Sensible Erection | Steve Jobs wins: Adobe kills Flash for Android for all the reasons he predicted

Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Steve Jobs wins: Adobe kills Flash for Android for all the reasons he predicted

quote [ Adobe, the maker of Flash, has yanked its availability for Android today, officially marking the end of mobile Flash for all devices. This gives a victory to the late Steve Jobs, who decided in 2007 that Flash was a bloated, insecure, battery and processor killing piece of outdated technology which didn’t belong on mobile devices like the iPhone. ]

its sad

its sad, because it begins the death of Flash in all other platforms as well. Web desktop video was simplified with Flash as one plug-in for all platforms. HTML5 has the problem that it requires video to be served in the format each browser allows which will cause problems in the future.

[sci&tech] [by tekagami@8:28pmGMT] [+10 Good]

Comments

ENZ said @ 8:41pm GMT on 15th Aug
Like half the internet runs on Flash. I don't see it as a death kneel for Flash just because shitty "smart" phones can't run it.

damnit said @ 8:50pm GMT on 15th Aug
For lack of something better, Flash prevailed. By the time Silverlight came out, Flash was used everywhere.

Cakkafracle said @ 9:01pm GMT on 15th Aug
I don't even have Flash installed on my system. I couldn't give 2 shits about Flash or AIR anymore. I used to be a 'flash developer', meaning I made sites and widgets gleefully using Flash.

Flash only became ubiquitous for 2 reasons. It allowed dynamic importing of jpg/gif (making it useful full-page presentations and 'sites) and the fact that no 2 browsers worked at all alike, esp. IE on windows (fucking %^$##).
The addition of Video was great too (yay youtube)

the need for Flash was removed by proper web standards and technologies. Animation can be achieved with what comes bundled in a modern browser, so fuck flash unless you want to make a game or show videos (but hopefully not for long)

and I dont' make games (sad face).

'Bye flash, eat my ass.

underdog said @ 9:18pm GMT on 15th Aug [Score:4 Funny]

Paradise Lost said @ 10:10pm GMT on 15th Aug [Score:1 Funny]
Turns out Adobe was kind enough to stop supporting it for Linux too.

Adobe's business plan seems to be: Stop making products.

mechanical contrivance said @ 11:48pm GMT on 15th Aug
Sounds good to me.

damnit said @ 12:11am GMT on 16th Aug
They make a shitload from their Photoshop lineups. They can't be bothered by Flash.

BergZ said @ 1:53am GMT on 16th Aug
From what I gather Adobe makes their big money on authoring/development tools (Dreamweaver).

Basically: If they can get someone else to write and maintain a web-language/player then that's a big expense they can offload while continuing to write the lucrative authoring/development tools.

Supreme_Coconut said @ 5:26am GMT on 16th Aug
To be fair: It's Linux. Why bother supporting something 2% of the population uses?

BergZ said @ 11:46am GMT on 16th Aug
Because a ton of set top boxes & smart TVs (both of which include web browsers) run linux.

foobar said @ 8:51pm GMT on 16th Aug
Over 70% of smartphones run linux.

eIfish said @ 9:27pm GMT on 16th Aug
No, over 70% of smartphones run Android.

Which they had a product for until a few days ago.

foobar said @ 9:29pm GMT on 16th Aug
Which is a variant of linux.

eIfish said @ 6:37pm GMT on 17th Aug
So run the more current Flash plugin for Android on your Linux system.

Oh wait, you can't, because while the kernels are similar, the entire rest of the environment, from the standard library to the environment, to the windowing system, is completely different.

You might as well be saying that four percent of desktops run NeXTSTEP, which is OSX because its kernel shares some history.

foobar said @ 2:12am GMT on 18th Aug
The primary issue would be that I'm not using an ARM processor on my desktop. The difference between Google's kernel and the mainline one are relatively minor.

You might as well be saying that KDE and Gnome are different operating systems.

eIfish said @ 1:48pm GMT on 18th Aug
The primary issue is certainly not the architecture: there are many Linux distributions for ARM, and the Android Flash plugin won't work on any of them. A better comparison would be saying that Slackware and OPIE are different operating systems. Which to all intents and purposes they are. Sure, they both can run bash, but so can Windows 7.

If a different kernel ABI, different toolchain, different windowing system, and different C libraries don't make a different platform, what exactly does?

foobar said @ 7:58am GMT on 19th Aug
You can sideload a more traditional Linux system on a device running android, and you could even run an X session on top of it if you want.

