Adobe has released the last Flash update ever
theverge.com
theverge.com
I remember about 15 years ago, there was a Flash animations channel on a Chinese website PCOnline.com.cn (Pacific Computer Network), many "Flashkers" published their art works and games there, Little Cherry Cartoon, ShiHuang Animations and that green bean frog to name a few. It was the number 1 place I went to every time when I back from school (that every half month).
For Americans, if you visit NASA.gov in around 2005 (I maybe misremembered the exact time), their intro page was a Flash animation featuring rocket launch and other stuff. And that animation was really cool and moving.
All of that is no more in today's web. Today's web only gives you few pictures or maybe a video in the background, and a big highlighted "Sign Up"||"Get Started" button. They are less and less "Look me, I'm so cool", and the resonance is mostly gone.
It's sad that Adobe was unable to address the security and stability issue in the Flash Player. Bye Flash, it was really fun.
Who could forget Yugo Nakamura's explorations in the early noughties, and many others which defined the early scene.
Even a decade or more ago some pretty impressive experiences were being delivered web-only. I ran a team in London where we really explored pushing the capabilities of the Flash player.
Granted we were just operating in a digital marketing context, in an environment where more involved gaming was already occurring, but we still delivered what feel like pretty decent 2d-gaming experiences, such as Professor Green and the Eco-Rangers: https://youtu.be/gUY2bVnhm44?t=85.
Back then I remember key figures from the Adobe team visiting our London office and candidly telling us the reason Flash was being blocked, esp. on mobile, was entirely due to commercial reasons by Apple, and not for technical reasons.
I believed them at that stage, but in hindsight it does appear there were serious performance, energy and security issues, but ex-Adobe engineers might want to chime in on that...
As someone who lived through that phase of web indulgence, I'm not mournful of a more indulgent time. It was a beautiful, exploratory phase, but the explosion in pointless, nonsense preloaders and custom UI represented usability ignorance and was not something to cherish.
In recent times the creativity and complexity has increased significantly in areas where it matters, such as web gaming, whereas in areas where it doesn't, such as UI interfaces to explore and understand information, it has gotten marginally or a lot better, depending on the context...
No.
Anecdote: the Mac OS X dev tools used to come with an app called "Spin Control." It would sit in the background and every time an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (causing the "spinning beach ball of death") it would sample the process and log the trace. One time I accidentally left the app open and forgot about it for a week. When I came back, I found thousands of logged events. All flash.
It popped up in different processes, because WebKit was embedded all over the place, but every single spin event had flash at the bottom. There were several different stack traces within flash, but they were all flash. Yes, I paged through them all. Yes, I thought the 100% figure was a bit suspicious, so I triggered a mail reindex just to see if Spin Control had somehow been configured to look only at flash or something. As expected, the reindex triggered a beachball -- and dropped sqlite into the Spin Control list. There was no filter skewing the results. Flash had literally been responsible for 100% of the beachballs over a week of document editing, email reading, web browsing, and generally typical user activity.
Point is: I find it credible that Apple saw flash as a limiting factor for their ability to deliver smooth UX and battery life, both inside and outside the browser.
That doesn't explain why Flash met the same fate on Android. They even had Flash players for Android, but those faded out after a few years.
Adobe isn't wrong in saying that Apple has a commercial motive to block Flash, but that would only apply to the point in time where Apple was trying to ban all third-party development tools for app developers, not just on the web. That was around the same time as Apple's "Thoughts on Flash" memo - in fact, the memo was written to justify the App Store policy.
However, Flash was also cursed by the circumstances of it's birth. You see, in the 90s, the trend was to do everything in software, because CPUs were getting more powerful all the time and most computers were desktops with wall power. Who cares about memory or CPU usage? That's stuff's getting cheaper all the time! Dev hours are more expensive than hardware! The idea of dedicated accelerators and hardware for video decoding, music synthesis, modems, or even 2D graphics drawing was going the way of the dodo, and 3D accelerators were far too bespoke and uncommon to stick into a browser plugin. (For the record, there were no less than 4 or 5 competing 3D APIs Windows developers had to worry about, and 1 or 2 more on Mac OS)
The iPhone was designed entirely backwards to this, which is ironic because Apple were the kings of "do it in software" going back to the original Apple ][ disk controller. But that's just how mobile phones worked. CPUs are power-inefficient and burn battery. Ergo, everything the iPhone could do had a hardware accelerator for it. Video and audio decoding were done in dedicated hardware blocks, UI elements were composited by the GPU, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had one of those hardware overlay scanout things, too. Flash Player - or, at least, the full desktop version - was simply not designed to work efficiently and use all of these accelerators.
