A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia. Flash use to be light weight, small and incredibly good for displaying vector graphics. You can scale up older Flash content to 1080p and it still looks great. You can't do that with YouTube videos of older flash content.
Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos.
It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable web app platform than Java applets.
Sure a lot of newer stuff uses cool Javascript frameworks for making games and vector graphics, but there are a lot of old games people won't be able to play anymore. There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash player in Javascript O_o)
I don't know about Linux, but back when Flash was relevant the Mac version always felt like an inefficient crashy dumpster fire to me. I don't have a source to back this up, but I always assumed that was a big part of why Jobs was so uninterested in supporting it on iOS.
Exactly, and the Linux version was similarly bad and unmaintained. I don't think they released a 64-bit x86 version until 2008/2009 when Linux on amd64 had been common since 2005 if not before. I remember having to either keep a 32-bit browser around just for Flash or use (impressive) hacks like nspluginwrapper.
I suspect the crappiness of the Mac/Linux versions was not because of developer incompetence, but a severe lack of developers/resources for those teams.
Hopefully there are some managers at Adobe who realize that, if they hadn't shipped a crappy product for so many years used by every Mac user, they could have made an actual case for their ability to support high-quality Flash on iOS.
The Linux version was really badly maintained for ages.
Circa 2014, I had to do weird stuff like sed on the .so flash plugin to bump artificially its version string from 11 to 12
This was to work around a requirement for VMware VCenter UI which required flash versions newer that
the one available for Firefox at that time (11.2 IIRC).
I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code. It's probably not the most beautiful code in the world, but at least, it would provide a reference implementation and help other implementations a lot.
As much as I personally dislike Flash, I have to agree that making it open source would be a net benefit to the world, even if only for preservation of existing media.
Even back then you had to do hacks to get it to work. But after that it became very hard to get anything to work. Eventually someone came out with a service called pipelight that I used to use that would allow you to use windows only plugins in Firefox: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pipelight. It worked great until I didn't need it anymore.
>I hope that at some points, Adobe will release the Flash source code.
We can hope but there were big-ish campaigns to get them to open source Freehand and then Fireworks and they just don't care and would rather you keep their monthly CC cheques flowing.
I guess my feeling could be summed up with... if you're going to be on an unpopular system, expect a less-polished experience. When Windows took up 90% of desktop marketshare, and the rest was squabbled over by Mac, Linux, etc., the fact that Flash supported them at all should be seen as a blessing.
Yes and no. It was nice to have support for that whole community of animations and games, even with crappy performance. And we could get to the godawful interactive-restaurant-websites where framerates didn't matter. But the existence of a terrible Mac port helped fuel its adoption as a web technology (versus something like ActiveX where you were Windows/IE only). Without that, maybe those restaurants would have stuck to HTML like they should have to begin with.
Especially on the video side where people stared to pick FLV as a format, we'd have been much better off just getting an MPEG in the QuickTime plugin, probably with better frame rates and definitely not crashing my browser so often.
As a portable web application platform, I suppose it was better than Java and I'm glad to have gotten access to those. But honestly that was a pretty niche use case.
"We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. "
That's... interesting, and it also smacks of quite a bit of PR to me. If an app causes your OS to crash, and that problem persists for several years, you can no longer blame that squarely on the app. Your OS should not allow an app to crash it. It happens anyways, and that means you have a bug in your OS at best (and possibly an exploit).
All this means is that Apple was unable to figure out how to keep their OS from crashing. Sure, flash was crap, but keeping crap software from crashing your computer is one of the things the OS does.
This was also published not too long after Snow Leopard came out (August 2009), which is when Safari first split plugins out to a separate process, as long as you were running it in 64-bit mode. Before that it could bring down the whole browser, after it would only kill itself and require pages to be reloaded. So it's not like Apple wasn't doing anything about it.
Obviously a positive change in general, but the push to prioritize that and get it done must have been 99% aimed at problems caused by Flash.
And even after that was implemented, an ad crashing flash in one window would still bring down a video player in another, if I'm remembering right. Still a crappy user experience.
That's definitely not what that phrasing means, and I find it hard to believe that it would have been accidentally overlooked in a PR piece like this. To me that means the likely explanations are that either it actually caused Macs to crash (which I seem to recall from experience it could, at least occasionally), or that Jobs is purposefully trying to shift OS instability blame to an application, which I think is possible. Or some combination thereof.
I believe that also applies to most UNIXes and UNIX-likes.
<rambling>
I really like that terminology though, it makes quite a bit of sense. When you witness a crash(you are not part of the crash, you were simply witnessing/interacting with the thing that crashed. You are not necessarily harmed), it is not like the whole world is falling apart. There was a crash, it is horrible and now you have to save what you can. This applies both digitally and in real life. Think crashing a drone or watching a plane crash. You rush to the scene and call for help, but you are not harmed.
Now when the OS fails, it stops everything and can potentially result in significantly more data loss than a standard application crash. Much like when a person is in an accident involving a vehicle. It is no longer just a crash, it is now a panic. When you end up in an accident you don't think "oh ya that crash" you think panic, not the word, the feeling.
</rambling>
Sorry for the rambling on, it kinda just happened. But ya that terminology is great.
If that's so, then the way it was worded seems needlessly unclear. It specifically says it caused Macs to crash. The normal terminology (and proper English) would be to say "cause Mac applications to crash" when referring to the applications and not the OS or hardware. It's like someone saying "Windows crash" is supposed to refer to Windows applications because people say blue screen instead of crash usually. Even if you accept the terminology, it's applied to the wrong subject.
As I said, I can't imagine that distinction having escaped notice in a PR piece such as this.