But back to the original topic, the different processor architecture is going to be a much bigger suck of development time than the difference between Android's Linux and mainline.

eIfish said @ 12:26pm GMT on 19th Aug
I've always found cross-development to be pretty painless: if you're not writing a kernel or something low-level, all you do is set the target architecture, and away you go. If you're not writing any assembler, not doing bit-bashing, and not interacting directly with hardware, then the exact same code can run on any machine with the same platform.

I'd say the biggest drain in developing a browser plugin would be the differences between the browsers, and not the CPUs they running on.

Superchibisan said @ 5:57am GMT on 16th Aug
adobe has the largest product list i've ever seen

Chop-Logik said @ 1:06am GMT on 16th Aug
"death knell"

mechanical contrivance said @ 2:11am GMT on 16th Aug
grassy death knoll

cb361 said @ 8:44pm GMT on 15th Aug
A bit more detail at The Register. Including the fact that Adobe say they'll still invest in Air.

I think it was probably the rise of solid state usb memory sticks that killed off floppies.

ahPook said @ 9:13pm GMT on 15th Aug
No facts to support your USB drive theory and too long of a gap between the two. Denser external media with much greater capacity like ZIP disks were the first blow, then Recordable CDs and more and more PCs coming out with CD and then DVD players / recorders. Thumb drives came along well after all that other stuff had killed off floppys.

cb361 said @ 9:53pm GMT on 15th Aug
I guess I'm talking about the requirement that floppies satisfied for me - transferring small numbers of files from one computer to another. Writable CDs were okay for archiving, but they were slower and clunkier than floppies for transferring files. I stuck with floppies until usb came along.

We had a zip drive at the back of the storage cupboard, but I never used it and I don't know much about the medium. The opening paragraph on the wikipedia page doesn't make ZIP sound like the technology that blew floppies out of the water.

... it was never popular enough to replace the 3.5-inch floppy disk nor could ever match the storage size available on rewritable CDs and later rewritable DVDs. USB flash drives ultimately proved to be the better rewritable storage medium among the general public...

foobar said @ 10:00pm GMT on 15th Aug
There was a half decade or so where there just wasn't a viable sneakernet. Floppies were too small. ZIP drives were unreliable and you couldn't count on them being everywhere. Writable CDs were cumbersome and slow, and rewritables were expensive.

rangerx said @ 11:45pm GMT on 15th Aug
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stationwagon full of floppy disks."

Ironically, this was an Easter Egg in an early version of Photoshop.

rndmnmbr said @ 10:03pm GMT on 15th Aug
Companies tried a lot of things to replace floppies before CD writers were ubiquitous. Zip drives were the most popular of the lot, but SyQuest and LS120 were out there too. And hell, floppies were still required technology before computers could boot from USB and/or you could use partitioning tools from the Windows boot disc - neither of which came before Windows XP.

The real killer of floppies for small file transfers, though, was cheap networking and the proliferation of the internet. Sometimes the easiest way to transfer a file was to attach it to an email. Mind you, USB drives are a massive improvement over every other method.

eIfish said @ 12:53am GMT on 16th Aug
I've still got a laser-servo drive:

- Writes those annoying floppys you sometimes can't do without, like BIOS recovery disks, F6 disks
- Powered eject, like on a grey mac.
- Plugs into a PATA port, which can still be found on some motherboards, and is available on add-in PCI and PCIe cards
- Laser. Servo.

ahPook said @ 10:03pm GMT on 15th Aug
Yes that's why I said proprietal external disk media was the 'first blow' to floppys, because they had greater capacity. CD-Rs are still in use today but I can't remember the last time I saw a ZIP, JAZ, Magneto Optical, etc.

Didn't realise you were speaking 'personally' so my bad there. I was talking about the technology as a whole.

cb361 said @ 3:33pm GMT on 16th Aug
Each one of us takes our personal experience and extrapolates it to cover the universe.

sanepride said @ 9:24pm GMT on 15th Aug
Seems like it's giving Jobs way too much credit for killing Flash. If indeed Flash is dead or dying, good. It killed itself- an antiquated, annoying and inaccessible platform that has clearly been superseded by better technologies.

foobar said @ 9:57pm GMT on 15th Aug
Flash's only real claim was a near 100% installation base. Even one sizeable platform blocking it takes that away, and forces people to find other solutions for that platform.

