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Adobe Flash is Officially Dead After 25 Years With Content Blocked Starting Today
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AMEN to that!!! Even when it comes to software and firmware. Java is so slow and buggy.
True, and many (all?) of those decisions were criticized at the time.
In retrospect, it is interesting how we kind of take for granted some of those decisions now - I am thinking of the older decisions (floppy drive, optical drive).
Not, however, the recent decisions, like the headphone jack & charger decisions - those are too recent to know how they will play out.
Flash was just a tool, and if you used it for things it was good for, there were no problems. Unfortunately, Flash cultists took it to weird extremes - I've seen sites built as a single SWF (meaning one giant download, with no deep linking, poor accessibility, and a huge resource footprint). I've seen people build things that were actually easier and lighter in pure HTML/CSS, such as navigation bars. I've seen many fugly video players.
I'm glad Apple embraced the open web. CSS and JavaScript are in an amazing place right now thanks to Apple and others (eventually including Adobe) contributing better technology to web standards, and literally anyone can create great work without paying a license for an Adobe app to do so.
I'm glad Apple embraced the open web. CSS and JavaScript are in an amazing place right now thanks to Apple and others (eventually including Adobe) contributing better technology to web standards, and literally anyone can create great work without paying a license for an Adobe app to do so.
Yep! Same thing Apple always has to go through with being first to take the risk. People love to trash Apple then they start seeing other companies doing it. Kinda like how Apple haters trashed them for removing the headphone jack from the iPhone, then Samsung jumped on the hate wagon with multiple ads mocking Apple about it. Then the following year Samsung introduces a new Galaxy phone with the headphone jack gone and NOBODY trashes Samsung over it. It's a pity that people still trash Apple about it. I applaud Apple for taking risks that other companies are too cowardly to do....until Apple does it.
I'm still mixed about this. Yes Adobe did a poor job of... pretty much everything related to Flash after it bought Macromedia. But we also lost a couple things. In 1999, kids could easily use Macromedia Flash to compose vector graphics and animate them into tiny-filesize, resolution-independent motion graphics and games. Millions of these things were created, some became parts of websites, some became viral sensations, many were ads and many were bad. But animating was easy, cheap, accessible to everyone. Jobs putting flash in the crosshairs was definitely the first major swing of the axe that made everyone realize there was no future in it & little reason to do more work in it, & it bled out slowly, but without a comparable replacement. Adobe still maintains the old program as "Animate", but at this point, if you want to actually distribute animated vector graphics, you've got to practically devote your life to becoming a programmer, or share rasterized video files of degraded quality and enormous file size. Animated SVG was supposed to take over, but with only a shakey format, & no dedicated application to it, I don't even care enough to look up whatever happened to that mess.
I think what bothers me is is a long-term trend of simple creativity tools being outmoded and replaced by prohibitively sophisticated tools. It's turned the internet from a billion chaotic, ugly DIY web pages w/ a trillion messy ideas, where people experimented and tried things and created a flood of unpredictable, exciting content, to everyone shoehorned into a uniform facebook/insta page where you're allowed to feature certain kinds of output that conform to their miserable pile of rules and requirements, ensuring everyone is limited to a couple narrow paths.
The spirit of the internet seems truly dead.
I think what bothers me is is a long-term trend of simple creativity tools being outmoded and replaced by prohibitively sophisticated tools. It's turned the internet from a billion chaotic, ugly DIY web pages w/ a trillion messy ideas, where people experimented and tried things and created a flood of unpredictable, exciting content, to everyone shoehorned into a uniform facebook/insta page where you're allowed to feature certain kinds of output that conform to their miserable pile of rules and requirements, ensuring everyone is limited to a couple narrow paths.
The spirit of the internet seems truly dead.
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But now where can I play my topical games like Saddam Extreme B****slap, The Bill Cosby Game, and the McCain Maze?
Well that answers my question of, "is someone going to make a Flash emulator." That seems like the best compromise if it'll work reliably.
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Almost nobody uses Java on PCs anymore. On servers and Android phones, it's very alive and will not go away.
One exception is Minecraft. Back in high school, I used to get into arguments about how it should've been done in C++ or something, and people kept saying arrogantly, "Java can run anywhere, even on my toaster." I said, there's a C++ compiler for every platform that has a Java runtime (plus a small graphics-related part of the game's code is non-Java). Well, turns out Java can't run on the Xbox360 or many other game consoles, so Mojang DID rewrite the entire game in C++ for them, calling that one "Bedrock edition." Now there are two very similar but technically separate versions of the game.
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Yep. I always keep some non-updated stuff around just in case. They also underestimate how many computers there are whose owners never update anything.
I still don't understand how Flash managed to stay so buggy for so long, with twice weekly fixes for buffer overruns and so on, and with such poor performance. Adobe could hire any number of developers to systematically go over and fix or rewrite what for a while their crown jewel, "the most installed piece of software in the world".
Another thing, how is Adobe going to prevent people from viewing old Flash sites with an old copy of Chrome or such?
Another thing, how is Adobe going to prevent people from viewing old Flash sites with an old copy of Chrome or such?
It was a huge mistake of us regulators allowing adobe to buy macromedia. The world would be a different place right now. Macromedia was my suite of graphic design tools, Flash thought me how to animate, that jumpstarted me into editing things and last year I was at Obama's list of picked features.
Sadly, the ineptitude of some in leadership across the enterprise will want to pretend as if this was some big surprise, while continuing to have their end-users and organization left vulnerable and held hostage with out of date and often unsupported software. Some of these groups even have ‘security departments within IT’. I especially feel for those in healthcare.
Ya..... what a shame... I liked those web based games. People will be caught up in. Developers will use the old saying as well "We can't update due to our ancient 20 year old OS/hardware"
I ran into a website late last week that REQUIRES Flash. If you aren't running Flash, you ain't getting 'stuff'.
I was like, 'Update much'? Um, need to get a grip on that slippery thing called 'reality'? Um, maybe just pull all the Flash crap out, and put out the website without it?
Um...
*KNOCK* *KNOCK *KNOCK* ANYONE IN THERE? HELLO!!!
I was like, 'Update much'? Um, need to get a grip on that slippery thing called 'reality'? Um, maybe just pull all the Flash crap out, and put out the website without it?
Um...
*KNOCK* *KNOCK *KNOCK* ANYONE IN THERE? HELLO!!!
I was always amazed at the people that were STILL using COBOL, and even RPG, and are still trying to get 'the universities best and brightest'. For COBOL? For RPG? For archaic Sanskrit tablets found in a hole in the middle of nowhere? That was one of the biggest bitches I had with the EE/CE program at the Uni that I was at. Let me get this straight, you think by requiring your graduates to be fluent in the ancient incantations of once thriving and now dead language (religion), they are going to be 'employable'? WHERE? WHEN? Who invented time travel so they can exploit their 'education' in runes, reading bones, and ancient tongues?
They eventually dropped RPG, and COBOL was finally given a quick, and somewhat embarrassing funeral from the syllabus... Yikes...
Java in the browser is dead, but there’s still Java programs you can download from the web and run.
A lot of them include their own JRE within an app bundle so few people would even realize they’re running Java.
Plus a lot of servers are still running Java.