No. Generally, the missing features you mention were inconsequential to decision-makers (outside of some ideological devs) and many of them were being gradually addressed by Macromedia/Adobe anyway.

Flash died because Microsoft was agressingly nipping at Adobe on the commercial side with Silverlight, because standard bodies were finally chipping away at its feature advantages with long-needed improvements to HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and most impactfully of of all: because Steve Jobs decreed it.

The death knell for Flash sounded exactly when the market-revolutionizing iPhone refused to support altogether.

But all of that's just about the runtime platform. The posted app calls back to the Flash editor itself, which was extremely mature and powerul but had too much inertia to successfully pivot to targeting HTML or apps before Adobe would give up on it.

Later apps have come, but inevitably start far behind the features that Flash offered designers, animators, and developers at its peak.

Yes, people forgot that websites for big companies were often flash based trash until the iPhone and the web changed to be mobile friendly as iPhones sales continued to skyrocket.

Thanks for this. People forget the creator experience in Flash. It was really amazing, albeit a little quirky.

I'm surprised you bothered to mention SilverLight. It was Microsoft's intent, sure, but did it ever have any uptake?

It's more of a curiosity or footnote than a relevant factor.

I think Silverlight was making deep inroads in the enterprise market for rich internet apps and that this was a growing customer retention issue for Adobe with Flash. That's part of why they invested so much in Flex and AIR as a more engineering-centric alternative to the Flash app's designer-centric timeline interface. They wanted to shore up what they were losing to Microsoft.

The consumer usage of Flash was most visible (games, cartoons, brochure sites, video streaming) and Apple's evisceration of that market was what ultimately killed Flash, but things were already looking grim on several fronts before that happened.

Lots of enterprise apps like ERP and that type of shit may STILL require Silverlight for older versions. It was huge in that market.

Edit: I replied to the wrong comment, although this still stands!

I still miss macromedia Director though. I learned to program with HyperCard and then director, and I always thought it was a shame it got canned when adobe bought it.. it was much nicer in lots of ways, although the player was more heavyweight. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever really found a proper replacement for HyperCard!

Perhaps you would enjoy Decker: http://beyondloom.com/decker/

Yeah, coming from back at that time, to consider Silverlight at all is to give it too much credit.

Jobs and his unwillingness to support it on iPhone killed Flash, and that's that.

Internally Adobe hated Flash. It strode right past Live Motion which used the UI paradigm of After Effects to produce animations which didn't cater to the traditional key framing model Flash was built on. I feel pretty strongly that there were forces inside Adobe that wanted to take advantage of the merger to bury the Macromedia IPs. Adobe had a great relationship with Apple. Photoshop was finely tuned to work on Macs and the majority of the creatives using it were working on Macs. Adobe could have threatened to put Apple's computers in the ground by limiting Photoshop support for OSX in 2009 in order to gain support for Flash on iOS. They didn't. They just never thought of Flash as an Adobe product. If Apple stopped supporting Photoshop things would have gone nuclear.

That would definitely explain why they were so half-assed in their attempts to adapt to HTML5.

Word on the street, at the time, was that Apple and Adobe collaborated actively on making Flash work on the iPhone without straining its battery. It is the failure to achieve that goal that prompted the whole about-face.

The only time I ever interacted with it knowingly was the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 software.

The original Netflix streaming site used Silverlight, I'm guessing because browser DRM wasn't up to snuff at the time. That's about the only time I willingly used it.

I remember reading something about how difficult it was to get flash to render correctly on iphone hardware at the time because it had no hardware support and software emulation was slow and terrible at best.

But this is only a vague memory of some article in a magazine or something similar, so take it as anecdotal at best.

Apple specifically refused to support Flash in mobile Safari and the original sandbox model for apps prevented any kind of perfomant virtual machine for something as sophisticated as SWF (or Java or .NET). That's improved some in the 15 years since, although the sandbox is still fairly conservative and tight.

But at the time, I don't believe Adobe engineeing publically bothered to swim upstream against this, and while there were third-party attempts to run SWF files or AIR applications on iOS they were indeed janky and slow (as you would expect).

So I'd give your memory like a B+ on this one!

The current sandbox model for apps still does not allow any sort of performant VM; by design. Hell, one of the biggest announcements of Apple's DMA compliance is just that they had to provide entitlements to access some kind of JIT support on iOS. They are extremely pissed that they had to do that, only they are supposed to be allowed to JIT code.

That being said the only people who complain about not having JIT on iOS are Mozilla and people who want to run game console emulators, which Apple doesn't want their users having because they despise the Church-Turing thesis. Game developers that use engines with VMs in them just develop around the execution of those VMs being very slow.