Once they have those solutions, there's a strong motivation to just drop flash altogether.

sanepride said @ 10:28pm GMT on 15th Aug
Sure, but even platforms and technologies with 100% installation bases are eventually supplanted by something better. Someone above mentioned floppy disks and CD roms.

buckaroo50 said @ 10:49pm GMT on 15th Aug [Score:1 Underrated]
The problem is there isn't something better (and by that I mean consistent across platforms, not that it's good) available right now.

buckaroo50 said @ 10:51pm GMT on 15th Aug
I think the real reason their pulling flash is $$$. It probably takes a lot of work to maintain and they don't make any money off it, not for Jobb's reasons.

Cakkafracle said @ 12:25am GMT on 16th Aug
They're just saying he was right, not that his decision killed it.

sanepride said @ 1:48am GMT on 16th Aug
The article certainly implies an active role on his part.

Flash is far from the only aging technology which Jobs single handedly put out to pasture.

And I'm also hesitant to give him credit for killing the floppy. All limited-capacity storage mediums are eventually doomed just because of their limited storage capacity.

Cakkafracle said @ 5:17am GMT on 16th Aug
oh, sorry I didn't read the article, the title was enough to stoke my inner ciderboy

EPT said @ 6:26am GMT on 16th Aug
I wouldn't give him credit for killing the floppy drive at all. At the time, Apple computers were still very much a niche system, a blip on the radar. What killed floppies were floppies. File sizes outgrew them, and they corrupted at the drop of a hat.

spazm said @ 9:52pm GMT on 15th Aug [Score:1 Informative]
Flash killed pretty much itself, Jobs was merely noticing the problems it gave.

mwoody said @ 10:50pm GMT on 15th Aug
I thought they pulled support for Flash on Android a long-ass time ago?

foobar said @ 11:07pm GMT on 15th Aug [Score:1 Informative]
They stopped supporting it, but it's now gone from the Market.

Tetsugakusha said @ 1:00am GMT on 16th Aug
I've been doing a lot of research into Flash recently because I've picked up ActionScript in the past several months.

This whole "Flash is dead" or "Thank god, Flash is dead in X" is absurd. Like someone said in this thread, Flash is fucking everywhere where laptops and desktops are concerned. I can't give two shits if Flash isn't being used in smart phones or tablets. Sure, phones and tablets are the future (or you can say the present), but if I was to guess, and with a bit of research I've done, looks like laptops and desktop computers are in the massive fucking huge majority of use. Smart phones aren't being used to file taxes or do your work in, and tablets may get there eventually (I'm hoping the Microsoft Surface Pro pushes it to this level, which Apple will eventually also copy their design ironically and destroy them) but they are not there yet.

Chances are if you have a laptop or a desktop, you have Flash. With the amount of youth on YouTube alone and playing Flash games, the chances of it being propagated are still massive. I have to wonder at this whole Flash hate: What is the fucking alternative? Last time I checked we are not there with HTML5. We might not be there for a long time. Even a software engineer at YouTube said in 2010 via blog that HTML5 lacks in all the essential ways for them, and that Flash is still the superior form.

I'm not against creating new software and better, more efficient stuff, but I find this anti-Flash stuff to be irrational. And Steve Job's issues with Flash were ironic considering their supremely closed in stance towards tech. The real problem is that Flash didn't try hard enough to make their stuff better for Apple and that they didn't suck Apple dick.

incpenners said @ 1:49am GMT on 16th Aug

Cakkafracle said @ 5:21am GMT on 16th Aug
home movies of how you were conceived?

damnit said @ 10:24am GMT on 16th Aug
Non sequitur

Cakkafracle said @ 6:17pm GMT on 16th Aug
what, you DON'T think he was gestated in his fathers rectum?

huh!

damnit said @ 9:14pm GMT on 16th Aug
I would only direct such comments when he's being an ass... but that's just me.

Cakkafracle said @ 11:56pm GMT on 17th Aug
point taken. i concede that it was untoward.

mwoody said @ 2:13am GMT on 16th Aug [Score:2 Informative]
From an IT tech's perspective, I dislike it immensely. Recently, an update broke their auto-updater for many XP machines, including some of our customers. It would crash every time the damn thing tried to call home to see if there was an update, which was often. Luckily, our management tools let us disable the service remotely, but it still took time to see who was having the issue and turn it off on each one.

It took them a month to even acknowledge they had a problem, and another to provide a fix. A fix which they barely advertised, and poorly supported. I had to build a wrapper to check and report back error codes remotely because their crappy silent updaters would fail without any warning if we tried to push it while a browser window was open. 'Just all around a pain in the ass.

And on a related note, it annoys the hell out of me that each time I let it update, I have to explicitly tell it, once again, "no, you have to have my permission to proceed in the future." It defaults to silent every time.

