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Comment by liquidpele | Hacker News Reader

I hate Adobe with the passion of 100 suns for killing flash like they did… yea it had problems, most software does, but it was like 20 years ahead of its time ffs, and the web has been ridiculously bland since they killed it. My conspiracy theory is that apple and google paid them to kill it to force sites to support mobile.

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Who needs a conspiracy when your product creates such a terrible user experience? I've never written a lick of flash, and I don't care to. I still have awful memories of just how broken Flash sites were. They'd stick out like a sore thumb since none of the widgets ever worked like native ones, there were constantly keyboard focus issues in Firefox, video never seemed to be accelerated and would decimate battery life, the privacy nightmare of the persistent cookies you'd need to load a flash app from Adobe to clear (permissions as with everything else gave the finger to the host system/browser). Who could forget the near constant security and stability issues? I, for one, am glad flash died.

Flash died because while it sucked on desktop systems, it was somehow way worse on mobile just as mobile was becoming more important.

If only Web development 10 years later was half of the developer experience of using Flash.

Is it though? Folks using the current tech stack du jour have still managed to recreate the user hostility that Flash pioneered.

Just because I can cook in the middle of the forest, doesn't mean the tooling is the same as on a Michelan restaurant.

Well, we've now gone from "none of the widgets ever worked like native ones" to "there is nothing even remotely in the same category as OS widgets available to the developer". Not sure if it's an improvement.

Flash sucked. It was bad for accessibility, it was closed, it was slow, it was a way to force ads on us. Sure you could do animations, but that was not what most of use needed/wished at the time.

The only population that liked flash were: - marketing departments - wanna be game devs and the teenagers that played their games

Pretty important population.

If you make games that millions of people play are you still considered a "wanna be game dev"?

Man, don't be so critical.

I for one won't shed a tear for developers and their users that have been screwed over by their garden master. You go for closed proprietary technology because it has certain benefits, so have the consequences too. Same thing also goes to classic ASP, Silverlight, etc. You have one master.

But I can't say I did not enjoy flash games. They had a mini boom around mid to late 2000s with "tower defense" type of games which was excellent. For me it felt a bit back in earlier 90s DOS, you had a lot of well made and unique minigames heavily concentrated on gameplay as opposed to "assets"

If they hadn't EOLed Flash then projects like Ruffle would have the difficult job of playing catch up with a proprietary runtime that would still be in wide use.

Flash died so Ruffle can live. <3

Adobe capitulated, but apple killed it when it didnt support it on ios.

apple killed it after Jobs had a hissy fit

Android did support it for a time though, it was a pretty good selling point in fact... but then google dropped it too :(

Google never dropped it. Adobe did, when they realised that they could make money from HTML5 instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.ado... .

I'm working on bringing Flash to iOS via browser proxy^0. Basically, what we do is run the browser on the server and stream the viewport to your regular mobile browser (ie, Safari). Then we use Ruffle injected into the remote page.

Basically it's a "monkey patch" to give you extensions-like capabilities but on mobile devices!

0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424

I remember using a browser called Puffin that worked like this to use Flash on iOS

I'm no Apple fan, but Apple killed it because Adobe was letting Flash be an awful, unreliable piece of software for years, and seemed fine with letting that be the status quo for a decade more. If Adobe did a better job of improving the stability and resource management of the Flash clients, they wouldn't have had to "capitulate".

Citation needed. Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were. I think that flash got a bad rap because browser vendors didn't like it's monopoly on content and they wanted a slice.

> Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were.

Citation needed. Saying that because Flash was widely touted as a significant contributor to browser crashes.

Though, looking for a citation for that myself just now... all of the search results I'm getting back are just an endless sea of "Flash crashed my browser" type of things instead. :/

Yeah, exactly. Just because everyone says it doesn't make it so, and the general public are often wildly wrong about basic computer facts.

Well, neither of us seem to have supporting evidence so far... ;)

---

Using some different search parameters is turning up some results:

* http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-anal...

* https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash

* https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data

There is some talking around the problem on the old Mozilla Blog:

* https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash...

Things being about a decade old is adding further difficulty. :/

> http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-anal...

This is a page where Firefox developers are discussing how to inject their own crash-reporting code into the sandboxed flash container. I never said that 3rd party plugins didn't occasionally have crashes, so I don't see the point of this link. Can you elaborate?

> https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash

This lists crashes seen in the Flash module. But again, I never said that 3rd party plugins didn't occasionally have crashes.

> https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data

This is a documentation page about types of all-cause failures related to Flash, (could be Firefox code issues)

> https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash...

Javascript also has "crash protection" in the form of a sandbox. That's why pages can "crash" without taking down the entire browser. This would also work exactly the same for Flash.

Yeah, that's all fair.

Did you manage to find citations supporting your assertion? :)

Chrome was the first browser to stop letting plugins crash the whole thing, so yea it was a thing before for sure, but it was still way better than other things like ActiveX or Java applets…

Adobe worked on it, and even they could not show anything convincing. This was the time when Flash was causing the vast majority of crashes on OS X. Even on Android they could not make it work reliably and it was plagued with security, performance, and overheating issues.

Adobe had stopped trying years before Apple officially stopped caring.

I remember celebrating when it died but looking back it wasn’t so bad. At least from a dev perspective, working with a batteries-included sdk from a single vendor is a lot nicer than this node_modules cancer.

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