>The iphone was an HTML device, loudly repudiating the proprietary (and terrible) Flash much less the crappy, mostly stillborn "mobile HTML" attempts.

Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one.

At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performance issues, etc. However, all of these things could've been ignored or overcome.

The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen.

Apple did find a solution in mobile Safari for touchscreen hover states on the Web. However the Web platform generally offers more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did, which I'm sure helps.

If I'm not mistaken the solution was to make touching an element trigger the :hover state and the click action unless the :hover state changed the visibility of another element. If the :hover state changed the visibility of another element, then the click action was not triggered until a user tapped again.

This is possible in HTML because it's trivial to determine whether or not a :hover changes display or visibility properties of other elements. As you've supposed, Flash did not afford browsers with that sort of ability.

> more affordances for accessibility than Flash ever did

TBF one thing Flash did manage to achieve was the proliferation of web sites and apps that were as hard to use for people without protected disabilities as for people who did have them.

Whether this increased empathy for people with disabilities is an open question

That could have been overcome. The general crustiness of flash could not have been (from Apple's POV).

Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to do with flash, and there were many. Either flash in a browser or flash in a browser embedded in something else (ads embedded in 404 pages for broken help pages that were never even displayed, lol). At first I thought it had to be a mistake, a filter I had forgotten about or something, so I triggered a spin in Mail.app by asking it to reindex and sure enough that showed up as the first non-Flash entry in Spin Control.

As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.

I was mistaken, I found a copy of Jobs' letter re:Flash and he does cite the proprietary nature of Flash and Apple's lack of control over the content served on its platform as the most important reason Flash was kept off the iPhone.

https://www.cnet.com/culture/steve-jobs-letter-explaining-ap...

  As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.

I used OSX and Flash in the late 2000s so I have no problem believing that.

> This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool. The third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor's platforms

Funny how one could and maybe should point the same criticism towards electron.

Better than OS 9 and Flash when it would bring down the whole system!

Pre OSX Macs I found to be more unstable than Win95 osr2. Apple really needed OSX!

Mostly thanks to flash!

Even in OS X it was still a bad plugin, one of Snow Leopard's headline features was that plugins were moved to separate processes so that Safari could keep running instead of bringing down the whole browser when a plugin had a problem.

If memory serves me right, that was one of the big raisons d'etre for Chrome (released in 2008)... so Snow Leopard (2009) was catching up with it more than solving a Mac specific issue. But yes, back then the big big plugin was Flash, and its security and performance left a lot to be desired (in all platforms).

I wasn't even using flash. It was Photoshop. When this bogged down from switching between applications it would just shit the bed.

Yeesh, thank you for the reminder about how much the flash-based web sucked. It's easy to forget.

Part of it sucked, part of it was great. On Mac-side the experience was worse than on Windows, that's for sure.

But Flash also allowed many games to be easily developed and played in the browser. Lots of fun cartoons were made (the Metallica cartoons "fire bad" on Newgrounds come to my mind now).

It's a shame Flash sucked so much on Mac, since the developer behind Flash [0] did create some nice games on the Mac early in his career, namely Airborne! and Dark Castle.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay

I had no idea! Those games were amazing.

True

Yeah Flash was slow, but the common alternatives for in-browser animation/games were (and still are) far slower. H.264/5 maybe did video better than Flash, even then idk, Flash YouTube was always way faster on my old iMac than HTML5 YT. Google Hangouts/Meet will lag a high-end Intel MBP thanks to the unaccelerated VP8/9 video, but AIM Flash-based video calls ran fine on an iMac G4. On top of that, there was never a real replacement to the Flash creation software. All those Flash games that people made without really understanding how to code, no longer doable.

I guess Flash had to die because of how outdated, insecure, and proprietary it was. It did seem like a nightmare to support well on mobile. Just wish someone made something strictly better.

Perhaps it was fast due to lack of tight security policies etc. These days, everything has to be containerized or be in a sandbox. That adds layers of overhead. Probably also why Google killed NaCl (Native Clients for Google Chrome). It was loosely in the same space as Flash and ActiveX - anyone remember that?

