apple killed it after Jobs had a hissy fit

Android did support it for a time though, it was a pretty good selling point in fact... but then google dropped it too :(

Google never dropped it. Adobe did, when they realised that they could make money from HTML5 instead: https://web.archive.org/web/20170114145431/https://blogs.ado... .

I'm working on bringing Flash to iOS via browser proxy^0. Basically, what we do is run the browser on the server and stream the viewport to your regular mobile browser (ie, Safari). Then we use Ruffle injected into the remote page.

Basically it's a "monkey patch" to give you extensions-like capabilities but on mobile devices!

0: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox/issues/424

I remember using a browser called Puffin that worked like this to use Flash on iOS

I'm no Apple fan, but Apple killed it because Adobe was letting Flash be an awful, unreliable piece of software for years, and seemed fine with letting that be the status quo for a decade more. If Adobe did a better job of improving the stability and resource management of the Flash clients, they wouldn't have had to "capitulate".

Citation needed. Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were. I think that flash got a bad rap because browser vendors didn't like it's monopoly on content and they wanted a slice.

> Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were.

Citation needed. Saying that because Flash was widely touted as a significant contributor to browser crashes.

Though, looking for a citation for that myself just now... all of the search results I'm getting back are just an endless sea of "Flash crashed my browser" type of things instead. :/

Yeah, exactly. Just because everyone says it doesn't make it so, and the general public are often wildly wrong about basic computer facts.

Well, neither of us seem to have supporting evidence so far... ;)

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Using some different search parameters is turning up some results:

* http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-anal...

* https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash

* https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data

There is some talking around the problem on the old Mozilla Blog:

* https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash...

Things being about a decade old is adding further difficulty. :/

That's not supporting evidence of the actual important part of the claim though. This is like asking "Did the 2008 Ford Ranger have electrical issues due to cost-cutting measures after the housing bubble collapse and subsequent layoffs?" and pointing to some forum posts where individual instances of that vehicle had electrical issues. I could dig up those posts and point to people saying "I've never had those issues", and I guess we can count them pound-for-pound right? But that's not scientific, and neither is this.

Look, I'm not saying that 3rd party plugins never crashed, which would be invalidated by your links. I'm saying that it needs to be proven that they were widespread and/or an actual problem.

AND ALSO we should make sure to prove that the same problem doesn't still exist in the Javascript ecosystem. Which, well, they do. The multiple layers of Javascript confinement we've added to browsers, guess what, those would have worked for Flash too. Saying that it couldn't be secured because it's 3rd party is counter-scientific.

> http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-anal...

This is a page where Firefox developers are discussing how to inject their own crash-reporting code into the sandboxed flash container. I never said that 3rd party plugins didn't occasionally have crashes, so I don't see the point of this link. Can you elaborate?

> https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash

This lists crashes seen in the Flash module. But again, I never said that 3rd party plugins didn't occasionally have crashes.

> https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data

This is a documentation page about types of all-cause failures related to Flash, (could be Firefox code issues)

> https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash...

Javascript also has "crash protection" in the form of a sandbox. That's why pages can "crash" without taking down the entire browser. This would also work exactly the same for Flash.

Yeah, that's all fair.

Did you manage to find citations supporting your assertion? :)

Chrome was the first browser to stop letting plugins crash the whole thing, so yea it was a thing before for sure, but it was still way better than other things like ActiveX or Java applets…

Adobe worked on it, and even they could not show anything convincing. This was the time when Flash was causing the vast majority of crashes on OS X. Even on Android they could not make it work reliably and it was plagued with security, performance, and overheating issues.

Adobe had stopped trying years before Apple officially stopped caring.