Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1(m.engadget.com) |
Adobe confirms it won't support Flash on Android 4.1(m.engadget.com) |
On the other hand, this news might just precede another announcement from Google saying "don't worry, Adobe doesn't support it anymore, but we do", just as they did for Flash on Linux.
The only thing I can think of is people who don't care about games, in that case flash does seem like an annoyance more than anything (we can do without flash restaurant sites or punch the monkey banners, but i suspect html5/js will just take its place there).
But really, it's a great game development platform and mostly runs really well on windows and these days well enough on linux & mac (assuming the programmer isn't doing something dumb like a busy waiting loop, which would suck resources regardless of platform).
haxe+flash runtime is my favorite environment for developing (and playing) 2d games by a long shot, so I am always a bit puzzled by all the flack it's getting.
1. Ceaselessly the biggest security hole on desktop computers.
2. Proprietary.
3. The need to install it in the first place and keep updating it. (And, no, I don't want it to auto-update.)
4. Can't cut and paste text from it. It's ridiculous to have to manually write down an address or phone number from a Flash-based site.
5. Search engines don't properly index it.
6. A Flash developer can hold you hostage by not giving you the "source" (the FLA master file).
7. It's allegedly a major source of browser crashes (or so I've read though I can't prove this).
8. It's slow. A website is insanely bloated to use Flash when text and pictures could have communicated the same information.
9. It imposes DRM even when the content owner didn't intend it. Think of all the subterfuge and trickery necessary to download a Flash video even when the website owner wouldn't have minded.
I use Flash on my Galaxy Nexus, and it runs perfectly fine for everything I want to look at. Sure, it's rubbish for things like games and full-flash websites (the latter should be long gone by now anyway) but for watching Flash videos on news websites it's fantastic, and it works just as well as it does on the desktop.
I want Flash gone as much as the next guy, but video on HTML5 is no more usable.
It would be ideal if there were a good native solution for all videos, but I can imagine this to be quite a hard problem.
I call it "The Bozo Loop", incidentally.
Aside from libavc, Firefox (and well, Chromium) just doesn't play H264 video at all, for much the same considerations.
As far Flash being terrible. I have never had any negative experiences. This blanket negative view of flash is just hype. It is used all over the place. In the hands of a bad programmer, any application can be terrible.
Performance tests between flash and html5 don't show much advantage to using html5.
The PRIMARY and ONLY reason for moving to html5 is that it is not proprietary.
As far as security hole, it was put there intentionally. Windows OS is one big security hole so it is like pointing to a tree in a forest. Other reasons are frivolous.
So we should move towards html5 but keep flash player working on all platforms until full migration of internet occurs to html5. There is simply too much flash content so it will take a long time to migrate.
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.
I bet we can install ICS's flash and whatever req. libs and it works with other browsers.
Why don't we just move onto HTML5 now? I use iOS devices and completely removed Flash from my Mac months ago. There is a Safari plugin to force the use of the H264 stream from youtube.
Haven't missed Flash at all.
Here you have a link to a comment I made a few months ago, about Adobe's shifting strategy regarding Flash: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3503774
I'll copy here some parts, so I can edit a little, mostly to adjust for current trends:
------------
Their business is to make and sell amazing Editors. CS is their main product. They bought Macromedia, just to own much of the market of Designer-oriented applications. And Macromedia filled a Gap.
But from now on, they are investing heavily in building tools for HTML5. -You can see them building Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tools. [1] (this link is almost a year old, so I'd expect them to have something much more advanced by now). - They are building HTML5 Editors [2] - They stopped developing Flash Player mobile. [3] In the same post where they state that they will stop developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, they state: Adobe to More Aggressively Contribute to HTML5. Ok, ok, they also state that they will keep working in Flash for desktop. But it's like when any software company says: "We'll drop X, Y, Z so we can focus on A". That's something said to please their shareholders, so it doesn't sounds like "As our products are no longer needed, we'll just kill them".
If you are a guest inside the browser, and the browser developer just throws you away (iOS, Windows 8 in Metro, only running in whitelist-pages), you have to move somewhere else.
Adobe just wants to keep selling their Creative Suite. So, the best thing for them to do, is to focus on HTML5, because they now know that Flash is doomed sooner or later. And they are doing it. I expect to see in the near future something like Adobe Flash Professional but designed for HTML5.
[1] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wallaby/ [2] http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/ [3] http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.htm...
One more thing: Imagine for a moment that you are Adobe. You have an amazing suite of products, and a few of them are based on Flash. You realize that the browser developers have chosen to work and invest in something else. You go through all 5 stages of grief [4]. You deny it, you get angry, you bargain, you get depressed, but finally at least, you accept it. You HAVE to adapt and you have to work with them. But you won't have anything to sell for at least 1 or 2 years. And you still have this wonderful suite on the market. What do you do? Do you go out and yell: DON'T BUY IT! WAIT UNTIL WE RELEASE OUR FUTURE-PROOF PRODUCT!!! Of course not!!! You say We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences But at the same time, in the same paragraph you say: We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders. And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.
Read it again: a smooth transition to HTML5.
TRANSITION.
That's their way to say: "Keep buying and using our products, while we develop our HTML5 editors. Then, you can buy our new products and move to HTML5 too."
They have went through the last phase. They have accepted it. And they are adapting, good for them :)
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.
