The Great Intermediary Panic | Hacker News Reader

The Great Intermediary Panic

minid.net

11 pointsmeerita7 comments

Flash didn't disappear when internet technologies got better. Flash disappeared because Apple refused to distribute it on iPhone - partly because Adobe couldn't effectively shrink it down to early generation iPhone technical capabilities - but partly because they didn't want a competitor to the iOS SDK.

Then Apple effectively vetoed - explicitly and through lack of investment) futher improvement in audiovisual web platform technologies (e.g. the custom shaders that Adobe wanted to make part of the nextgen filter spec) during the critical period where developers were making their platform choice for mobile.

Apple has been no friend to the further evolution of the web.

What about the bit where the majority of the browsers on the web are or were derived from WebKit, which was Apple originated?

Nobody really wanted Flash. It was expensive to develop for, had a bunch of security issues and was generally bloated.

"Expensive to develop for" sounds very biased.

Have you had to pay an ActionScript developer’s cigarette and booze bill?

The majority of browsers are derived from KDE's KHTML/KJS, webkit included. Apple made very significant contributions (like the webkit project itself), but that's not where the codebase originated.

That would never have worked if people weren't already fed up to here with Flash.

It was bloated, buggy, slow, and by far the single biggest vector for malware. Like, by orders of magnitude. Not to mention being a proprietary black box that didn't interoperate with the rest of the web stack, and toxic to accessibility.

If Flash were genuinely a beloved technology that everyone but Jobs wanted to keep, he would've lost that battle sooner or later.

And Apple has absolutely been a friend to the further evolution of the web. Killing Flash was, in fact, necessary for the further evolution of the web. Now we have HTML5 with widely-compatible methods of doing everything Flash used to do and much, much more, that you don't have to install anything else to use. It's all built right into the browsers (or, at least in many cases, the webviews!), and thus also gains the benefit of the browser/OS vendors' security reviews.

On every tech that would have made HTML5 an effective application platform (databases, advanced AV, animation) - Apple has been 5-10 years behind Google and Firefox, and in many cases simply vetoed or wouldn't implement.

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