You need to let this go. You're trying to argue something that everyone understood well at the time. Thousands of news stories followed up on every detail in that letter and it was very clear what Apple meant.
Yes, but he didn't say panic, he said crash. Crash is often used to refer to both application crashes, and os crashes, which are also often called kernel panics. Saying something causes "Macs to crash" when you mean applications running on a Mac, as people are suggesting, is very unclear.
I agree, the wording isn't great. Kernel panic is a specific thing, yes, but there are other system-wide crashes that are much more common on Macs than kernel panics.
"Sleep Wake Failure" comes to mind. When the 2016 MBP was new I'd get one literally every night that I left my computer asleep. It's now much less frequent (a couple a month, still more than it should be), but more often than panics (haven't had one yet).
To clarify, because I think people may be misinterpreting what I meant by that. I wasn't implying a definitive intent to the statement, but stating that the suggested interpretation is not what that statement means in English, as the the subject is a "Mac", which could logically be construed as the OS, the hardware, or both, but not an application running on a Mac. So either it means something other than the suggestions put forth (that he's referring to application crashes), or it's a misstatement, on purpose or not.
They mean application crashes, not the entire OS. And Flash was the reason they rewrote Safari's plugin system to load them in a separate process so as not to crash the entire browser. This was released around the same time as the open letter.
IIRC at the time, Flash lite powered or existed on many more mobile phones than did iOS. Neat stuff to read into the history of. Many of the things in this letter were true, but Apple itself was holding back some things. iOS had it's own battery management issues at this time (even though it was 1-2 generations ahead of Android power management). Cutting to the bone of power management has paid dividends for Apple, the iPhone generally manages power much better than any Android phone I use. The latest Nexus phones from Google started to change that drastically and I hope that continues.
It was bewildering how bad Flash on the Mac was. Simple animations and videos would spin all of my cores up into the high 90s%. I installed a CPU throttling command line tool and would set the flash process to 30% of one core and the animation or video would still play fine, with no noticeable degradation in quality or framerate. I've always wondered whether part of the monetization of Flash was an embedded Bitcoin Miner or other such code to make use of our spare CPU cycles.
Flash has always been crap on the Mac. Always. I was working with it around 2000-05 and the player was always like half as fast as a similarly specced Windows machine. Plus there were some wonderful Mac-only bugs in v5 of the editor that cropped up when you tried to edit files big enough to contain a whole cartoon. And by "wonderful" I mean "I lost a week of my life to editing a cartoon in five minute bursts of work, followed by having to reboot the entire system because Flash had crashed so hard it refused to run until I did that."
Adobe always used to blame OS X for being literally half the performance of the Windows version claiming it wasn't their fault (Mac team was a fraction of the size I heard).
Then Jobs wrote "Thoughts on Flash" and magically a month or so later the Mac version ran a ton better and continued to get better for about a year.
Have little sympathy for such a reactionary approach to user experience when the majority of Flash authoring occurred in ad agencies running Macs.
There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash player in Javascript O_o)
With some work, it can be revived and used to port old content to the web. One of the difficulties with Shumway was being but-for-bug compatible with the Flash player, which turned out to be nearly impossible... If the developer is in the loop, the task is a lot easier.
In this mode, the browsers run remotely and stream the video to your browser. We are still working on the audio support but hope to have audio support soon. It should be possible to archive Flash in this way, though we could use more help/research in this area.
Once the last version of Flash is released, we'll include the latest browsers that can run it.
If the Mozilla Shumway project or similar picks up again (we hope), Webrecorder can integrate that as well to offer a native JS based Flash-recording and replay.
If anyone is interesting in helping out, let us know!
It might be possible to also run Flash in a mini VM. Who knows, maybe someone will figure it out playing flash in WebAssembly in "legacy mode" which disables a vast swath of file and other security issues. Introducing sandboxing could be one angle, but I'm sure someone far more experienced has already thought of this.
I remember Flash under Macromedia... I also started disabling it after I found out that you could access the local file system through some hacks. Actually had to do this for storing state on a project (around 2002 iirc).
I agree that it's great for 2-d animation, one of the best tools around, and why it's still used for education/training. Flex/Flash Builder also wasn't bad at all, and AS3, while verbose was interesting. Having XML as a first class citizen at the time was nice, and paired really well with VB.Net on the server, where XML is also first class.
There are a couple Flash players in JS... I do hope that Adobe opens the format up so a lot of the stuff made in flash can be preserved... the content itself was so much smaller than video files, and the interactions are much harder to setup and match using JS alone. I'm actually a little sad when I see converted flash animations to video (youtube) only because the originals were significantly smaller, without all the noise compared to video.
When Adobe bought Macromedia, my hope at the time was that the output format would evolve into straight, browser runnable JS, vector, movie and audio assets in a zip file with a manifest. So that the actual container format could be built into and supported by browsers directly. Where Adobe could concentrate on the tooling, which is where they made their money anyway.
The funny thing is, I thought Silverlight was FAR closer to what I'd wanted Flash to be, but there was just no way it would take hold, as the tooling was nothing close to Flash.
> A lot went downhill after Adobe bought Macromedia
Still annoyed Fireworks was killed, it was pretty much the feature set of Sketch and more with a decade of work behind it. Then they killed it and are now left scrambling to replicate Sketch not realising they already had it and lost it.
Many animation studios still use Flash .. to make their YouTube videos.
It ran on three platforms (Mac, Linux, Win) and was a much better portable web app platform than Java applets.
Sure a lot of newer stuff uses cool Javascript frameworks for making games and vector graphics, but there are a lot of old games people won't be able to play anymore. There's a lot we'll lose once Flash goes away forever, in a way that can't be archived like old Geocities pages (unless someone makes a Flash player in Javascript O_o)