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?"
Flashblock was a great method of filtering annoying content.
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.
https://github.com/fohr/blossom
I'll be giving a talk later this month at Throne of JS in Toronto.
From http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/06/29/abobe-pulls-support-...
But it does show you can get on just fine without Flash. There is no equivalent Chrome extension. I don't know why. A completely Flash free experience is the reason I use Safari.
Flash is not used just for video, there are a huge number of games that use it and HTML5 is not ready for prime time there. (Not enough browser support, and coding a game in HTML5 is much harder.)
Those are some of the reason actionscript, air and flex are going to be around for a long time, even on mobile. If you "miss it" or you don't miss it, that is your own constructed opinion and it won't make flash go away sooner/later or ever for that matter
Flash simply outputs to ios executables now and you don't have a clue you are running it anymore, so, maybe that is part of why you don't miss it.
You don't seem to miss the know how of why it is necessary still, so that kind of loops to the point you don't know why we can't "just move onto HTML5 now?" Weird huh. How did that come about.
Picking camps is not the same as having a valid opinion based on objective reason, in your case it makes you stand out like a meme based "are we there yet" user. Cheerleading is awesome. But it really doesn't make the players score on its own.
Last reason why it won't "go away", flash developers get paid to make chart topping games that run on ios, while apple takes a store app cut from it.
For example, lets say you want to create a little green radar HUD map for where enemies are on a battlefield in front of you. In AS3 you can make each enemy dot be a sprite, and move them individually when necessary. You can mask them when they reach the edge of the HUD, fade them out when they disappear. When you turn left or right, they all turn together. Because of how Flash's graphics engine works, only the graphical areas that are changed in each frame are actually redrawn; this is all handled at a very low level and the speed is close to native; it can also be coded to take advantage of a GPU.
To accomplish the same thing in Javascript and Canvas, you have to write an engine that tracks where each of those things is in global space. To draw little rectangles at different rotations within the same canvas, you actually have to rotate the canvas, draw the rectangle, then unrotate the canvas. Once you've got this engine written, you still have to redraw the entire canvas with your engine deciding how to draw each pixel, square or circle, one by one, with every single frame. To get around that, you write another engine that determines which areas are changing and only redraws those. But then you have to decide what to do when overlapping objects are in front of or behind that area, so now you've written a scene graph, z-order and a traverser, and possibly parent-child relationships, from scratch. Fine, but you realize that the traverser, running as it is in untyped javascript without the benefit of typed iterators like vectors, can't handle more than a dozen objects before it's hogging up even more of the CPU than if you just redrew the whole stupid canvas every single frame.
So, all this behavior is necessary for any game. Good coders are struggling to make these things playable in HTML5 to keep the mobile market happy, but to do that you have to cut a lot of corners. The game quality's obviously lower, and the games are slower than they would be in AS3. It's just unavoidable. People who don't know how computers work then complain that Flash is so slow, etc. because of the perception of sloppily coded banners and stuff. But when the same exact things are written in Javascript and Canvas they are much, much slower.
Edit: why would someone downvote this? Do you really believe that designers (not developers) should handle canvas and Javascript directly instead of using an editor?
OMAP4470 supports it in hardware (so galaxy nexus like phones).
OMAP54XX supports it in hardware.
Tegra 3 supports it in hardware.
So just in time for this development ;)
This is the single most important reason. I say this as a 5-year veteran of Flash and Flex app development. Adobe has a poor compiler and VM with inconsistent specs and behavior, a poor set of libraries with myriad inconsistencies, a poorly designed UI library that's internally inconsistent, poor consulting that attempts to apply business logic on top of an inconsistent platform, and poor security that tries to patch holes at the wrong layer without thinking about them in any depth.
Computers and computer systems thrive on consistency and provability. Each layer depends on the ability of the layer under it to mathematically prove that it works. Without that, everything topples.
Adobe is built on an ethos of inconsistency.
That is the root of the problem.
As a coder who doesn't, and never will, sign works-for-hire agreements, I'm the model of a dev who won't give you the source if you fire me or treat me like shit. In one incident, a customer who paid $100k for me to develop a flash app, then sold it to News Corp without mentioning to them that they didn't actually own the source for it. News Corp had, legally, every right to reverse-engineer that app; moreover I actually gave them the source because I'm a nice guy, but I stipulated that they couldn't repackage it without my assent, and that the classes which had been developed outside the project at hand (some of which had been coded on other customers' dime) were not for resale at all; and that in no way could they claim ownership and try to prevent me from reusing any of it for my own purposes. News Corp then hired a team of coders, paid them in excess of $300k to try and reverse-engineer my code. When that failed, they called me and offered me $50 an hour, half my regular wage, to help them, if I would just sign their NDA, which happened to include handing them eternal rights to everything I'd ever done. I told them to fuck off, and the project died a week later.
But more importantly, anyone who knew what they were talking about and who wasn't just a frat boy shilling for HTML5 because that'as what douchebags talk about at Q's on Fridays would know that technically, there are 101 decompilers for Flash, and legally, you can decompile code you paid for and have someone else edit it as long as you aren't reselling it, even if you didn't have the coder under a works-for-hire agreement; and morally, if your coder is telling you to piss off and not giving you the source then you're probably an asshole who deserves it.
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.