Adobe held back everyone from the web to desktops. I created the Arora web browser and countless times had 3rd party people put it on embedded devices only to turn around and ask me how to get the flash plugin working. I had no answer but to send them to Adobe and pray that they were using x86 and Adobe would be even interested in helping them and that the fee for helping wouldn't bankrupt the company.
Flash helped keep all of us on x86 more than people realize. The arm port was always a second class could you even imagine ppc or mips? And the idea of some other more radical arch? Forget it, Adobe would laugh at you for even asking. How many Linux users choose 32bit x86 (this for the OS that seems to work on everything!) for years because they knew that flash would work?
When I heard that news about its death I celebrated. I drank a beer. I would have sung a song if I was any good. While we knew it was coming having it actually set in stone was nice. The era of the web requiring flash is coming to an end and we can start to move onto interesting solutions and interesting hardware knowing that we wont have to grovel to one company hoping they will pity us and only charge us millions for a product that kills our batteries and pegs our cpu.
Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion and not of my employer.
I really hope you are not suggesting that since you apparently don't enjoy Flash therefore no one else could possibly enjoy Flash?
Edit: always use the right tool for the job, of course.
It has its uses.
I can't remember the last time Flash killed my browser or OS. It's been at least 5 years, probably more.
Flash was designed to compensate for the deficiencies of the web. That's great. Now that web technologies are finally catching up, Flash is no longer as necessary as it once was. That's great.
So now we find ourselves in a transitionary period where HTML5 and friends are able to replace Flash in almost all situations. That's great. And for those remaining use cases where only Flash will do, well, it's available on all major desktop platforms. That's great. If you want to do something on mobile that HTML5 and friends don't support but Flash does, well, you're SOL thanks mostly to Steve. That's not so great. That's less innovative apps due to functionality denied.
So where does this leave us? Flash is a mature technology that has served its purpose well over the years, and has started to gradually fade into the twilight as open protocols fill the same gaps it was designed to fill. Go ahead and use HTML5 if it works for you; that's what it's designed for. But why all the hating on Flash?
What I really notice is that all of these web technologies designed to improve the user experience chew through multiple orders of magnitude more CPU than a native app. 2-4x more I could understand. Hell, I'd even settle for 10x, but when it's going over 100x for poster-child quality HTML5 or Flash sites (which are not by any means impressive compared to a native app), something's definitely wrong.
And it runs fine on my 64-bit Linux box. Crashes are incredibly infrequent compared to what is generally reported on threads like this--I don't even remember when it happened last. Probably sometime in the last year.
It's silly to assume that someone on HN would be unaware of the players in the mobile marketplace.
Adobe themselves said that Apple's move to block them proved to be the clincher: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-o...
Quote: "This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops."
So you end up making a rich "HTML 5" version for tablet and smartphones.
Why, then, would you bother with Flash for the PC? If you have a modern simile for Tablets, Flash is just completely redundant.
Flash is a sign of a derelict site. It would be hard to justify its use for greenfield development.
If you have a modern simile for Tablets,
Flash is just completely redundant
Flash is not redundant if it allows you to escape the browser's limits. Here, I'll give you an example -- try doing chat-roulette without Flash.
http://devworks.thinkdigit.com/Internet/Native-webcam-suppor...
Pretty soon a 'chatroulette' type app without Flash will be a reality. Plus, it will work with tablets and phones, something Flash soon won't be doing.
How does Flash jive with responsive web design techniques, meant to provide one flexible interface for desktop and mobile form factors?
Answer: It doesn't.
Flash is the only piece of software that has consistently taken down my computers at home and work (windows and linux). I'm jumping for joy to see it go.
Edit: I started my web career ~12 years ago using Flash .. it was magic but the browser has finally caught up .. let it die with dignity.
I don't think much more needs to be said. Adobe has thrown in the towel themselves regarding Flash on mobile devices, as they couldn't manage to develop a solid experience. How can you argue maturity in this day and age while ignoring that Flash is dead in a mobile environment? (edit: until RIM saves it!)
So I downloaded the new Flash 11 and installed it, the 64 bit version so I can now use 64 bit IE. I have IE 9 set to not accept third party cookies. In Flash, I don't want cookies set either so I go to the global settings and make sure no sites can save anything on my computer. Now Flash doesn't work at all. No where. It should work on some sites that don't require cookies but it won't even load. I'm not sure why this is but the only solution I've found is to completely uninstall Flash, restart my computer and then reinstall it and allow every site to store Flash cookies on my computer. I've replicated the issue with Firefox and Chrome.
Strangely enough Youtube worked during these issues - because of HTML 5.
Also, there's a bug in Flash 11 in Windows 7 where for some reason the taskbar doesn't get hidden when you full screen a flash video.
Flash could've been useful, but Adobe's coders are the worst in the business. All they had to do was make it small, efficient and easy to use. Essentially they did the exact opposite and only had a business model because there were no competitors. In addition, they have security issues and all these random strange issues which should never happen.
I liken Flash to Blackberry and how RIM is allowing Android apps on it's service. It has to do that to stay relevant because no one is going to use it otherwise. Adobe Flash would be dead within 5 years if they didn't switch their tools to work with HTML 5.
Now the question is, why would developers create two versions of the videos - one for Flash and one for mobile HTML5? Why wouldn't they just create an HTML5 video that plays on both mobile and standard browsers?
The best use for these CPU hungry, crash-happy little rectangles that represent portals into some pocket Universe, disjoint and separate from the web surrounding and encompassing it, is for audio and video. As that use becomes redundant Flash will have very little to justify its existence.