I've thought about that too. Can only guess about it myself. Old software tends to be faster just because it has to be, and there isn't always a compromise other than time-to-implement.

Not sure how ActiveX's sandboxing worked, but I'll bet it was even less than Flash, since it was running actual x86 code.

ActiveX required that the ActiveX code you wanted to run be already installed on your computer. The security mechanism was that users obviously wouldn't install insecure stuff...

Turns out nearly every extension had gaping security holes.

Not quite. ActiveX would download and run unsandboxed native code direct from the web, even if it wasn't installed. The security mechanism was a popup dialog that contained the publisher name as verified by a code signing certificate.

This is how I remember it. I was dealing with early 2000s smart home software that used ActiveX. I'd visit a website in IE, press ok, and run their "web app" that had raw access to my serial and ethernet ports. It was bizarre even for back then.

Not hard to believe. Reliability was one of the points in Steve Jobs' _Thoughts on Flash_:

> 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. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

Back in the day there was even a Mac browser plugin called "Click to Flash" that would prevent Flash from loading in web pages and draining battery like crazy. Made the web livable and more secure throwing Flash garbage ads everywhere.

Ah, the dev page for these: https://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/

People also don't remember the huge number of CVEs that Flash had: https://www.cvedetails.com/version-list/53/6761/1/Adobe-Flas...

There were also browser extensions that'd replace YouTube's terrible flash player with an HTML5 h.264 player which was a godsend on single-core PPC G4/G5 machines, where flash would happily keep the CPU pegged for no good reason.

> Flash had been responsible

Was it just Flash or low skilled web developers using Flash the wrong way, adding 10 Flash advertisements on a page and so on?

My fuzzy recollection was that the OS X version of Flash was much worse than the Windows version. Given "Thoughts on Flash" and the direction of the iPhone, this ended up being very expensive for Adobe :)

I always thought Flash was unusably slow, until I tried it on Windows. On Windows Flash was fast and fluent, on the Mac it was choppy and unbearably slow.

Since Flash was so ubiquitous on the web, this made Macs a lot slower for many tasks than Windows computers. No matter how much Steve Jobs touted the power of the G4, and boasted about the speed of Final Cut, nobody would believe it when their Mac couldn't even run a space invaders clone in IE4 fluently.

Adobe ignored performance on Apple devices for years. There was no way in hell Apple would allow Adobe to do the same to iOS.

Spin Control lives on as part of Instruments, which can be configured to collect a tailspin whenever an app hangs.

Also, from a practical perspective, even Adobe never had a fully working (feature parity to desktop) way to actually load Flash on the iPhone. Apple kept asking for one: Adobe could never produce something that wasn’t buggy crap.

There were some 3rd party things that sorta worked a bit, but they were not good either.

Flash was bad on touchscreens for sure, but we’d have seen content adapt eventually anyhow, if it had actually ever worked in the first place.

Very true. In case anyone is too young to remember, in the days of the iPhone 3G, it was somewhat popular to buy apps which would use a real browser on a server somewhere to render a browser session, complete with Flash, and stream it to you. It was very handy for those of us who played Flash games and needed to check in on our game on the go. (Think FarmVille, Cityville, etc.)

I don't think that wasn't the deal-breaker. Jobs didn't want Flash to become the de facto development environment for the phone.

I'm pretty sure he always knew they'd end up with apps on it, they just didn't pull that together for the first release, thus the HTML song and dance. But if they supported flash, that would reduce a lot of the demand for apps later, and worse - it would be cross platform.

So he used the other (still good) reasons - battery life, security, etc. to obscure the real reason - Apple was not yet ready to compete with it on their own terms, so they banned it.

>The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen.

It's more about control and all the other reasons.

Mousovers is a dead herring. They could still give Flash not to run existing stuff, but new apps, that would take iOS into account.