The painfully sad part of this is that Adobe already knew better. Flash Lite came out back in 2003, although you probably would never have known it because it was basically Japan-only until around 2006. None of this was a surprise to them, it just took them until Flash Player 10.2, in 2011, to actually build in support for things like hardware-accelerated video. Oh, and that only applied to new players that used StageVideo, because Adobe hadn't actually done the hard bit of hardware-accelerating actual Stage composition. They even wrote a Stage3D framework for pre-rendering everything as GPU textures, but they didn't build this into the player, so only games built around this framework would get the performance benefit.
Meanwhile, web developers were enjoying the benefits of hardware-accelerated everything right out of the gate. You didn't have to add a 10mb+ reimplementation of HTML and CSS in WebGL to your site. The web browser just transparently sliced your content into GPU layers and rendering got faster. Apple figured this out and every other browser vendor eventually did the same thing. Same with video and audio tags: the browser is entirely responsible for playback, so it just hooks into whatever hardware nonsense it needs to run good. And because it's the easiest way to get video and audio onto a page, most sites are power-efficient by default.
Why didn't Adobe take this approach? Well, the way they handled Flash updates was that everything was versioned, and they didn't touch the player behavior of old movies. They were betting on Flash developers continually upgrading to newer Flash technologies that would be easier for them to make efficient. Instead of figuring out how to JIT a highly dynamic language like ActionScript, they tried to convince ECMA and Brendan Eich to go along with adding immutable classes into JavaScript. ActionScript 3's class system was specifically designed to make writing JITs easier. Meanwhile, Google was busy writing V8, which could just JIT-compile even your nastiest, most dynamic JavaScript into relatively efficient ASM. It even JIT-compiled the object layouts!
So it's sort of a one-two punch: Flash was cursed by being born of a culture of "who cares about performance, the Pentium II is coming", and by the time they had the opportunity to pull themselves out of that, they were too busy worried about keeping old movies from breaking and instead tried to build new platforms inside the old one that were more performant.
The rev-share licensing controversy was around the point I'd started moving away from the Adobe world.
As you illustrate, the web won and many of us in the Adobe community moved on (who weren't involved specifically in games etc).
The funny thing is, I don't even remember the premium features nonsense from back then. I only learned about it when looking up information on how Domain Memory works. That's how irrelevant Flash Player already was, and THEN they decided to start asking for more money beyond just how much Creative Suite cost.
The historical causality runs the other way: I gave Waldemar Horwat keys to the JS kingdom at Netscape and in ECMA TC39 TG1 in late 1997 when I went to cofound mozilla.org. Waldemar then designed "JS2" aka "ur-ES4" (my term) which is still archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010119185300/http://www.mozill...
https://web.archive.org/web/20001206082000/http://www.mozill...
Believe it or not, Microsoft on the ASP.NET side got excited about this ur-ES4 work and did their own version, shipped server side as JScript.NET around 2001:
https://www.drdobbs.com/a-talk-with-andrew-clinick-on-micros...
The team at Macromedia I was in touch with after Firefox 1.0, mainly Gary Grossman, Edwin Smith, and Jeff Dyer, were trying to do a successor to Gary's ActionScript work (which was based on JS). They tried to license Sun's small footprint Java VM, for full Flash (not FlashLite) on mobile devices, but when Sun learned it was going to run ActionScript 3, not Java, they denied a license.
So Ed whipped up a proof of concept that the Macromedia folks could do it themselves, and this led to AVM2 (open sourced as Tamarin with Mozilla; alas the team got pulled back to work on a doomed Flash for mobile play, so Tamarin was in practical terms abandoned).
My work with Macromedians was a high point of early Firefox era standards rebooting. Jeff and I went to Geneva in spring 2005 to meet with Ecma and Microsoft folks to restart JS standards work in TC39. When Adobe bought Macromedia, we saw a path to ES4 as a standard. This ended only partly in tears, as AS3 was too static and different (namespaces!), but the good parts got into ES6.
But immutable classes originated with Waldemar's JS2/ur-ES4 work in the very late '90s.
The first iPhone had 128MB RAM and 400Mhz CPU. The first iPhone that met those specs came out in 2011.
