The flash plugin was always just an output format for Adobe Flash, which is now Adobe Animate, and the reason Adobe can kill the plugin is because it's simply not necessary anymore: as of many years ago (since around when the iphone came out and didn't support the flash plugin) it has been possible to make the exact same stuff in the current version of what's essentially the same program and export it as standards compliant html.
In other words, Adobe isn't killing flash (which is now Animate) at all, they're just killing an obsolete browser plugin format.
If this type of animation is less popular now that's just an issue of fashion; if people still wanted to make the exact same type of animated landing pages using Adobe Animate they absolutely could.
You're right from the perspective that capabilities have increased, not decreased (though that was not true for a period during the flash / HTML5 crossover). You can make anything you want – and more – in the current context, and any particular historical format or container love is anachronistic pointlessness.
But you're wrong in the sense that development paradigm represented an era where programmers and non-programmers alike could dive in to explore, conceive and create experiences in a way that is more interesting and accessible to a broader group of people than today's more modern, powerful practices.
The flash plugin itself, as a format, does not enable something different, but the editing environment and culture definitely did, so in some way the death of the container does mark an end of a particular creative era in digital society.
Perhaps only for the participants, and even then I'm not mournful, but it is an ever-so-slightly sentimental moment for those that witnessed that fusion of creativity between types who were decidedly not technologoical and those who were, fused in a shared creative endeavour.
The parent commenter is correct. Adobe Animate is literally the Flash creation tool you remember, and provides the same experience.
[1] "Adobe Animate (formerly Adobe Flash Professional, Macromedia Flash, and FutureSplash Animator) is a multimedia authoring and computer animation program developed by Adobe Systems." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Animate
The fact that Animate can export to a web-compatible format is not sufficient for replicating the richness of Flash-based media with web standards. We tried. The output was far too bloated and inconsistent and didn't interact well with other web content. It also didn't support many the features of SWFs that we had previously been using.
We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs. It's faster and leaner than the web export from Animate, and we were able to figure out ways to replicate the special features we needed (or design around them). Plus, it acts like responsible, interoperable web content, not a blob of JS that acts like a compiled binary.
Point being — there's a lot more nuance here. Yes, Adobe Animate is the same tool as ever. But the fact that you can't as easily take the output from that tool, publish it, and get an It Just Works™ experience means there's a significant barrier now that never used to exist.
Well that's unfortunate.
"Bloated" I get, since there's no longer a black-box binary output format.
"Inconsistent" I'm not sure I understand, since presumably Animate's output is consistent. Does Animate create content that isn't rendered consistently across browsers?
"Didn't interact well with other web content" is interesting, because Flash never did this well IIRC. What was lost?
> We ended up writing our own JS animation framework that works with Animate-exported SVGs.
Neat!
A. Creative people creating games and other fun stuff with Flash in similar vein than HyperCard and Visual Basic allowed decades earlier
B. Bloody stupid web page enchancements and whole sites made in Flash for the effects and they were PITA to use and find. Ie. you cannot use the website without flash because the button animations have been done with Flash so the whole navigation doesn't work because Flash broken or disabled on purpose.
Most of the time I just ended up hating Flash-content because its randomness to work with Linux even on Mac and Windows was really, really annoying. Having fancy effects on a web page without any real added value didn't help.
Who could forget Yugo Nakamura's explorations in the early noughties, and many others which defined the early scene.
Even a decade or more ago some pretty impressive experiences were being delivered web-only. I ran a team in London where we really explored pushing the capabilities of the Flash player.
Granted we were just operating in a digital marketing context, in an environment where more involved gaming was already occurring, but we still delivered what feel like pretty decent 2d-gaming experiences, such as Professor Green and the Eco-Rangers: https://youtu.be/gUY2bVnhm44?t=85.
Back then I remember key figures from the Adobe team visiting our London office and candidly telling us the reason Flash was being blocked, esp. on mobile, was entirely due to commercial reasons by Apple, and not for technical reasons.
I believed them at that stage, but in hindsight it does appear there were serious performance, energy and security issues, but ex-Adobe engineers might want to chime in on that...