And legacy flash movies and animations and games that just needed click and not mousovers would still work. To be frank, mouseover interaction weren't really that big in many (most?) Flash games anyway.

Mouseovers were just the tip of the iceberg: fixed screen sizes and other desktop UI conventions, assumptions that you could just leave things constantly running rather than figure out how to do proper event-driven programming, etc. Yes, they could have tried to do a “Flash mobile” but most of the appeal was compatibility with the huge library of existing apps and users wouldn’t have been happy with that, while authors would have bristled at having to give up their favorite hacks. Flash was a fractal of bad programming and UI design, and there was no way to get that community to improve since Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way. People wrote Click-to-Flash plugins to keep it from crashing your browser, every browser had to change their architecture to handle Flash crashing, the plugin & authoring tools had tons of performance, stability, and security issues – and Adobe just kept snoozing, waking only enough to cash the royalty checks, and claim the next version would be totally better.

Another poster mentioned the hangs - which is very true - and I can say that the desktop Macs I supported had a high 90% of the crash logs show Flash as the culprit, not to mention almost every CPU / battery life issue.

There were some great artists who produced neat work despite it but the only company to blame for Flash’s demise is Adobe. As a thought exercise, ask why Flash on Android consistently sucked – if they were trying to make the case that Apple should reconsider, they could have put at least one intern on making that seem appealing.

> Adobe was one of the worst offenders and didn’t care about their platform in any discernible way.

This is par for the course for Adobe. The other day I had occasion to try to fill out a PDF form using Acrobat Pro. I made it through about a page (painfully slowly) until I unwisely saved my work. Then I cursed for a bit, tried quitting and reloading, and eventually gave up and started over in PDF.js. Superior in every way.

I remember when a major selling point of Acrobat was that you could save a filled out form, whereas third party apps couldn’t. Apparently doing so still breaks the form, and third party apps have gotten it right for many years now.

Adobe seems to pretty much never care about their platform once they have market share.

I remember working on a project in 2010. We hit multiple crashing bugs in Flash (both runtime and IDE) doing fairly basic stuff. I figured we’d paid for support, might as well use it, and reported them to Adobe.

Literally never heard back until a year later when they closed the tickets saying it might be fixed in the next release and we should buy licenses to find out (spoiler: no).

FYI, the idiom is "red herring"

I remember my old Samsung Galaxy Note (or was it the Note 3?) could actually sense when your finger was near the screen but not touching, for mouseover events.

I always wondered why that feature didn't continue - I remember it working quite well, but IIRC it only worked in Chrome browser.

That, and even if you somehow fixed that, Flash on mobile sucked. I had Flash on my Windows Mobile handset. It was horrible!

> "Apple likes open standards when it is weak."

Everyone does. AMD is the same. The market leader focuses on features, the runners up try to take them down with openness. The competition is good for consumers, but the motivation is one of self-interest, not the common good.

You might actually expand "Apple likes open standards when it is weak" to "companies likes open standards when they are weak."

Generally speaking you get standards consortiums when there is a clear winner that is mopping up the space.

Here's an example that's happening right now: Nvidia-NvLink-Infiniband.

Nvidia owns the highspeed interconnect inside the chassis (HGX), the NICs (Mellanox), the inter-host interconnect (Infiniband), the high performance inter-host interconnect (switched NvLink), the and the ethernet network (Mellanox has the same 52.1Tbps switch performance that everyone else has now). GPU training is RDMA heavy and this is a place where both NvLink and Infiniband shine, ethernet much less so. Retransmissions are very bad, in global-performance-terms, for ROCEv2 transfers. Right now Nvidia is just crushing it and there's zero chance anyone is going to catch up by introducing new Infiniband ASICs.

So what happens? You have a consortium spun up by all of the companies in the Ethernet space - Ultra Ethernet Consortium - to try and use "standards" to push back on customers who don't want to make big investments in "non-standard." UEC is pretty vague but seems to be promising Broadcom-style cellized fabrics, the whole point of which is to have an ethernet-like standard that avoids ECMP-induced flow collisions and retransmissions - that is, get Ethernet into the same territory as Infiniband.