Apple wasn't refusing to support Flash on mobile Safari. The actual story is more complicated: Apple tried to collaborate with Adobe four times on mobile Flash but, depending on who you ask, Adobe either shipped code that just plain didn't work on phones, or Apple couldn't be bothered to even get Flash to compile. Probably both are true. The very public open letter from Jobs regarding Flash is after Adobe said "fuck it" and decided to ship what they had as a packaging solution for developing iOS apps. While most of the open letter is written to say "this is why we're not shipping Flash as a browser plug-in", the real reason it was published was to justify rule changes in their developer agreement intended to prohibit porting Flash apps to iOS.

Said rule changes were overturned in 3 months, thanks Obama.

I always thought Flash died because Apple didn't want people to be able to write and execute arbitrary code in an app on their phones. That it posed a security risk, a stability risk, and potentially a business risk (as it could allow people to circumvent the limitations they'd imposed on, say, distribution and payments). Is that wrong?

Yes, it is wrong. Mostly. Or just some minor reason.

It was largely a fallacy perpetuated by Apple. The same fallacy used to more recently justify the app store exclusivity, aimed at preserving their enclosed ecosystem under the guise of protecting users from potential malware threats.

While it's true that Flash posed security risks, not just on mobile but across platforms. Acrobat pdf readers continue to grapple with high-severity CVEs.

Another argument against Flash support on the iPhone was its purported battery drain. It's worth considering the technological landscape of that era: Arm processors were less power-efficient, and early iPhones struggled with battery longevity. Remember, even basic color screen phones could last several days on a single charge—illustrated by the enduring appeal of the Nokia 3210, which could comfortably endure a week without needing to be plugged in.

Yes flash early implementation for mobile was very inefficient.

Yes Apple had valid reasons for resisting Flash support. However, at the heart of the matter was Adobe's lion stance on royalties, a proposition deemed cocky by Jobs. Plus jobs was in the money Business. So the moot negociation red eventually led to a declaration war on Adobe.

Despite Adobe's towering market cap, and arguable more influential in the tech spheres, they underestimated Apple's strategic timing and their ability to a big push for new web standards, which ultimately led to the widespread adoption of HTML. Adobe's defeat to maintain their spotlight animation authoring tool for the web. Cousin comment touches on its disrespect for existing web standards, it never evolved to embrace the browser, it kept running as its own thing with limited to no interfacing with the browser API even.

This conflict not only signed the future death certificates of Flash but also spelled the end for other authoring tools which came from the Macromedia umbrella, and those had already begun to lose relevance post-Adobe acquisition.

Adobe's numerous acquisitions, it's easier to enumerate the surviving applications since the launch of the iPhone than to list those consigned to oblivion.

Not exhaustive, but here is the gist: Adobe applications that have ceased to exist since 2006:

Adobe mainstream products that have ceased to exist since 2006: - Flash - Fireworks - Dreamweaver (on life support) - GoLive - Muse - Encore - Contribute - SpeedGrade - Story - Edge Animate - Edge Reflow

Adobe mainstream products that remain plus those created or aquired since 2006: - Photoshop - Illustrator - InDesign - Premiere Pro - After Effects - Acrobat - XD - Audition - Figma

I'd forgotten how many they had killed off. Adobe actually ended up abandoning their Figma acquisition https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38681861

You could add Lightroom to your list of survivors.

Autodesk employed a similar acquire, absorb some features and then retire strategy, in the CAD 2D/3D space.

Computer Associates, Symantec - lots of companies that liked to buy up and kill whole market segments :/

> It was largely a fallacy perpetuated by Apple. The same fallacy used to more recently justify the app store exclusivity, aimed at preserving their enclosed ecosystem under the guise of protecting users from potential malware threats.

What was the fallacy?

In addition to all of those things, it also burned your battery like crazy. Jobs was very public about his annoyance with Flash’s battery drain.

I think the GP is talking more about the authoring tools for Flash. You could do everything - graphics, animation, audio, video, scripting - in a single package that was relatively easy to use.

Mobile apps are even worse than Flash and those reasons haven't hampered their adoption.

Flash died because both Apple and Microsoft wanted it dead. Possibly justifiably.

It's crazy to me they didn't see the value in porting actionscript to something that compiles to JS/HTML5, though adobe couldn't be trusted to see this potential obviously. If they had something like that ready in ~2011 it could have completely replaced HTML 5 canvas adoption

I blame Adobe for Flash dying much more than Apple. There's a lot of features that would have been hard to port (maybe Flash Player could have evolved into providing support for those and being optional for simpler content), but an HTML5 output that worked for 90% of 2D games and animations would have kept it relevant. Or at least funding Shumway while it was around if no one at Adobe was able to do it.

Instead they made a converter where you lost audio, video, scripting, effects, etc. It should have at least been able to convert a Homestar Runner cartoon.

There's a correlation between the death of Flash and the rise of mobile devices browsing. Flash was pixel-based and the whole paradigm doesn't really work for responsiveness.

Flash was vector based.

Flash was just as responsive as HTML+CSS: As much as the developer makes it responsive.

Also, flash was most certainly not pixel based. It was vector based and a common workflow was to create your graphics in the more powerful Adobe Illustrator, then import into flash for animation.

