactly that, again and again... most individuals don't know how to handle power -- especially in cases where it affects others. For instance, a poorly designed website for a realtor or restaurant can be an annoyance to thousands of visitors, but that's what you get when anyone can put a site together in Frontpage or Flash.

Wow ... someone saw the Homestar Runner main page and declared "this! this UI is the future!" But any useful platform will inevitably be used to do ridiculously terrible things, and Apple was wrong to ban twenty years' progress in programming language design in a doomed attempt to impose good taste. Designers like this will always be out there and you can't stop them without utterly crippling your platform. As everyone else noted, HTML5 will no doubt be used to get these results even more inefficiently.

(BTW, this atrocity works just fine without js. I wasn't expecting that.)

Agreed. It's not the technology that's the issue - it's the people using it. I hope there will be improvements in canvas rendering efficiencies, but in the meantime it's nothing more that a CPU stress tester on many systems.

it's just a matter of time when such websites will appear using HTML5. The root of the problem is not the technology, it's misuse of it.

Only if and when a WYSIWYG tool becomes available to easily create these interfaces and animations in HTML5.

Most of the people making these hideous Flash sites can't code, which is demonstrated by the fact that often there's not even a fallback page -- the creators somehow assume that everyone in the world uses Flash Player.

And those tools will become available, because apparently there is a market to sell to.

Apple did not kill Flash.

It was killing itself quite nicely before Apple didn't include the standalone limited-function mobile version of it in 2007.

Having used flash on my nexus one a few times I can say that there are plenty of other reasons to kill flash on small touchscreen devices.

There is nothing right in what Apple has decided to do.

Apple has the right to do it but that's another thing.

Whether flash dies or not I don't really care about. I would though prefer to see it die out because developers and end users decided they should leave it rather than some industry king pin forces it out of his devices.

However great HTML5 is going to be it's not by any metrics close to something like http://audiotool.com/.

We can argue what is the future of the web, but this attempt to force Flash out of different platforms even before there is any real alternative is really sad.

Flash for better or worse is the de-facto best and most widespread technology we have for these kind of experiences. And there is much interesting experimentation being done with that platform just as with HTML5.

But the difference is that HTML5 is trying to do things that Flash did well 3-4 years ago if not more. And that to me at least shows that HTML5 isn't ready to take over anything neither from a consumer nor a developers perspective.

You know what's sad? That you can't save anything in Audio Tool! I spent at least 2-3 hours tinkering with it only to discover I can merely immortalize my efforts into an MP3.

You can save everything in there.

Under file you can save draft, save edit etc.

Clearly, Apple was right.

I can't wait for sites that jump in your face with unnecessary animation and sound AND render incorrectly depending on browser when doing so.

Pretty good but ill see your bet and raise you:

http://www.evangelcathedral.net

The graphics sound like tower defense.

Flash doesn't deserve to "die" per se, but it is massively over used currently and I think Apple's efforts to fight back against that overuse are justified. That being said, this trend of casting every disagreement in tech as a Manichean life and death struggle is getting annoying. We can have differences of opinion with regards to technology without casting it in such black and white good vs. evil terms.

s/Kill/Block

Thank you.

My god that was horrible. I was listening to music and that crap came up.

I was looking for an article, closed it in disgust when I figured out that the site was the example.

Speaking of the misuse of technology, Flash seems to have a culture of this sort of crap (remember shockwave?).

HTML 5 seems to have more of a culture of nuanced integration with the rest of the web page.

Of course the more successful usages of Flash seem to trend toward seamless integration.

Seconded. Please link articles, don't just make (tired) arguments.

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