I'd say that AS3 wasn't ahead of its time, I'd say that we were sent back in time when we had to abandon Flash thanks to Steve Jobs and the bend-over Adobe CEO at the time.
AS3 was super cool, easy to learn and safe to scale amongst many developers. Flash had gotten pretty darn fast near the end... And it was all sent down the toilet.
I loathe Apple, but their influence in killing plugins will go down as one of the most important steps forward in web development history.
The only sad part is how many AS3 and Silverlight games just kinda disappeared into the void.
The real argument Steve Jobs should've forced was make it work for mobile.
But that wasn't what he wanted - Flash was "free content/games", so he attacked it on one front, but won two. Sadly, Adobe didn't quite listen to the public, and he was charismatic and forceful, and won.
Since Flash has been banished, so many artists and developers have wanted something that fit that middle ground as much as Flash did. Me too :D
For the record, that is exactly how it did not happen.
At the time I was a full time flash developer, doing flex and flash on AIR.
One day, Steve Jobs made an announcement that Flash was crapware and had to die for standards (sic!)
I shook my head in disbelief. The same week, the CEO of Adobe (some shmuck) went to CNN to address what Steve Jobs had said earlier this week.
I fully expected a rebuttal, but instead, NOPE: he totally and literally threw his product under the bus, on the world stage.
Flash was dead. Its replacement was said to be coming, and yet nothing good came out.
Javascript at the time was pitiful. Typescript didn't exist yet, and MVVM in HTML wasn't a thing. We were back to web 1.0.
Flash gaming was a billion dollar market at the time that Apple knew they could convert the big dev shops into native app developers for their app store (see Zynga and others) by enforcing native-only app development.
This was the last straw for flash, which was already struggling for funding. See, Flash was already a rather unprofitable project, having no app store, no ad network, or payments platform. The Flex/Flash dev licenses made only peanuts. With Apple closing down roads to adoption, this caused Adobe to finally reconsider its long term investment in runtime engines. source: flash team friends
edit: For history completeness, here is CNET's article with Apple's media statement on why it dropped flash. Job's statement was that Flash wasn't a good enough runtime to allow on iOS (or any runtime): https://www.cnet.com/culture/jobs-why-apple-banned-flash-fro...
Please take me back to that world
Apple is just very good at spinning the narrative in their favor, i.e. it was because of "stability/security/performance issues" and not "it's a potential App Store competitor, bury it now".
See also: Apple preventing apps from downloading/including scripts dynamically (read: AIR), which was a total security risk, until it wasn't when they lifted the restriction years later when AIR was not so relevant anymore.
Glad to be corrected tho
It's irrelevant though as if Apple cared so much about preserving the user experience, they would also block slow or crashy websites, which they didn't, because they don't pose a threat to their business model.
And it doesn't pose a threat because they (still) control what is possible on iOS web by restricting browser engines to webkit only.
Dunno about Android, but crashy web sites weren't really a thing I've ever had to deal with on iOS (or BB10).
"only player in mobile space" iOS had 28% market share when the letter was published (Q2 2010), just after Symbian with 33% and Symbian was not on the same level of "smartphone". Android was 4%. So yes, what was supported in iOS had a significant effect on the industry as a whole. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272698/global-market-sha...
"It was bad/slow/unstable" Sure, but that's irrelevant. It's not even the main problem Jobs had with it. It's that he lost control over the platform and, if you read between the lines, the App Store revenue. Read the letter and ensuing battle yourself: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash#References
"It was bad/slow/unstable" Sure, but that's irrelevant.
Sure, if literally everything were different flash could've been great. But that's not how life works. Sure, Adobe could've added a bunch of spit and polish (ignoring that flash was inherently bad for video), but they couldn't / didn't.
If flash were some sort of killer feature, surely Google could've doubled down on it and flown the "look how much better than Apple we are" flag. Or Palm, or Nokia, or Blackberry. Nobody defended flash because no users wanted it.
Adobe couldn't even get the desktop experience up to snuff, they had no chance with mobile. That is not and was not an Apple problem, that's an Adobe had an "awful product that nobody wanted to use on their hands" problem. Flash was as popular as it was because a.) that's all there was and b.) it allowed for abusive ads so adtech companies loved it.
Sure. I did not put a wall of text because I thought the context was still clear but apparently not, fair enough.
* Adobe's CEO was far from compliant, fought as he could and pushed development up to the point where even he saw the writing on the wall:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/apr/29/adob...