If you look back in time in the tech industry, you see this over and over and over and over. Standards are great, they make certain kinds of multi-sided markets and markets that need broad participation to be viable possible - but they are also routinely about the losers joining together to compete.

> they are also routinely about the losers joining together to compete.

That is the greatness of it. It reminds me of democracy: The less powerful join together to give everyone an equal vote, rather than having one vote per dollar.

In this case though dollars work just fine - the incumbent who probably invented the market now gets smaller companies banding together against it after a while.

> Right now Nvidia is just crushing it and there's zero chance anyone is going to catch up by introducing new Infiniband ASICs.

I mean, Cornelis Networks is trying with the resurrected OmniPath. I hope they pull it off, but I'm not holding my breath.

See: https://www.cornelisnetworks.com/products/

It's not going to work because they are too late.

HPC cluster builds are complex enough due to the presence of multiple networks (2x moderate-scale infiniband chassis and 2x ethernet chassis as a minimum) without introducing unknown vendors. At that point, if you're doing IB, why not just go Mellanox since you will almost certainly buy 200GE Connectix NICs and not the 100G NICs from these guys.

UEC will - like most standards - _eventually_ work. In the mean time, Nvidia pods are the obvious choice for anyone who really cares about performance, and other vendors (Cisco, Arista) if they don't.

Idk, I personally did it for a HPC cluster two years ago. 2x100GbE + OmniPath was a sensible way to reduce cost, especially as the cluster was very light on GPU power and mostly focussed on CPU-bound jobs. Last I heard everyone there is still very happy with what we built.

Was that before Intel spun it out? I can see people being willing to do that build if Intel was seemingly on board. Today things are pretty different.

Modern HPC mostly means GPU compute and tons of data shuffling, but point taken. CPU bound jobs aren't going to stress the i/o, so you probably could have done 100GE for less. I'm curious what you did for storage but I'm guessing with CPU-bound that is again much less of an issue.

I'd even bend that quote to say "Given a problem that maximizes their profit if solved, it's an acceptable compromise for companies to resort to solutions they don't control, if they don't have the ressources to create competing solutions they'd do control."

While we’re over generalizing… What could be said about grand unification vs the march of progress? Can the laws of physics change? Must we reinvent arithmetic?

One of my greatest joys learning to program is reading old (well written) code, and piecing apart the timeless from the legacy.

Or wait for the incumbent to get big fat and lazy before beating them using a 10x faster, dumb, "unsuitable" interconnect loaded to only to half its theoretical bandwidth.

Same for adaptive sync. Gsync was first to market by a country mile, the adaptive sync standard wasn’t even approved until like 6 months after the first gsync stuff showed up and if nvidia hadn’t gone first it would have taken much longer if it happened at all.

Freesync wasn’t really market-ready until at least 2015 and the early products were mostly junk, it’s not until the gsync compatible program that any vendors really cared about LFC or flickering issues.

> losers joining together to compete

You are saying it like it is something bad. Competition is good for consumers, and I cheer any means to spin up, sustain and heat competition.

    Then as they clawed their way back from the precipice, 
    they started "adding value" again.

I don't know if I can agree. On the software side, MacOS supports all those things. On the hardware side, it's still nothing but industry-standard ports.

I didn't say they necessarily denigrated the open formats but added and preferred their own proprietary image, audio etc formats as they gained market strength.

On the hardware side I'm delighted by Apple's USB C/TB push (and Apple contributed a lot to those standards, esp based on what they had learned with Lightning) but note they revived the proprietary "magsafe" connecter on recent laptops (though you can still use USB C PD). Apparently enough customers wanted it.

And as others have pointed out, Apple is hardly alone in this

> Apparently enough customers wanted it.

Magsafe is genuinely a nice innovation that users missed. It solves the cord yank problem. But I do like having the option to use USB-C if I don't have the MagSafe cable.