One of the biggest knocks against the iPad in 2010 was that you couldn’t view the “real Internet” without Flash. Adobe promised Flash on the Motorola Xoom that came out a year later. Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t view its Flash based home page on the device.
The flash plugin was always just an output format for Adobe Flash, which is now Adobe Animate, and the reason Adobe can kill the plugin is because it's simply not necessary anymore: as of many years ago (since around when the iphone came out and didn't support the flash plugin) it has been possible to make the exact same stuff in the current version of what's essentially the same program and export it as standards compliant html.
In other words, Adobe isn't killing flash (which is now Animate) at all, they're just killing an obsolete browser plugin format.
If this type of animation is less popular now that's just an issue of fashion; if people still wanted to make the exact same type of animated landing pages using Adobe Animate they absolutely could.
You're right from the perspective that capabilities have increased, not decreased (though that was not true for a period during the flash / HTML5 crossover). You can make anything you want – and more – in the current context, and any particular historical format or container love is anachronistic pointlessness.
But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices.
The flash plugin itself, as a format, does not enable something different, but the editing environment and culture definitely did, so in some way the death of the container does mark an end of a particular creative era in digital society.
Perhaps only for the participants, and even then I'm not mournful, but it is an ever-so-slightly sentimental moment for those that witnessed that fusion of creativity between types who were decidedly not technologoical and those who were, fused in a shared creative endeavour.
The parent commenter is correct. Adobe Animate is literally the Flash creation tool you remember, and provides the same experience.
[1] "Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional, Macromedia Flash, and FutureSplash Animator) is a multimedia authoring and computer animation program developed by Adobe Systems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate
The fact that Animate can export to a web-compatible format is not sufficient for replicating the richness of Flash-based media with web standards. We tried. The output was far too bloated and inconsistent and didn't interact well with other web content. It also didn't support many the features of SWFs that we had previously been using.
We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs. It's faster and leaner than the web export from Animate, and we were able to figure out ways to replicate the special features we needed (or design around them). Plus, it acts like responsible, interoperable web content, not a blob of JS that acts like a compiled binary.
Point being — there's a lot more nuance here. Yes, Adobe Animate is the same tool as ever. But the fact that you can't as easily take the output from that tool, publish it, and get an It Just Works™ experience means there's a significant barrier now that never used to exist.
Well that's unfortunate.
"Bloated" I get, since there's no longer a black-box binary output format.
"Inconsistent" I'm not sure I understand, since presumably Animate's output is consistent. Does Animate create content that isn't rendered consistently across browsers?
"Didn't interact well with other web content" is interesting, because Flash never did this well IIRC. What was lost?
> We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs.
Neat!
A. Creative people creating games and other fun stuff with Flash in similar vein than HyperCard and Visual Basic allowed decades earlier
B. Bloody stupid web page enchancements and whole sites made in Flash for the effects and they were PITA to use and find. Ie. you cannot use the website without flash because the button animations have been done with Flash so the whole navigation doesn't work because Flash broken or disabled on purpose.
Most of the time I just ended up hating Flash-content because its randomness to work with Linux even on Mac and Windows was really, really annoying. Having fancy effects on a web page without any real added value didn't help.
It definitely doesn't happen anymore (narrator: it still happens).
And it definitely doesn't happen in absolutely every browser out there and it can't really be blocked (narrator: it does, it is just done with JavaScript, which only hermits disable).
If your world view is "block javascript or let any and all javascript run", I don't know how to help you, because that isn't reality.
Why should I name a "browser-embedded technology"? I can just point out browser vulnerabilities.
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html...
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?...
If anything, they're not that great against Flash:
https://www.cvedetails.com/product/6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.h...
Keep in mind that Flash itself was a runtime, much as a browser is. More limited, but still pretty big.
> If your world view is "block javascript or let any and all javascript run", I don't know how to help you, because that isn't reality.
You can't help me, I think no one can. For now we can still kind of run ad blockers, even though Chrome is working hard on stealthily removing them.
But for regular users, who don't run them (probably 99% of users out there), how do they protect themselves from cryptominers? From nasty ads?
You're using a browser build by a giant privacy abusing ad company, and you wonder why it isn't so friendly to ad-blocking/privacy-protecting plugins?
COLOUR ME SURPRISED.
You can't bury your hand in the sand and pretend that everything is fine. It's not.
