Comment by davidjgraph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidjgraph | Hacker News Reader

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http://thegraphicalweb.com/meet-svg

For those that don't remember, Adobe produced an SVG plugin for IE, which they pulled in 2006. Having SVG on all browsers reduced their competitive advantage they had with Flash having a higher penetration then SVG.

Adobe was doing their best to kill off open standards in favour of their proprietary ones 6-7 years ago, a plan that failed due to the poor quality of Flex, IE 9's support for SVG and iOS' dislike of the technology.

It's always amusing to see such folks eat some humble pie, particularly when the technology they were trying to peddle was such a poor piece of engineering.

The new adverts about IE 10 trolls are really an attempt to divert from the real reason people have beef with MS and Adobe. They tried to kill open standards, failed, now want to join the cool gang like nothing happened.

But don't limit our penetrating stare to just those that have historically done this. Keep an eye on where Google are going with the various Chrome extensions.

So, Adobe and HTML, fine, but they only joined us because they couldn't beat us.

And for instance, you could say that "iOS's dislike of the technology" was nothing more than a strategic move from Apple and Jobs to win a battle of content over the channel, where the money lies, but you chose or forget to acknowledge this in your discourse; I just don't see how it is any different from MS or Adobe or any other corporation trying to do what they are supposed to do: making profit.

Also, ouch on the "poor piece of engineering"... If I recall it has been able to help push some usage of the web forward (Youtube? Before Flash?), and foster creative content (anyone been working in the game or ad industry these past decade could testify... I'm talking Art Directors and Flash devs on websites, not annoying page ads). Or maybe I'm wrong on this - if so, please someone correct me. I don't remember Java succeeded in this field.

I don't want to start a flame war, it's just this anti-someone view, whoever that may be, raises my eyebrow all the time. As far as I know they do what _every_ other company on the field does: use and protect their hero assets for as long as they can, then catch up with the disruptive tech as soon as they penetrate.

I fully agree. I could have continued past Adobe and MS and started on the likes of Apple, but it'd have been a very long post. I considered whether the MS comment was out of context, that was my attempt at saying it goes beyond just Adobe.

But the OA is about Adobe and HTML. Of course, it's not so much that they'll jump to the tech that has displaced them, it's more the marketing language (which, again, I know everyone's at it) suggests "yeah, cool, we always wanted this one to win, honest". They even give a history lesson on the site, and that's not the history I remember.

Poor engineering, that's aimed more at Flex than Flash. I spent many months suffering at the hands of Flex and the Adobe IDE. We implemented exactly the same app in both Flex and Java, Flex and its environment were painful, relatively.

Companies will protect their own interests, but both I personally view Adobe's decision to drop the SVG plugin, and Microsoft's decision to enforce their own standard on IE as de facto, as having put a general drag on what could and can be achieved in browsers. They're entitled to do so, but I think the decisions have been detrimental to the Internet population as whole, that's all.

>the decisions have been detrimental to the Internet >population as whole

Absolutely. We're still paying the price(s) now...

Steve disliked Flash because it crashed small mobile devices and chewed system resources.

A few years later Adobe AGREED with this by discontinuing Flash on Android.

>A few years later Adobe AGREED with this >by discontinuing Flash on Android. Is this "agreement" a fact you can unambiguously prove by pointing out to some statement from an Adobe person, or is this a subjective assumption. Another subjective assumption there: company losing the game because of a disruptive product? I sure hope they acknowledge this pronto and refocus to cope with the changes!

Android was expanding more rapidly than iOS.

What reason do you suggest for them not latching onto that opportunity?

I don't know work at Adobe so I wouldn't know, really.

My only guess would be based on "The Innovator's Dilemma", at least roughly... so acknowledging the disruptiveness of HTML5 would imply refocusing their priorities in a mid/long-term strategic move: maybe rethinking how Flash should be used (i.e. game creation platform instead of RIAs) and buying startups involved in the disruption.

More a sane, opportunistic move for the business, rather than a judgement over the objective quality of a product.

> And for instance, you could say that "iOS's dislike of the technology" was nothing more than a strategic move from Apple and Jobs to win a battle of content over the channel

You could say that, but then you'd be choosing to forget the fact that mobile Flash was awful from day one until it was discontinued, which was 100% of Steve Jobs' public position on Flash. Performance sucked, it was a battery hog, and it didn't interpret touch gestures correctly at all.

Who really cares what the motivation of Apple was? We're all better off with Flash never making a successful foothold in mobile. Feel free to write it off as nothing but selfish evil if you must, but that doesn't change the fact that it was a positive overall and only Apple had the balls to do it, regardless of potential motivation.

What is that poor quality of Flex you are talking about? How can you even compare Flash and SVG? How was Adobe trying to kill off open standards?

Having spent a year writing AS3 code for Flex, the compiler and the runtime continually struck me as generally ambiguous, and at times contradictory. Most of these were either amusing, or mildly irritating, as an indicator of poor quality and attention to detail, but some were more severe.

Personally, it's an environment that I was very glad to leave behind.

I agree, I thought Flex was a powerful and useful tool.

Built on Flash, the abandonware tech everyone is leaving.

Flex was pretty horrible, and only started getting reasonable after Flash 10, but there was a constant conflict between the Flex team, and the Flash team (within Adobe). You could even see passive aggressive comments written in the Flex source:

"Waiting for jso-en-so (Flash Team) to FIX THIS, until then use <some horrible workaround>"

Isn't this how big projects usually function? There is no ideal software and if you have to ship, you have to ship even if you have to write horrible workarounds that do the job.

Flash and Flex just fell out of fashion. Everyone moves to now fashionable HTML5. Including myself. It is just painful to see how all the same wheels get reinvented again but now for a more inferior language on a platform that is less compatible between different browsers.

> It is just painful to see how all the same wheels get reinvented again but now for a more inferior language on a platform that is less compatible between different browsers.

Assuming you use/used Windows. For everyone else, it's a brand new day.

Only Windows Flash devs that developed on Windows for other Windows users, never concerning themselves with OS X, Linux, Mobile, or anything else, maintain this sentiment.

Everyone else is glad Flash is dying the painful death it deserved. Interactive web content has been under the stranglehold of Flash for the last two decades. It's going to take some time to re-implement the more advanced features of Flash in a public standard, but it'll be worth it in the end.

Hell, IMO it's worth it right now. Compare the performance of that page to a full-screen flash page like Lacoste.com. On anything other than a Windows machine, the HTML5/SVG demo from Adobe runs smoother than Lacoste.com.

Yes I agree most people are leaving Flash (and Flex) now. I wouldn't use either of them today.

But back in about 2006 Flex was a clever tool

Overall, this is a very good thing. Adobe had a chance to really bring SVG into the mainstream back in 1999 when they introduced LiveMotion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_LiveMotion) but they failed to include SVG support. They were still focused on proprietary standards and were clearly envious of Flash.

At it's heart, Adobe is a tools company. Regardless of whether or not they wanted to embrace SVG and Canvas, the fact that they are now building tools to support these standards will only make them more accessible to many more developers and non-programmers.

I don't think it's fair to say that pulling a plugin that they wrote in the first place is akin to "doing their best to kill off open standards". It's more like looking the other way.

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