To further my annoyance, several years back I worked on a personal project intensely for a while, but had to give it up because it turned out that once you got past a certain number of lines of code in one flash file, it would start randomly not saving your work in individual objects. I contacted them directly, posted on forums, etc. describing exactly how to reproduce the error, and it took them two years to acknowledge the problem and provide a fix... in a for-pay update.

Meanwhile, since it gave no warning when a piece of code wasn't saved, my project grew more and more unstable, with interlocking pieces of code being in different versions altogether without my knowledge. I had no choice but to abandon the thing altogether, literally thousands of hours in.

I've tried to come back to it a few times but, eh, it's just not a good platform. I won't argue that it's dead until a true successor rolls along - HTML5 doesn't have me convinced - but the only possible reason I could be said to be sorry to see Flash go is that AIR is a thousand times worse.

Cakkafracle said @ 2:36am GMT on 16th Aug
I'd like to point out that HTML5 isn't a *thing*, it's a specification for tagging structures. It's STILL a subset of XML, to build "HTML5 APPS" you need to rely heavily on javascript for any logic/interaction, and CSS/images for visuals.

Canvas and web storage and geolocation, etc etc, while awesome, are not 'HTML5'

Might as well say AJAX or Web2.0 for all it's worth.

that being said, it IS the future!

happiest_sadist said @ 4:37am GMT on 16th Aug [Score:1 Underrated]
Real Soon Now?

Tetsugakusha said @ 5:15am GMT on 16th Aug
That's interesting and I appreciate knowing about your experiences. I do know that there are huge issues with it.

Just out of curiosity, what type of programs where you creating?

I've been using AS3 and Flash for game development and to learn game design, so I may be on a different side of things.

EPT said @ 11:04am GMT on 16th Aug
Flash isn't dead, and isn't going to be dead soon, but it is dying a slow death as other cross-platform alternatives come online.

SicJake said @ 12:34am GMT on 17th Aug
The high point of flash I think was video, but that is now easily replaced by HTML5. The fact that youtube is all HTML5 is something.

HTML5 for games isn't quite there, but it's getting close.

http://playbiolab.com/
http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara/

The only other use of flash was annoying pop up animating advertisements:p and html5 does those too.

I'm sorta surprised Adobe is killing it now tho, I figured they'd wait until after they release a product that can do html5 like flash.

sherlock said @ 3:02am GMT on 17th Aug
No, flash will die relatively quickly because it's main use is for video. As mobile becomes more important, it will be dropped in favor of HTML5 to avoid having to support two code paths. It may take a long time to come up with a replacement for flash games due to JavaScript performance an lack of widespread adoption of a fast web graphics API such as WebGL, but this is not nearly as important as video.

kishi said @ 2:21am GMT on 16th Aug [Score:1 Insightful]
Well, if Steve Jobs is so smart, why is he dead?

zenviper said @ 3:58am GMT on 16th Aug
This.

sanepride said @ 4:27am GMT on 16th Aug
When he killed Flash it took him with it.

mechanical contrivance said @ 4:40am GMT on 16th Aug
Because he preferred homeopathy to surgery.

Adam said @ 5:19am GMT on 16th Aug
I couldn't give two shits about Flash as a technology. All I know or care about as an end user is that my devices can access the pages that I want to access. That means being able to get Flash on my Linux x86 systems. Gnash does work, after a fashion, but the prebuilt binaries for it on most major distros are old as dirt and it has a million dependencies which makes compiling from source a pain in the butt.

I'm annoyed that there won't be any updates for Android though. I'm not bothered about the battery draining and CPU hogging since I'm rarely doing anything that demands use of Flash for a long stretch of time. But it would've been nice if Flash on Android's more severe defects were ironed out.

foobar said @ 7:01am GMT on 16th Aug
They're likely to drop it altogether rather soon. Microsoft isn't allowing it on Surface outside Youtube and I wouldn't be surprised to see it booted or at least marginalized from Windows 8.

Tetsugakusha said @ 6:02am GMT on 17th Aug
Where did you hear that Microsoft isn't allowing it on the Surface outside of YouTube? I thought the Surface Pro will have full capability to watch and download whatever a person used. That means Flash capability.

ithaqua10 said @ 1:44pm GMT on 16th Aug
with all the invites for crappy games on facebook, flash unfortunately isn't going anywhere, but as some of the big game makers on facebook, are now porting their games to mobile, and linking them so they update where you are in a game, I hope flash and it's instability crash prone POS self dies sooner.

spazm said @ 1:55pm GMT on 16th Aug [Score:2 Funny]
We can only hope they'll update shockwave.