Almost every browser out there is dying, everything is being taken over by Chrome/Chromium/Blink. The alternative is Webkit/Safari, which comes with its own limitations.
Firefox's market share is 5% and dwindling. Web developers have stopped caring about Firefox. Many sites are slow or barely working in Firefox. Firefox bugs aren't being fixed.
Soon I'll be forced to use Chrome because the alternatives won't allow me to do my job.
Open Source browser alternatives can't keep up. And even though Chromium itself is Open Source, it's not a complete browser for the modern web (see DRM).
So we're all going to be using Chrome or browsers built by corporations with the same incentives as Google (Microsoft also has an ad network, Opera is now owned by a semi-shady Chinese VPN company). And these browsers are gutting ad blocking.
Plus ads are getting smarter and we're not that far off from a point where ad blocking in its current form is no longer efficient. See for example stuff like the DNS over HTTPS changes.
And if it would only be about this, you'd be missing the point by "only" half a mile.
The other half a mile is that many people are forced to use a certain browser. At work, at school, etc. Or they don't know how to change their browser or what a browser even is. We're all in this together, the internet is one big network.
And for regular people, modern browsers are just as bad as Flash. Maybe even worse, at least Flash had a modicum of design as a platform. The web platform is a huge mishmash.
How?
> Plus ads are getting smarter and we're not that far off from a point where ad blocking in its current form is no longer efficient. See for example stuff like the DNS over HTTPS changes.
Surely there will be ways to work around that.
All the popular sites, including many intranet sites in every company I've worked for, use Javascript. I mean, you can disable it/enable it selectively, maybe I should try it with some Firefox extension. But I expect 95% of the web to break if I disable it.
So it's kind of a revolutionary attitude, which works out if you have nothing to lose, I guess. Or if you're trying to prove a point, but along the way you're probably hurting yourself, too.
So you're making fun of me although you haven't tried it. Yeah, okay.
> But I expect 95% of the web to break if I disable it
And you'll be wrong, it is much lower than that (except if you're talking about adverts failing to display, then I guess yes, in that respect it does).
I don't give a damn about other sites (and I don't browse intranet sites on my home machine -- if I'm in an office I use their office machine). If they don't work I don't use them except in rare cases when I really need to in which case they get run in a VM.
> you're probably hurting yourself, too
That's deeply patronising from somebody who admits they haven't even tried doing what I do, nor has even asked why I and others do it (hint: it's for many of the reasons you described). It sounds like you're talking to a rather stupid child.
I already use the strictest Tracking Protection stuff in Firefox, for example, and I do hit sites that don't work correctly.
Maybe it's worth revisiting but something tells me that the web uses more JavaScript, not less, since I last tried this experiment.
And regarding the patronizing aspect, let's say your bank's website uses JavaScript, what do you do?
Edit, actually, sorry, I re-read your comment and you answered my question:
> I don't give a damn about other sites (and I don't browse intranet sites on my home machine -- if I'm in an office I use their office machine). If they don't work I don't use them except in rare cases when I really need to in which case they get run in a VM.
Q.e.d.
I'll just rephrase things to something less offensive: you're not "hurting" yourself, you're limiting yourself, sometimes with drawbacks not everyone is able/willing to endure.
Well mate, take a guess :) I do it on the phone only (and I don't mean smartphone). I've had a little exposure to bank's competence from the inside 20 years ago (large UK bank, mortgages), they couldn't find their own arse with a torch, arrows, diagrams and a PhD in arse-finding.
> 'll just rephrase things to something less offensive: you're not "hurting" yourself, you're limiting yourself, sometimes with drawbacks not everyone is able/willing to endure.
That's much more accurate. We can agree, however consider that that 'limiting [my]self' means limiting my exposure to ads, abuse of my CPU, tracking, most dark patterns, nag screens, malware and more. The tradeoff's very ok for me, and I've experience the web on both sides. Oh yes it's worth it! (for me).
The one I use is called, appropriately enough, Disable JavaScript [0]. It puts a simple toggle button in the toolbar, and remembers the setting on a per-domain basis. If a website has annoying behavior, it's little effort to switch JavaScript off to see if the site is still usable that way, or to re-enable it briefly to glance at some missing content. I recommend it; it's surprising how many sites I've disabled JS on, and left that way because there's no major breakage.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/disable-javas...
https://developers.ibexa.co/blog/embed-flash-swf-content-wit...