Also USB-C absolutely sucks. The socket seems to attract dirt and dust in a way that prevents its proper working like no other.

I have lots of USB-C devices and never had that problem.

I'm careful with my stuff though.

Phones are very sensitive to it as they are in a pocket.

Pocket lint -> pushed in USB cable -> after some years the connector wont connect anymore

Had lots of phones, always in my pocket, never had that problem.

Actually I just realized I put it in my pocket top-end down. So the usb socket is facing the sky. I suppose that might keep the usb socket further from pocket lint.

The only port I’ve ever experienced this problem with is Lightning.

At least on many iPhone versions, if anything damages one of the delicate lead springs inside the port, Apple service will tell you to replace the entire phone.

I'm the other way around: I just want to carry a UB C cable or two. The cable was designed so wear and damage should accrue to the cable, not the connector in your device.

The current computers are the best of both worlds in that respect :)

That's true. I forgot they brought Magsafe back. (Side note: I don't know why they couldn't just make a standard USB-C connector, except magnetic...)

Some of the new MacBooks require a charging port capable of greater than the current USB-C specification limit of 100W, that's likely one reason why they decided against coopting USB-C exclusively for charging.

USB-C now allows 240W

I wasn't aware, thanks!

About your side note: That seems physically impossible. Magsafe only has five pins, and is larger than USB-C, which has twenty-four pins. To me, USB-C is a modern miracle. It is so small, reasonably strong, reversible, and has very high pin density.

Amusingly the new MagSafe is based on USB-PD I believe, just in a different connector form factor. (The old was 1-wire I think?)

> Apparently enough customers wanted it.

This magnetic thing saved my macbook from numerous falls when people tripped on the power cord.

It was ubiquitous, worked across the whole lineup and for several generations. It is hard to forget that until usb-c, it was commonplace for a manufacturer to have a wide range of power adapters, of varying voltage, power, connector, etc. Apple do their own shit, but they do it consistently.

Right, I quite often charge my Asus laptop with my MagSafe charger.

I charge my Mac with USB-C. Your Asus has that, right? But yeah, I forgot they brought MagSafe back. Thanks, corrected.

I think you are joking, but if you want to, you can buy an adapter for like €10 that will go from magsafe to USB-C, and then indeed charge your non-Apple laptop with it.

iChat stored every conversation (if you enabled history) in HTML files the user could find in their Documents folder and read. Messages history is stored in an undocumented SQLite database that you’re not meant to touch. I’m not saying they’re completely proprietary in every way, but you can see the progression from wide open to “keep your hands off.”

For another example, Apple Notes was actually just mail messages stored in IMAP, until they decided to deprecate that in favor of another iCloud-backed black box in order to add more features.

IMAP notes still works.

It works about as well as it always did, which was not very well.

Html as a database is unacceptable though.

Emails as notes sounds pretty clever though.

One thing that I've enjoyed is how for decades Mail.app has been first and foremost a generic IMAP mail client, with features specific to iCloud Mail being far and few between. It works exactly as well with e.g. Fastmail as it does iCloud Mail. Conversely, iCloud Mail is just plain old IMAP and works fine with other generic IMAP clients.

Compare this with Gmail for example, which has a crummy IMAP implementation, and though the Gmail mobile app supports adding non-Google IMAP accounts, it clearly prioritizes being a Gmail client.

NeXT had RTF support. It was used everywhere including NeXTmail

Or even “Apple doesn’t like open standards that are weak”. OpenGL was just no longer fit for purpose. They were competing against DirectX, needed to do ML acceleration, and at the time Vulcan didn’t exist. They had to do something, and especially given their chip strategy that must have been in full swing at the same time, Metal must have been a no brainier.

Big tangent, but can someone tell me why matter/threads doesn’t suck ass?

I have one of these devices and frankly I have no idea what I expect it to be doing.

> I would add some nuance to this statement: "Apple likes open standards when it is weak."

> [...]

> Then as they clawed their way back from the precipice, they started "adding value" again.

Just four words: embrace, extend, and extinguish

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...