Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, Flash just needs to die and the sooner the better. It's horrible. I'm not even talking programming here (I know nothing about Flash programming). It's a horrible user experience.

One of the things I'm thankful to Apple for is in them taking a stand against this horrible experience and hastening its demise. Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature.

Flash isn't horrible per se. It's horrible because Adobe is completely incompetent in making it run stably and on platforms other than Windows (and even there it's a stretch). Were they competent and the Flash experience just worked, I'd be fine with it.

The suckiness of Flash is what's driving the adoption of HTML5/JS because, let's face it, HTML5/JS isn't exactly a mature platform yet.

I just wish there was a way I could run a browser with Flash even installed without being bugged by "You're missing plugins. Would you like to install them?" Flashblock, Click-to-Flash and the like help but I'd rather not have the software installed at all.

It makes me sad that Chrome bundles Flash and can't have it conveniently extracted either.

To be fair, Apple didn't kill Flash (much as I'd like to give them credit for it). Adobe did.

But what exactly are you basing the accusation of a horrible user experience on? Is it a matter of a Flash app that's badly designed? Because that's not Adobe's fault. If one were to duplicate the app's horrible user experience over to iOS does that mean the user experience for iOS apps can be considered as horrible? If I write some bad javascript that causes the browser to consistently crash does that mean that javascript or even the browser sucks?

Lack of Flash on iOS is a feature for you. Let's not assume what's good for you must be good for everyone else. I for one have never had much of a problem with Flash on the hardware that I use, but in some circles a negative opinion always outweighs a positive one.

The complaints about the problems you describe just running the Flash player on several different platforms are rather well deserved. It does seem that Adobe has decided at some point to drop the ball on the whole thing. But the player does support backwards compatibility all the way back to the beginning. I've always thought that possibly the majority of their problems relate to that. They should try just ripping out support for anything that uses versions less than actionscript 3 for a leaner plugin.

But, this statement does seem more about the Flash player itself in the browser. It doesn't necessarily mean that Flash, as in the platform, will die. It'll probably live on as its own platform that requires something like Adobe Air to run on some hardware.

Also, almost everything you hate about Flash's "user experience" will live on in the canvas tag. Unless I misunderstand what you mean by user experience.

>But what exactly are you basing the accusation of a horrible user experience on?

Can't speak for them, but yeah, I mean, in the end it is all subjective right? You can try to measure it, but sometimes Shit Just Doesn't Feel Right™. That's how I've ALWAYS felt about Flash. Before Steve Jobs said it, before Google was a company and I was little, and after I anxiously installed it on Android only to once again be sad by how awful it is.

Also developers at WWDC or Google I/O wouldn't cheer if either company said "We're going all in on Flash." they would look at their neighbor and say, "Wait...what? Why?"

But then I could make you a Flash app that does nothing but show a blank 640x480 stage with a simple button and then you would say "that just doesn't feel right"? But if I did the same thing in canvas you would react with "that's better"? That doesn't address my question about what is meant by "user experience". It is a tool, nothing else. Unless someone can show me a common trait across almost all Flash apps that is some sort of fail that can be directly tied to Flash then I attribute complaints of user experience to the developers of the app, not the tool.

Now, if you were to say that your experience with Flash in general on mobile devices is that it tends to crash and is slow; then that makes sense. That would be a user experience problem directed at Flash. It just seems to me most complaints of user experience with Flash is based on a misguided hatred of Flash itself.

The reason everyone would react that way with your hypothetical is because that would be stupid, that's not what Flash is for.

It felt great the first time I saw stick fight, and playing Desktop Tower Defense felt right as rain.

I have one concern with flash dying: It means that annoying, crappy ads will migrate to HTML5. Annoying HTML5 ads will not be as easy to selectively block. I suspect that the low quality UX will simply migrate and crash a bit less.

Flashblock was a great method of filtering annoying content.

I suspect that this problem will be resolved by using black lists to sites serving the js to create those ads. Just bocking those sites (the way we can black porn at work) would serve the purpose.

I agree that the majority of the blame for Flash dying is Adobe's fault but not for the reasons you outlined. Outside of security concerns everything bad about Flash can be accomplished with 'HTML5', <canvas>, SVG, and JavaScript if you throw the wrong developer at it.

Adobe's biggest mistake was not open sourcing Flash as HTML5's canvas and audio in one. It could have been rewritten to use JavaScript. Converting a game/app from AS3 to JS on 'Flash Canvas' would have been trivial.

I can live with Flash going away but there's a lot of good we're throwing out with the bath water. ActionScript 3 is a pretty nice language. It's basically a mix of Java or C# and JavaScript (it has events and callbacks but not scope issues). There was no need for an ActionScript the Good Parts book.

HTML5's canvas is very primitive compared to Flash's display list. With the display list you have a hierarchy of visual objects (Sprites) so objects can added as children of other objects and if the child dispatches an event it can bubble all the way up the list to the root parent.

FWIW, Blossom does that kind of thing for applications (I'm the author).

https://github.com/fohr/blossom

I'll be giving a talk later this month at Throne of JS in Toronto.

So much hate. The worst side of HN always comes out when Flash comes up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com