The day Apple won the Flash fight | Hacker News Reader

The day Apple won the Flash fight

gigaom.com

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Fluff article, really despise these immature "wars" and biased blogs. I own an Android phone, iPad, Touchpad, and a Windows laptop. I use the best technology I can and let results decide my decisions rather than brand loyalty.

The new Media Server is for video content only - your iOS device will still be missing Flash content. Competent websites have already solved this problem. I'm all for HTML5 taking over as long as browser compatibility is maintained and developer tools improve for both designers and developers. For now, Flash wins in the performance, cross-browser compatibility, and developer tools.

http://www.craftymind.com/guimark3/

People seems to forget that Adobe is a company that makes tools. For Adobe, it has never been Flash versus HTML5. It's about giving tools that people are willing to buy or upgrade to. Even if the iPhone had never existed, Adobe would still be adding HTML5 and mobile support for their products.

Indeed. Adobe is already making some html5 tools, as well as allowing cross compilation of fla files to swf and html5. They actually want flash to die too, since the patent licensing of SWF is quite expensive, complicated, and restrictive.

Adobe has actually been saying this, too, but no one is listening.

I think it was Adobe that forgot it was a company that makes tools. They did make it Flash versus HTML5, and are now realizing that they should have been agnostic as a toolmaker.

Flash existed long before HTML5, there was no platform for the tools. They revolutionized the web and HTML5 is catching up

Precisely.

I work for an agency that has the chance to invite different teams from adobe into our office every 6 months or so. Many people might not realize this but when they come to your office they are looking to hear what you have to say, they are not there to push an agenda of how they envision the future.

They have a whole process of looking over your latest work and hearing about where it went good and where it went bad. They discuss new features that may or may not be of interest to you, and then finish of by asking where you would personally choose to invest in adobe if you had the opportunity. They actually want to know if given the opportunity to be their bosses, what would you direct them to work on.

This is why this article strikes me so odd, because Adobe didn't lose anything, they asked their partners what they could build for them, and clearly video streaming to ios was a top feature request.

It's not "giving tools that people are willing to buy", it's "selling tools that are profitable". iPhone or not, if there wasn't a business reason to support HTML5, I'm positive Adobe would've been perfectly content being the proprietary standard for digital media.

I find this a little ironic as today Apple also chose to highlight a Flash app as its iPad Game of The Week: http://yfrog.com/nxvz8p

Machinarium is a popular flash game that runs on iPad through Adobe AIR for mobile. My guess is we'll see a lot more native Flash games on the app store as processor speed increases, and even more impressive work when Flash 11 ships its Stage3D GPU acceleration for mobile (part of the Molehill project).

> Basically, Adobe is acknowledging Apple has won when it comes to Flash.

Why does this article have to have a "vs." narrative? Is it possible that Adobe just wants to succeed and will do what it takes to gain profits?

And I'm not so sure Apple has won just yet. If a device were to gain the traction necessary to gain enough marketshare (you saw a bit of this with HP's TouchPad), we support Flash is a pretty decent incentive for the average consumer who isn't caught up in the HTML5 vs. Flash war (read: every average person).

Uh, I'm pretty sure the average person doesn't know (or care) what Flash is.

Agreed, my mom still doesn't understand why her "Smilebox" doesn't work on her iPad (video slideshow software).

Agreed. Further to my point, the average person will take a look at a lego block vs. the video they want to see and make their assumptions and decisions based on that, assuming other factors match or exceed iPad's.

If Flash was as strong as an incentive as you claim it is than iPad sales should have leveled off once Android tablets came to be. we support Flash hasn't turned out to be as big as an incentive as Android tablet makers had hoped. As far as I'm concerned most people are waiting for the >200 android tablet, Flash or no Flash.

For the time being it's an iPad market and Adobe has to pivot around that. I believe in the beginning Apple wasn't against the idea of Flash, but Adobe couldn't deliver (they didn't deliver anything until almost 3 years later) and by the time they did deliver something Apple realized they could do without.

Right, except the Android tablets are not better than an iPad (read: no individual Android branded tablet has exceeded the sales of the iPad).

Apple's position in the market isn't static. If a competing product came out and was better than iPad's offerings (read: matching engineering, design and ecosystem brilliance) people would certainly entertain a different product. Now add Flash. You can't see how that would be possible?

Well considering the rhetoric from Apple & Adobe regarding iOS and flash, it's definitely been an "us vs them" scenario. Adobe were very quick to publicly criticise Apple for not supporting Flash in iOS, and Apple were very quick to respond with equally stern comments. So I think the author is correct to frame it in those terms.

As for the article, I think it's very balanced. Yes, this is a "win" for Apple, because Adobe have adapted to iOS, not the other way around, and Adobe have been very clear on this issue. They wanted iOS to support flash.

But the article also goes on to say that this is a big step forward for Adobe. Which it is, and that's a positive comment for Adobe.

