I'm not an Apple fanboy, but Jobs deserves all the credit that goes his way for killing Flash.
It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer.
It was a great product, but Macromedia / Adobe demonstrated subsequently that they were in no way a security-responsible long-term maintainer.
Remember, Apple actually begged Adobe to get build a version of Flash Player that wouldn't burn iPhone users' batteries. They did the same thing when the iPad came out. They knew not having Flash was a weakness. Adobe utterly failed to "get" mobile and shipped plugin builds that were about as buggy as the desktop version was.
Getting Flash to work on iPhone would have taken a huge commitment of resources on Adobe's part, similar to how Apple spent lots of time and money getting Safari/WebKit to render mobile sites correctly. It's not impossible, it's just something that you need executive-level buy in on. Google thought Jobs was bluffing and decided to allow Flash on Android; and it was so terrible that Adobe dropped it a year later.
As an example of what Adobe's real priorities were; two years after "Thoughts on Flash" Adobe decided to gate off certain Flash APIs behind a revenue sharing agreement so they could charge Unity developers to cross-compile to SWF. No, really, that happened. Adobe conjured up a whole licensing scheme and everything for it, because they wanted to make sure someone was there to pay for AS4 development. The thing about platforms is that their value is in the money that the platform owner leaves on the table. The more that you claim for yourself, either by charging more fees or neglecting maintenance, the less reason there is to use the platform.
I genuinely feel Apple may be unlearning this lesson.
In other venues, I've seen this described as "becoming 50 percent richer by being 10 percent less greedy."
And how 90s Apple decomposed, and only really turned it around by creating enough demand via consumer device market share that developers had to come back.
It can be argued that this probably would have happened anyway with Javascipt engine performance improving rapidly and web standards beginning to provide media functionality that had been missing etc. However, it was Apple who stopped them cold and greatly accelerated its demise rather than hanging in there for another decade or more.
It was a very smart move to not enable that dependency on the iPhone.
It's no wonder Steve Jobs just decided not to straight up not the tech. The security concerns were just a convenient scapegoat.
* It was yet another thing to install. (Most non-tech-savvy users didn't know how to install a web browser, let alone a browser-specific plugin.) I was an "expert" computer user and I still had trouble getting it to work quite often.
* Flash apps were very resource-hungry on the slow machines at the time. Not quite as bad as Java, but still pretty bad. You had to wait for them to load, and when they consumed an outsize amount of CPU and memory compared to the value delivered.
* A lot of enterprise software started getting written in Flash (vSphere 6, anyone?). I feel bad for every IT department that had to put up with this. Of course, before and alongside that it was Java.
* The Flash runtime was a huge source of computer-pwning exploits. "Click to play" flash was a good idea but about a decade too late to make any difference.
No, Flash was never particularly well-liked by ANYONE except animators, web video game companies, and web ad companies. It was going to die eventually. Even if we were to accept "Jobs killed Flash" as true, that would make it one of his _least_ successful endeavors since Flash only went EOL this year, 14 years later!
My point being that Java felt like they were stewarding a platform seriously (admittedly, mostly towards enterprise priorities).
Whereas Flash felt like they were saying yes to whatever their designer customers asked, and worrying about the details later.
And IE is just being deprecated in many places. 14 years to EOL is a snap of the fingers on enterprise timescales.
For practical purposes, ~Aleph-nought.
https://www.gsmarena.com/over_300_flash_bugs_were_discovered...
The amount of zero-days zero-click remote code execution that came out of iOS on the past few months...
Zerodium had to stop buying zero-days for iOS last year, as they had too many of them.
I means I won't say that Adobe did a great job on security, just that it wasn't a good justification to kill the whole product.
Flash didn't get taken down because of security issue, but because of Jobs manipulative tactics.
Flash was not killed, it committed suicide. All Jobs did was keep the death throes off iOS.
It was running pretty well 10 years on my LG Optimus One at the time, which was a cheap 200$ phone (not subsidized, I got it for 50$ because of a promotion that gave 100$ while it was 50$ off).
Still remember a few years ago, a bunch of friends started to play on our group conversation on the cheap HTML5 games of Facebook... theses games were so simple, yet most were complaining of performance issue. That was on phones that was now few generations better, and not the entry-level ones either...
Jobs knew how to control markets, we are on a thread about this. Flash was killed because he needed it to be killed to control the market.