Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benologist | Hacker News Reader

The way Apple treated Adobe might have been their very first platform abuse on the iPhone. Flash was huge at the time, but more importantly it was software being actively developed which means it was software that would have improved even as the hardware also improved. At one point Apple even prohibited cross-compilation just to fuck with Adobe, who had adapted Flash at great expense to produce native iOS apps. They had to recant that when they realized they'd also banned Unity3d and many more technologies.

If Apple hadn't contrived their little vendetta, killing someone else's multi-billion dollar piece of software, today Flash would be a flagship IDE on the iPad Pro continuing its then-two-decade legacy as a creativity powerhouse that helped fuel innovation online and in games, media and software.

The worst thing about this sad period of Apple history is today they aspire to kill Electron in the same way.

https://www.macstories.net/news/new-iphone-dev-agreement-ban...

https://onezero.medium.com/apple-is-trying-to-kill-web-techn...

Flash's whole raison d'être was as a patch for W3C gridlock. The final emergence of HTML5, ES6, and just simple ideas like video tags did a lot more to kill flash than anything Apple did. Apple not supporting proprietary browser plugins on early iphones (which it still doesn't) probably helped to move us forward to open web technologies a bit faster, and meant the whole internet was less beholden to a single company. One shouldn't forget how many otherwise simple websites at the time were unusable on platforms that Adobe didn't support, or supported poorly. The several x-platform mobile frameworks that we can choose from are almost all based on a rich and open ecosystem of modern javascript and web technologies that Flash was the alternative to.

The electron article you linked to strikes me as speculative hyperbole. All the "threatened" electron apps mentioned in the article are still around, eating up RAM. I updated two of them through the App Store this morning.

in terms of video chat support , javascript is terrible compared to flash. Flash and RTMP are lightweight, support multiple streams and CPUs don't even sweat it. Doing video chat with javascript is a nightmare of protocols

The iPhone was a brand new product with an install base of exactly zero, vs Flash with an install base in the millions.

I don't think it's fair to call it "abuse". If anything, they saw that Flash was not going to work on mobile and made a tough but calculated decision. It could have backfired on them. In my opinion, it was the right move and we're all better off because of it.

We're about to see a whole lot of software that "doesn't work" on Macs and especially software that "doesn't work well". Is the solution to ban the software? Should we impose a short time limit on improving software and ban the stragglers? These would be ridiculous things to do to software on ARM Macs.

There was one particular problem Jobs had with Flash that transcended the software's addressable issues and made it "impossible", which is why referring to it as platform abuse is apt:

> desire to avoid "a third party layer of software coming between the platform and the developer"

Shortly after that they banned Flash, Unity3d, and most other compatible dev technologies, eventually relenting due to outrage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_and_Adobe_Flash_controve...

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/13/technology/companies/13ap...

"We're about to see a whole lot of software that "doesn't work" on Macs and especially software that "doesn't work well". Is the solution to ban the software? Should we impose a short time limit on improving software and ban the stragglers? These would be ridiculous things to do to software on ARM Macs."

WHAT? Why would it be ridiculous. You have about 6 years to get your app to run on ARM. Same as the 32-bit app owners. Apple gave devs an 8 year warning. If your app developer does not switch to ARM in the next 3 years then it is time to find an alternative.

You don't need to ban poor-performing software to use something else, or to wait for updates that will improve it, or for competing software to emerge. All of this can take place with nothing being banned.

Banning has no place in software development at all, which is why it's not wreaking havoc on Github with projects being disappeared for poor performance. It's why you can't write to Github and request a repository be banned "FoR pERfOrMaNcE ReAsoNs". Games don't get banned from GOG and Steam for poor performance. There's simply no such thing as Raspberry PI banning software. Firefox banning pages that perform poorly does not exist. Everywhere we build and distribute software regards poor performance as something we might be able to fix, something we should wait to be fixed, rather than a bannable offense.

> today Flash would be a flagship IDE on the iPad Pro continuing its then-two-decade legacy as a

...resource-hogging security nightmare. You described my nightmare scenario.

> ...resource-hogging security nightmare.

Oh, you mean like a web browser?

No web browser since IE 6 has been as bad as Flash. It was an attacker's dream come true.

> resource hogging

Completely true.

> security nightmare

Really? All serious browsers are open source and the major ones seem decently well audited, considering the relatively low amount of exploits being published. IIRC Flash was a bit different in that regard.

FISHING SITES AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

flash has been abandoned for 15 years

History would be different if Apple had bought Flash back then. It made sense: a web-based lightweight platform for making games and such on a phone.

That is the issue... Flash was not LIGHTWEIGHT! It was an obese messed that Adobe "NEVER" managed to control. Sure the files you pass from server to client was "somewhat" light weight but the player was breathing heavier than a fat man leaning over the buffet table!

yeah apparently javascript or html5 video isnt lightweight either though. I 'd prefer the timeline in which the flash ECMAscript and animation model had become standard in the browser.

Not sure what you are talking about. JS and HTML Video is as lightweight as you can get. The 3 main browsers just keep optimizing performance with JS on every release. If you need to compare Flash to something then compare it to Java Web Applets

Adobe wasn't able to create a non-power hungry version for Android which meant Steve Jobs was right. Flash died because they could not move forward while retaining compatibility.

Also the x86 version caused YouTube videos that were "PAUSED" to spin up the fans! Same video in the YouTube HTML video player (BETA) remained silent.

Yet it ran on early, low powered, Androids (pre-2012). It seemed to work during the couple of times I tried it.

I guess it was software decoding those videos on YouTube beta.

As a user I am glad that Apple pursued this strategy. Flash did have its use cases, that’s for sure. I still believe that the web is better off now without it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com