And finally,

"we support Flash is a pretty decent incentive for the average consumer who isn't caught up in the HTML5 vs. Flash war"

Wh.... wh..... what?

> Adobe were very quick to publicly criticize Apple for not supporting Flash in iOS, and Apple were very quick to respond with equally stern comments.

It should be right vs. wrong, not "I have an iPad, so therefore..." The vs. narrative is ridiculous because both companies muddy up the facts. How can you be on either company's side?

Both sides mask intentions and facts. Adobe isn't for any particular user's innovation. And Apple is not for open, web-based apps. Try and upload an image or file from your iPhone from Safari. See how the standardized file input doesn't work? Not exactly enticing me to create a web-based app for the iOS.

When you come to defend Adobe and Apple based on their false intentions, you just further falsify the industry as a whole. Dissension is the highest form of patriotism. It's okay to be critical when it's appropriate.

I have my own opinion on Flash, but I don't think I was defending one or the other in that comment. The point was, it was absolutely an Adobe vs Apple battle of wills scenario. We can debate wether the "vs" mentality was right or wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that Apple and Adobe went head to head, very publicly, over this issue. And Apple won, I don't see any other realistic or pragmatic way to call it.

From an ActionScript developer's point of view it still takes too long to develop anything interactive in html5. So for the sake of time cost/income, I'll continue to push interactive content out in flash, while using html5 for linear stuff.

With the recent news of unity for flash, the whole thing is about to embark on a new adventure.

Apple did not win anything, Adobe just decided to support a device which has a large enough user base to be 'worth it'.

If Apple had sold a few hundred thousand of these then this would have never happened.

Isn't that the point of the article? Apple sold enough devices to get Adobe to change their content delivery strategy?

This is just for video, most websites already support non-Flash video using one of the hundreds of Javascript frameworks.

This article is written very childishly and is completely devoid of anything non opinion. This person is obviously neither a market strategist, nor a competent reporter.

Before the iPhone it seemed like everyone agreed that Flash sucked, but after iOS that was taken to be some kind of Apple fanboy position. Which is to say, plenty of people with no particular allegiance to Apple have been unhappy with Flash for a long time, so there is no need to paint this as some kind of unilateral war on Apple's part. Flash is crappy and it's finally, slowly dying, that's all.

Unlike most people who grumbled about Flash, Apple actually made the strategic decision not to support it any more on its mobile OS. I'm not a huge fan of Apple, but I admire and respect them for taking this calculated risk.

I've been racking my brain to try and make sense of why som many people seem to have forgotten just what Flash did to the web, and that's it. Pro-Flash is the polite face of Anti-Apple.

There's no doubt Flash transformed the web but not all of it was good. Flash was (and still is) buggy - how many browsers have crashed and how many vulnerabilities has the Flash plugin introduced?

Sorry, I wasn't clear. What I think flash did to the web was bad, and in my view held the internet back five years.

I don't know what you mean about what Flash did to the web. A lot of restaurants and small businesses had bad flash web sites built. Before flash a lot of people made websites with tons of animated gifs, but that didn't cause me to hate animated gifs.

Animated GIFs have never crashed my browser or cause it to perform horribly though.

The biggest fans of Flash are not users, but designers and game makers who have invested years of effort in mastering the creative tools. And I truly feel for them, both in terms of sunk time/costs, and the dearth of alternative tools that don't require a buggy and closed runtime environment.

Could not agree more. Even folks who claim to be for open standards (including Google) defend Flash as if it was an open standard.

But it's not--it's proprietary to Adobe and was designed for the desktop and not mobile. And while performance on Windows was always pretty good, it was horrible on Mac OS X. Flash is the single biggest cause of browser crashes on the Mac.

Ironically, Apple choosing to support HTML5 video and encouraging their developers to do them same got them lots of criticism.

And even if your browser didn't crash, your machine would slow to a crawl because almost all of your CPU cycles got hijacked by Flash, even on new hardware. Apps like ClickToFlash (http://clicktoflash.com/) were required to make surfing the web tolerable on the Mac.

Eventually Apple stopped including Flash preinstalled on Macs; many Mac users removed Flash so their machines would run cooler and faster and with more stability. And existing users realized (thanks for articles like Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It (http://daringfireball.net/2010/11/flash_free_and_cheating_wi... they could uninstall Flash and the world wouldn't end.

Even when pundits were producing FUD constantly about the lack of Flash on iOS, even predicting that Apple would eventually relent, I knew it would never happen.

Apple would never allow something they didn't control to become the video or animation standard on their platform. And certainly not something that would have a detrimental impact on battery life and wasn't designed with touch in mind.

Apple didn't just win today; they won when they said publicly what many of us already knew: Flash is legacy technology that's not necessary going forward. Which they've proven repeatedly.