As someone who lived through that phase of web indulgence, I'm not mournful of a more indulgent time. It was a beautiful, exploratory phase, but the explosion in pointless, nonsense preloaders and custom UI represented usability ignorance and was not something to cherish.
In recent times the creativity and complexity has increased significantly in areas where it matters, such as web gaming, whereas in areas where it doesn't, such as UI interfaces to explore and understand information, it has gotten marginally or a lot better, depending on the context...
Anecdote: the Mac OS X dev tools used to come with an app called "Spin Control." It would sit in the background and every time an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (causing the "spinning beach ball of death") it would sample the process and log the trace. One time I accidentally left the app open and forgot about it for a week. When I came back, I found thousands of logged events. All flash.
It popped up in different processes, because WebKit was embedded all over the place, but every single spin event had flash at the bottom. There were several different stack traces within flash, but they were all flash. Yes, I paged through them all. Yes, I thought the 100% figure was a bit suspicious, so I triggered a mail reindex just to see if Spin Control had somehow been configured to look only at flash or something. As expected, the reindex triggered a beachball -- and dropped sqlite into the Spin Control list. There was no filter skewing the results. Flash had literally been responsible for 100% of the beachballs over a week of document editing, email reading, web browsing, and generally typical user activity.
Point is: I find it credible that Apple saw flash as a limiting factor for their ability to deliver smooth UX and battery life, both inside and outside the browser.
The first iPhone had 128MB RAM and 400Mhz CPU. The first iPhone that met those specs came out in 2011.
One of the biggest knocks against the iPad in 2010 was that you couldn’t view the “real Internet” without Flash. Adobe promised Flash on the Motorola Xoom that came out a year later. Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t view its Flash based home page on the device.
Adobe isn't wrong in saying that Apple has a commercial motive to block Flash, but that would only apply to the point in time where Apple was trying to ban all third-party development tools for app developers, not just on the web. That was around the same time as Apple's "Thoughts on Flash" memo - in fact, the memo was written to justify the App Store policy.
However, Flash was also cursed by the circumstances of it's birth. You see, in the 90s, the trend was to do everything in software, because CPUs were getting more powerful all the time and most computers were desktops with wall power. Who cares about memory or CPU usage? That's stuff's getting cheaper all the time! Dev hours are more expensive than hardware! The idea of dedicated accelerators and hardware for video decoding, music synthesis, modems, or even 2D graphics drawing was going the way of the dodo, and 3D accelerators were far too bespoke and uncommon to stick into a browser plugin. (For the record, there were no less than 4 or 5 competing 3D APIs Windows developers had to worry about, and 1 or 2 more on Mac OS)
The iPhone was designed entirely backwards to this, which is ironic because Apple were the kings of "do it in software" going back to the original Apple ][ disk controller. But that's just how mobile phones worked. CPUs are power-inefficient and burn battery. Ergo, everything the iPhone could do had a hardware accelerator for it. Video and audio decoding were done in dedicated hardware blocks, UI elements were composited by the GPU, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had one of those hardware overlay scanout things, too. Flash Player - or, at least, the full desktop version - was simply not designed to work efficiently and use all of these accelerators.
The painfully sad part of this is that Adobe already knew better. Flash Lite came out back in 2003, although you probably would never have known it because it was basically Japan-only until around 2006. None of this was a surprise to them, it just took them until Flash Player 10.2, in 2011, to actually build in support for things like hardware-accelerated video. Oh, and that only applied to new players that used StageVideo, because Adobe hadn't actually done the hard bit of hardware-accelerating actual Stage composition. They even wrote a Stage3D framework for pre-rendering everything as GPU textures, but they didn't build this into the player, so only games built around this framework would get the performance benefit.
Meanwhile, web developers were enjoying the benefits of hardware-accelerated everything right out of the gate. You didn't have to add a 10mb+ reimplementation of HTML and CSS in WebGL to your site. The web browser just transparently sliced your content into GPU layers and rendering got faster. Apple figured this out and every other browser vendor eventually did the same thing. Same with video and audio tags: the browser is entirely responsible for playback, so it just hooks into whatever hardware nonsense it needs to run good. And because it's the easiest way to get video and audio onto a page, most sites are power-efficient by default.