Meanwhile we didn't have a replacement, and any replacement lacks of all the features you list, text selection, etc.

It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's the reason.

> It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it.

That's how it happened in my orbit anyway.

Steve Jobs published an open letter entitled "Thoughts on Flash", in which he said that iOS would never support Flash. We had a discussion at the web shop I was working for; we decided to stop making new things in Flash.

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

Fun story: Apple demoed the iPad to Hollywood execs a couple weeks before the release. The Hollywood folks saw all their web properties rendering almost no UI and their video content not available.

I worked for a boutique consulting firm at that time and Warner Bros/Telepictures was our big client. We immediately got calls from a lot of execs and I had a week long firedrill of converting MANY Telepictures properties from Flash (mostly for the video content rendering with timecoded UI updates). They also had a video delivery company that was co-located with AOL fly out to Burbank and fly back with tons of hard drives full of episodes of Ellen, the Tyra Banks show, etc to recode from Flash video to video that could be served with the <video> content tag on iPads.

It somehow all got done by the iPad release and Apple published a top 10 "sites that work great on iPad" page on their site and we had done 4 out of 10 of them. All we had to test on was desktop Safari resized to the screen size they told us it needed to work on.

I remember that a lot of people were sure that we were going to get an even better replacement.

"HTML5 is going to be the replacement."

So much for that. Goodbye web games.

There are still a lot of "web games", but it's nothing like it used to be.

The replacement is CSS + JS. Thank God Apple helped kill Flash.

And 10 years later I just don't see the level of amateur uptake that flash had.

For 10 years flash minted thousands of young animators and content creators. Since flashes death there are far fewer upstarts and communities despite Internet adoption being magnitudes higher

The heyday of Newgrounds was truly a golden age for stupid amateur cartoons and games.

Yep. The tech may be more mature and less prone to breakage, but the fun of creating, the joy of stupid games went with it for a lot of folks.

I would bet there are many more young amateur animators and content creators now than there have been 10 years ago. Their work is just more diverse than the "signature Flash animation look".

I really think the all-in-one-ness of Flash is what made it so easy to use. Not only that you can make almost everything for a game/cartoon in one interface (IIRC audio wasn't included), but also that the output was a single file you could share easily.

The rampant piracy of old Flash versions probably helped a lot too.

> CSS does everything Flash once did

Tell me you never used Flash by not telling me you've never used flash.

Flash's USP and core value proposition was the (IMO) fantastic IDE that you used to create flash apps and animations. It was exactly as technical as you needed it to be. As you upskilled you could do more things, but more importantly do the same things more elegantly. In stead of a manual animation you could script it out in AS3. I loved it and I'm really sad that I only entered the professional workforce as Flash was on it's way out.

I still mourn the disappearance of the game development and distribution scene that Flash made possible. It seems like all we have these days are walled-garden app stores filled with pay-to-win, ad-filled games.

From a gaming perspective, I agree that Flash was excellent. The current era of ad-filled pay to win games does suck.

..hence the reason apple killed it ;)

I was developing Flash since before it was called Flash, back when it was called FutureSplash Animator. I'm not talking about the IDE, I'm talking about the user experience that could be created with Flash.

As a UX professional, the death of Flash was one of the most satisfying moments of my career. It's hard to overstate how much better the web is today than it was when it was overrun by sealed-off Flash sites.

Apple killed flash by not allowing it to run on their mobile devices. It's really as simple as that.

I think Apple claimed that Flash was too power hungry to run on a mobile device.

I was hired back in the day to convert a flash based app to a "Dynamic HTML" app. The flash developers all quit because they didn't want to work with HTML and Javascript. And this was all because the company wanted to support iPhones and iPads. And there were a lot of companies doing the same exact thing back then - abandoning Flash for HTML/Javascript/CSS.

Add to the list that when we resized the window or went fullscreen the typical Flash app would keep its original size. A Flash app born for 800x600 screens wouldn't look well in a 1366x768 screen or 1080p ones. It became tiny as resolution increased and diagonals more or less didn't. Then Steve Jobs and battery life or removing a competing ecosystem.

Not my experience outside of aspect ratio mis-matches. Flash content used a lot of vector art which scales fantastically. It not resizing is the developer's fault, not the technology's (which is common with Flash, it got blamed a lot for its misuse).

I know. I even built a Windows screensaver in Flash around 2000 but I don't remember the details. Anyway the web was littered by tiny and more tiny Flash apps that never filled the page beyond their originally assigned size. I guess that the customer never paid for the necessary updates or the dev was not available anymore. Customers eventually switched to HTML and JS.

They did solve the search issue before it's demise.

"Google and Yahoo to Search Inside Flash Files" (2008)

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4...

> IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button.

Don't SPAs do exactly this?

There is a ton that flash did that CSS does not do, but it is more about the toolchain / dev environment for flash apps than the actual technical capabilities. It is very strange to me that no one has built "Flash but on Html5" yet.