The only people with "goodwill and nostalgia" about Flash, are either wearing ridiculously rose tinted glasses, or have zero clue about technology.
So yes, some people have nostalgia with no rose tinted glasses, and I would like to think I have a clue about technology.
There is no reason we couldn't have had safe Flash except Adobe didn't care.
Comparisons with Windows don't make much sense because it is an OS and a thousand SDKs and ever growing attack surface.
Zombocom has more value than all today's social media combined.
You can do anything there.
The bad thing about flash is they also had network access without SOP... oh wait websockets does that. They also had FS access... which HTML5 has too now. Well the sandbox had some CVEs occasionally but then again, all software does.
I guess the worst thing was that it meant you had to install a closed source package from a large SV company... like most people do with Chrome.
"and it will block Flash content from running on January 12th, 2021."
This is a good example of the lack of respect tech companies have for their users!
After so many years, you learn suddenly that in 1 month of time you will not be able to open existing content anymore.
I would have understood if they had only EOL it and also displayed a warning of obsolescence and risk alert for someone using the plugin that will not be updated anymore.
But imagine the huge amount of content already existing that is lost forever? Even worse, if you had created some yourselves and would not be able to see it anymore.
Imagine one day Microsoft saying that they are deprecating Office documents (docx, xlsx) as now everything will be done online with office365 and so existing office installation will be remotely disabled to not be able to open documents anymore in 1 month...
Otherwise, users will be taught to ignore the warnings.
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25242115 - https://ruffle.rs/
But the greedy fucks they are, they won't.
On the positive side, at least open implementations won't be dealing with a moving target anymore.
Using Rust and wasm for browser. They have browser plugin and desktop versions too. I've been trying to contribute, and it's really already able to play a large amount of content well.
Can confirm. I've gone through and downloaded the .swf's for some games I had nostalgia for, and ruffle has played a significant chunk of them quite well. For a relatively early version, I'd say that's pretty good.
Certainly I've enjoyed contributing so far, and I think this is my pet OS project for the next while.
I read that there's some "standalone" player, is that downloadable freely or some part of some paid Adobe offer?
Virtual machine. I still have Windows 98/2000/XP ones around for that reason, they still run fine and are so light weight at this point that the cost is essentially nonexistent. Even software 3D can handle anything from that era I've cared to throw at it, let alone anything lighter. All the security issues aren't particularly important since they can be well isolated.
I have a coworker that worked on flash, it sounded like a nightmare of a project.
Some of that can be seen by what Adobe has done with PDF. That is, cram every single feature you can imagine into a format (including, I believe, flash... lol)
I have just tested the demo, and am happy to see that it can display the Bin Laden (Banana Boat) song, aka "Nowhere to run - nowhere to hide"[1]. It is a culturally important artifact - whose size is 432KB (compare with how much bandwith does a Youtube video of it at Full HD would take).
I could also play the Xiao Xiao stick fight series[2].
Sadly, I still couldn't play a game I've put many hours in back in the day - Gem Tower Defense[3].
However, I could open and play it with KMPlayer[4]. Looks I will be able to continue wasting my time in Flash games going forward!
[1]https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/2767
[2]https://dagobah.net/flash/xiao_xiao_5.swf
Several things:
-Thank you for the wonderful game! This is my favorite tower defense game hands down - I never played another one after Gem TD.
-Hope you'll post about it here! More people deserve to know the awesomeness that is Gem TD!
-Things like Gem TD proved a great distraction when I was going through things in life. And one round doesn't take long, it could be played in small increments. I feel like there is a lack of games that.
Good luck in whatever you are working on - including the HTML5 Gem TD! :)
As an archivist, I'll have to disagree with that.
History must be preserved properly.
and on hardware that was less powerful than a premium phone today.
I can imagine spinning up a virtual machine to use legacy flash content.
Steve Jobs, "Thoughts on Flash",2010 https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
So not 100% true that it's the last update ever if China will get further updates.
I do this from time to time since some of the old games were rather entertaining.
I clicked skip/cancel from muscle memory and IIRC it took me to an uninstall page!
First time I've come across that behaviour!
* Yet Another Pointless Update
https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live-fo...
If corporates started banning Electron (i.e. Teams#, Slack 'thick' installs) there would be motivation to come up with something better.
# Wormable interactionless RCE via Teams (Electron) a few months ago and they refused to acknowledge it.
Although luckily most electron apps are available on the web as well.