Eventually they just cut their losses, without having put working versions for Android tablets or Windows Phone, and the implementations on Android and BlackberryOS having their own issues.
* Even by the end of its run on mobile, Flash had performance and stability issues:
https://www.wired.com/2011/11/adobe-mobile-flash-dead/
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/134551-why-flash-faile...
It was also the leading cause of crashes on OS X at the time. That was a big point when process separation for plugins was added to Safari:
https://www.macworld.com/article/198369/keynote-48.html
* It was also disastrous effects on laptops' battery life:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/11/the-future-of-notebo...
* I am not going to link stories on security issues (there have been tons of those all the time when Flash was used, so it's difficult to find some from around 2010), but I hope you agree on that one.
* To this day, there has not been any convincing argument regarding the lack of accessibility and bad user experience with websites that included Flash elements, or the privacy issues related to Flash cookies that kept appearing.
* I don't have a link offhand because the instance I remember was in Walter Isaacson's book, but there were several people saying that Adobe engineers had been pitching Flash for iPhone to Jobs, with demonstrations, for quite a while and never managed to solve the technical issues. It is completely untrue to say that Jobs was dead set against Flash from the beginning.
Overall, there is a summary of technical arguments here: https://daringfireball.net/2010/01/apple_adobe_flash
> At the time I was a full time flash developer, doing flex and flash on AIR.
At the time I was a student and relied on Flash for several things (websites we had to use for lectures, games, even some development in CS courses, etc). This may be why we seem to have wildly different perspectives. But I can assure you, Flash had been rubbish for quite a long time in 2009. It was buggy, crashy, notorious for turning laptops' fans the moment it appeared on a web page and sucking batteries dry.
> One day, Steve Jobs made an announcement that Flash was crapware and had to die for standards (sic!)
Come on, Adobe is and has been many things, but certainly not a champion of open standards. Apple's track record of supporting standards is stellar in comparison.
> I fully expected a rebuttal, but instead, NOPE: he totally and literally threw his product under the bus, on the world stage.
He really did not. He complained that it was unfair, threw a lot of FUD around (there even was that Flash evangelist telling Apple to go screw itself, and look into any post by Kevin Lynch from that time if you want more vitriol). They lead an anti-Apple campaign for about 2 years at that time. What he could not do is contest the technical points, because they were founded. If it were not for the Android community trying to convince itself that Flash was great because was not on iPhones, there would be absolutely no discussion.
Then, Flash for Android stopped in late 2011 (more than 18 monts after Jobs' letter, at which point Apple and Adobe had been talking about what to do with Flash for years). This would make absolutely no sense if its only issues were politics and Apple (it was still on pretty much any device on the Internet except for iPhones and iPads), and development stopped for all platforms around 2015. None of that is the kind of capitulation you describe.
> Flash was dead. Its replacement was said to be coming, and yet nothing good came out.
That much is right Web apps took a long time to improve.
> Javascript at the time was pitiful. Typescript didn't exist yet, and MVVM in HTML wasn't a thing. We were back to web 1.0.
Come on. None of the popular websites stopped functioning. All the things we associated with Web 2.0 worked just fine on iPhones and iPads. What we lost was games, which should not have been in a browser in the first place.
I don't think this is fair to say Apple is better when it's specifically the open web. While Apple has been timid to expand web capabilities, Adobe has been an enormous aid in pushing the open web, and they have teams of researchers that work with TC39, khronos, and other partners. WebGL, WASM, WebGPU, and a huge part modern CSS today is due to years of R&D and spec work. While Apple had a native app platform to lock users into, Adobe (especially post-flash) had not much to gain other than growing the web to be a better export target for their creative tools.
> Come on. None of the popular websites stopped functioning.
Popular is pretty relative. What about Newgrounds, Zynga (209 million users), schools using Flash rich media for courses, and every website that used Flash for video content. Once Apple iOS decided to forever block flash, it caused these sites to become inaccessible for years on Apple until web alternatives arrived.
Ugh flash based video was a scourge on the web. It was bad on desktop where you're tethered to a power cord and the worst problem with excessive CPU usage was that your fans would spin up. That would never fly on mobile where you're way more constrained by battery life. Besides that flash video widgets always caused problems on desktop with focus stealing and whatnot.
The benefits of standardizing video under the guise of HTML5 cannot be overstated.
I can grok the benefits of using flash for "rich" content (ignoring that most of the rich content were popup ads), but video? No. Video was hands down one of the worst uses of flash.