They disliked flash for different reasons. Google for search and apple because flash games were too powerful, jobs wanted those games turned into iPhone apps.

The offical reasons were speed and security, which was obviously a farce since all the major browser vendors wrote their own PDF viewers which is both slow and known for tons of security issues as well.

They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and secure implementations of flash and Java instead of disabling them. Especially for Java given Google's deep experience with it and that they already have their own runtime.

Apple may have fired first on flash but google recently disabled all NPAPI plugins in chrome as well. The reason... "Security". I guess code not made by Google isn't secure enough to be used on the internet?

Well let's remember that while Adobe claimed that they could have gotten Flash to run on an original iPhone in 2007, that when Flash finally came to Android, it required a 1Ghz processor and 1 gig of RAM. The first iPhone had a 128MB of RAM and a 400Mhz processor. it wasn't until 2012 that the first iPhone had 1Ghz+ processor. The very reason that Apple could get away with slower processors was because Apple was dependent on slower more processor intensive VM solutions like Java and Flash.

I was maintaining a port of the Opera browser for Japanese feature phones in 2007. We supported flash in 11Mb of RAM: 6 for the browser, 5 for flash. That included the screen buffer IIRC. We ran regular desktop web sites under these conditions just fine (with 2007 expectations regarding interop). The experience may not have been great, but that was much more an issue of tiny screens without touch support than anything else. Had Apple wanted to, they would absolutely have been able to support flash on the iPhone. We could on much worse hardware. Not doing so was about controlling the platform, not about technical limitations.

http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/mobile/opera-del...

That was Flash Light not real Flash. If Adobe could get full fledged Flash running in a 128Mb/400Mhz first generation iPhone then why couldn't they get it running on similarly equipped Android devices when they had the opportunity?

You can run real Flash Player 9 on a Nokia N800/N810, which had the exact same specs (128Mb/400Mhz). It ran Debian Linux with a Firefox based browser.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800

It actually ran quite well! I used to play flash games all the time.

This is ridiculous. Flash is a hack on a cludge, 20+ years of legacy code, fiddling with raw chunks of memory for speed and with no type system enforcement. You couldn't do animation or FMV with javascript in the past, these were features only recently supported by browser or standards. The only spec for flash is the implementation.

Google went to significant efforts to sandbox it, but that still caused problems, not least with additional complexity. As for this idea that NPAPI should continue to live... Yes "security" is a problem with NPAPI.

As for Google fixing Java... You may have heard of Oracle? And the fact that they are .... not nice?

>They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and secure implementations of flash and Java instead of disabling them. Especially for Java given Google's deep experience with it and that they already have their own runtime.

Yup, Google should:

1. Reverse Engineer a proprietary language/API (Flash).

2. Write a secure VM for it (Flash and Java), trying to hit a moving target.

or

Get everyone to use an open, standardized tech (HTML5/js).

Can you give me one reason Google should prop up Flash?

>The offical reasons were speed and security, which was obviously a farce

Security wasn't a farce at all. "Flash is a big hole" (which is true) translates to "Chrome is a big hole".

I modded you up, not because I agree with everything you wrote, but because I want people to post counterpoints instead of brigading you. I think you're mistaken about Google not being able to index Flash; they've had that capability for about eight years to my knowledge.

I do agree with you that Google's security model is broken in many ways, both on the web and in Android.

Thanks, I might not be right about any of it but saying bad things about apple and google, or both at the same time :) tends to result in downvotes.

As in most things there's probably some truth on all sides.