Why didn't Adobe take this approach? Well, the way they handled Flash updates was that everything was versioned, and they didn't touch the player behavior of old movies. They were betting on Flash developers continually upgrading to newer Flash technologies that would be easier for them to make efficient. Instead of figuring out how to JIT a highly dynamic language like ActionScript, they tried to convince ECMA and Brendan Eich to go along with adding immutable classes into JavaScript. ActionScript 3's class system was specifically designed to make writing JITs easier. Meanwhile, Google was busy writing V8, which could just JIT-compile even your nastiest, most dynamic JavaScript into relatively efficient ASM. It even JIT-compiled the object layouts!
So it's sort of a one-two punch: Flash was cursed by being born of a culture of "who cares about performance, the Pentium II is coming", and by the time they had the opportunity to pull themselves out of that, they were too busy worried about keeping old movies from breaking and instead tried to build new platforms inside the old one that were more performant.
The historical causality runs the other way: I gave Waldemar Horwat keys to the JS kingdom at Netscape and in ECMA TC39 TG1 in late 1997 when I went to cofound mozilla.org. Waldemar then designed "JS2" aka "ur-ES4" (my term) which is still archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20010119185300/http://www.mozill...
https://web.archive.org/web/20001206082000/http://www.mozill...
Believe it or not, Microsoft on the ASP.NET side got excited about this ur-ES4 work and did their own version, shipped server side as JScript.NET around 2001:
https://www.drdobbs.com/a-talk-with-andrew-clinick-on-micros...
The team at Macromedia I was in touch with after Firefox 1.0, mainly Gary Grossman, Edwin Smith, and Jeff Dyer, were trying to do a successor to Gary's ActionScript work (which was based on JS). They tried to license Sun's small footprint Java VM, for full Flash (not FlashLite) on mobile devices, but when Sun learned it was going to run ActionScript 3, not Java, they denied a license.
So Ed whipped up a proof of concept that the Macromedia folks could do it themselves, and this led to AVM2 (open sourced as Tamarin with Mozilla; alas the team got pulled back to work on a doomed Flash for mobile play, so Tamarin was in practical terms abandoned).
My work with Macromedians was a high point of early Firefox era standards rebooting. Jeff and I went to Geneva in spring 2005 to meet with Ecma and Microsoft folks to restart JS standards work in TC39. When Adobe bought Macromedia, we saw a path to ES4 as a standard. This ended only partly in tears, as AS3 was too static and different (namespaces!), but the good parts got into ES6.
But immutable classes originated with Waldemar's JS2/ur-ES4 work in the very late '90s.
The rev-share licensing controversy was around the point I'd started moving away from the Adobe world.
As you illustrate, the web won and many of us in the Adobe community moved on (who weren't involved specifically in games etc).
The funny thing is, I don't even remember the premium features nonsense from back then. I only learned about it when looking up information on how Domain Memory works. That's how irrelevant Flash Player already was, and THEN they decided to start asking for more money beyond just how much Creative Suite cost.
That doesn't explain why Flash met the same fate on Android. They even had Flash players for Android, but those faded out after a few years.
No.
I remember about 15 years ago, there was a Flash animations channel on a Chinese website PCOnline.com.cn (Pacific Computer Network), many "Flashkers" published their art works and games there, Little Cherry Cartoon, ShiHuang Animations and that green bean frog to name a few. It was the number 1 place I went to every time when I back from school (that every half month).
For Americans, if you visit NASA.gov in around 2005 (I maybe misremembered the exact time), their intro page was a Flash animation featuring rocket launch and other stuff. And that animation was really cool and moving.
All of that is no more in today's web. Today's web only gives you few pictures or maybe a video in the background, and a big highlighted "Sign Up"||"Get Started" button. They are less and less "Look me, I'm so cool", and the resonance is mostly gone.
It's sad that Adobe was unable to address the security and stability issue in the Flash Player. Bye Flash, it was really fun.