You do realize that Flash still runs faster and uses less CPU than HTML5's canvas, even in OS X?

http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/

You do realize you're referring to outdated benchmarks, right?

On my Mid-2009 15-inch MacBook Pro running Mac OS X 10.7.1 and Safari 5.1, I get 180–190 frames per second at 1000 particles using canvas.

On Chrome, using its embedded Flash player on the same machine at 1000 particles, I get 30-40 frames per second--big difference.

Like all of major browsers, most graphics on Safari 5.x are hardware accelerated via the GPU.

To sum things up: Flash is significantly slower than HTML5's canvas running the same benchmarks on current browsers.

This "everyone" that criticized Flash pre-iPhone were web developers on message boards. Now lay people who are just Apple fanboys are partaking in this silly fight. I absolutely do not remember the level of hatred that exists today (again, as far as I can tell, mostly on Apple-leaning websites) pre-iPhone. But maybe we just have different viewpoints on the history.

I actually think Flash is not entirely bad, it just does not really belong in browsers. As self-contained apps, Flash applications are pretty cool - they are fun and easy to program (at least AS3 - AS2 sucks), and I often use it as tool for rapid-prototyping little algorithms. Trying to put Flash into browsers though is like putting a sandbox inside another sandbox - it just gets in the way and impossible to effectively interface the two.

> Flash is crappy and it's finally, slowly dying, that's all.

Is it, though?

Google bundles Flash on Android. Android device makers use the existence of Flash as a differentiating factor from iOS devices. And this is not just something disconnected from what users want, if you look at Firefox Mobile's input system,

https://input.mozilla.com/en-US/?product=mobile&sentimen...

then one of the top complaints is that Firefox Mobile doesn't support Flash.

I wish this wasn't the case, but it isn't clear at all that Flash is dying. Google bundling it in Android (and Chrome) is helping it quite a bit. If Google had taken a hard stance against it on Android, like Apple did, that would have been great. A lost opportunity.

So you're saying it would have been great if Google released a browser that couldn't even play all of its YouTube content?

Android has a native YouTube app. The Android browser could have run that in an embedded form, or simply redirected to the native app.

Google aided in de-emphasizing Flash when it began converting video to H.264 to support the iPhone in 2007. Apple and Google were partners then--people forget Eric Schmidt spoke in glowing terms about the iPhone and Apple on stage at the iPhone’s rollout: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3206653149996743169

I disagree, it is dying, though slowly as I say. Regardless of what Google is doing, the two top-selling smartphones and the best-selling tablet by far do not have Flash. These devices now have a huge install base, and that undermines what used to be one of Flash's biggest selling points, which was that everyone had it. At the very least, there needs to be an argument for doing something in Flash where in the past it would have been a no-brainer.

Android device OEMs do try to use Flash as a differentiating factor, but I seriously doubt that argument has much traction at all. They're using it because they're desperate for selling points, not because it's such a good one.

Flash support is the new "IBM Compatible".

Mac users and Linux users agreed that Flash sucked. Windows users just saw it as the thing that let them play games and videos in the browser without downloading some stupid plugin for every different site.

And even though it sucked on Linux, and held back the platform (by e.g. making ARM a 2nd class web platform and not working with pulseaudio or 64-bit) it also gave Linux access to consumer-focussed software that might easily have been delivered with Microsoft-centric technologies that wouldn't have worked at all on Linux.

Google's support of Flash on Android and Chrome OS has helped it to become slightly less crappy. Meanwhile Apple's anti-Flash stance has encouraged people to push web-standards harder so Linux has done okay out of the battle.

It's been more than a year after Jobs' post disparaging Flash and promising that HTML5 can fill much of the gap.

While it has improved, HTML5 on iOS still lags behind a lot. Apple wins the Flash fight when Angry Birds can run on HTML5. Maybe that is what they're afraid of.

>Maybe that is what they're afraid of.

Who is "they" in this statement?

Apple.

Why is that necessary? Angry Birds works just fine as an iOS app.

For Flash to become obsolete feature parity of HTML5 is not necessary. If most use cases are covered and if the number of devices without Flash provide enough incentive for content producers and publishers to do without Flash it’s very possible that Flash will disappear slowly.

Angry Birds was just an example for the level of functionality (graphics, animations etc.).

Sure, but why exactly is that level of functionality necessary?

It would be wrong to assume that HTML5 needs feature parity.

Angry Birds already runs on HTML5. http://chrome.angrybirds.com/

But does it work on Safari on iOS?

No, because HTML5's canvas performance on mobile browsers is comparable to Flash's performance on mobile browsers.

Incidentally, Flash still outperforms HTML5's Canvas on both desktop and browsers.

http://www.blackcj.com/blog/2010/09/17/flash-outperforms-htm...

Possibly the OP meant running on a mobile device?

I tried to see if Fennec would handle it, but their browser sniffing didn't let me find out...

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