/s
What made Flash great was that it was an authoring tool that just let you be weird if you wanted to. The web of the 2010s feels so sterile with cookie-cutter responsive templates. The weirdness is almost entirely restricted to meme images drawn in MSPaint or videos from YT'ers or TikTokers trying to get a TV deal.
I'd love have a developer take a look at some the Flash website tours on the Web Design Museum YT channel and comment on whether rebuilding those in HTML, CSS and JS only is feasible. Some of those websites were built 20 years ago and look far more advanced than what we see these days.
https://experiments.withgoogle.com/collection/chrome https://mrdoob.neocities.org/
That evening, watching some movie online it suddenly stopped. I check and it is the same flash update. I guess Flash updates bring us together in a bonding experience.
A pity for the environment that enabled so many media experiments and animations. I won't miss the memory leaks or the updates, though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGlyFc79BUE&list=FLqVd9KhDa2...
Anyone here have experience using the newer Adobe Animate and getting it working fine on websites?
I live in Germany and there are a few bars here that are open around the clock. Many of them hat to close for the first time in years because of the Corona lockdown.
There's an anecdote about the "Elbschlosskeller" in Hamburg: they didn't have a key for the front door at all, so they had to install a new lock to be able to lock up. Before that, the pub was open continuously for about 70 years
I think the functional fix is that they show reminders because in the release notes, it says: "Some users may continue to see reminders from Adobe to uninstall Flash Player from their system". Adobe seems to say that there aren't security fixes, because they say on October 13, 2020: "Assorted security and functional fixes".
https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/release-note/fp_32_air_...
This immediately enraged me and I considered Linux.
I couldn't help but to consider Apple. But Apple is worse, they started the trend of collecting your information just to use their product. Apple is the reason Microsoft can ask for an email. Apple is the reason for the death of Flash. Apple bent at the knee to china. Apple uses pricing as a marketing tactic.
Any support of that company is bad capitalism.
I don't have an email associated with my windows version. I opted out. I don't sign into anything windows related. But I swear if I have to authorize every exe I download from github, I'm just gonna be a full on linux junkie.
You can also use this to allow you to tweak personalization settings on an unactivated copy of windows before it hits up the activation servers and locks you out of personalization options.
[0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C270SViXAAAzTLh?format=jpg&name=...
And now we have giant js bundles composed of thousands of little libraries, ad hoc animation, subpar media playback.
The web stack wasn't prepared to match the ease of authorship and distribution of Flash. It still isn't up to the same par, and it's been 15 years.
If Adobe had open sourced the entire standard and the player itself early on, they'd still have the best authorship tool and would have done amazing things. I don't know what they were thinking. They had an awesome tool, but their strategy was so wrong.
Flash was like PHP. Admittedly not the prettiest, but people did amazing things with it. It was a tool that worked for a lot of people. Teenagers were using Flash and getting really good.
Steve didn't want Flash eating his batteries, so he killed it on Apple. He also left us with the fucking robber barron App Store and the concept that we can't run stuff or upgrade our own devices. Seems like Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you can or can't run on their platform - that's monopoly power. They killed Flash.
Steve was worse than Flash and stole from us.
There are good reasons to hate Flash, but that decision was an obvious strategy credit: they were going to kill Flash anyway because they wanted to prevent cross platform runtimes and toolkits on iOS, in order to fully control the platform and not be commoditized. Same reason why they banned JIT, in order to prevent Java/C# being used (it took a long time for these platforms to adapt and even today they are not widely used, maybe except for Xamarin, but even that is marginal compared to Objective-C/Swift).
Javascript was also slow back then, Chrome/V8 were only launched in 2008 and reached phones only years later, yet JavaScript based websites were used on smartphones.
I'd be curious to see a comparison of site performance now, Flash vs a bog-standard HTML + JS + animations site. I think they would be quite similar.
Also computing power increases with time, so this is a silly reason to kill off a feature.
There is one and only one browser engine on iOS, the one that Apple makes. Everyone and everything has to use it.
Secondly, they can hobble it at will, just like they're doing now with progressive web apps. We've had progressive web apps for how long? 5 years? Safari still doesn't really support them.
I wonder why? Might it have to do with the business selling tens of billions of dollars of platform-specific applications each year? Nah, that can't be! :-)
What killed Flash is much more dull and prosaic: it cost a lot to develop & maintain, and wasn't making as much money as Adobe would've liked.