Adobe Officially Ends Flash Support, Recommends Uninstalling Immediately

[eRondeau]

A little perspective...

Flash was released by Macromedia 25 years ago, which was purchased by Adobe in 2005. At that time the web was in an uncomfortable transition from a text-based environment to a multimedia environment. The demand for rich content was strong except nobody knew quite how to do it. The eventual winner (HTML-5) was still years away, so for a decade Flash was about the only reliable way to get video & multimedia online. Flash dominated "Web 2.0" for years and professional Flash websites were stunningly impressive indeed. Its downfall is well-documented in Steve Jobs' open letter and elsewhere, but in the years before many young adults reading this were born -- Flash was ubiquitous online and in many ways was the backbone of the public internet.

 

[oneMadRssn]

Good riddance to Flash, RealPlayer, Divx, SilverLight, and all of the other crap codecs and plug-ins that made early multimedia such a catastrophe. Some of it may have been necessary, but in the end it seem to serve everyone except the end-user.

Hey man, respect your elders.

DivX is a huge part of h.264; without DivX, none of any modern video encoding would be possible.

RealVideo was a PITA, but so was everything back then. They were WAY ahead of their time, and pretty much paved the way for modern interactive video content.

Silverlight .. idk never used it.

Flash, well, flash. It basically made web apps before there was even such a thing. Hugely innovative, basically facilitated the interactive apps and web we know today. But Adobe kept it around for way too long. Should have been obsoleted 10 years ago when Jobs wrote that letter.

 

[blindpcguy]

such a good thing to see go. iv not installed flash in gosh 5 6 years if not longer dont miss it at all

 

[Macaholic868]

Steve Jobs called his shot. The rest is history.

 

[Ethosik]

For most things, yes. There's still no good alternative to Flash for games or other static interactive content. I know that despite the EoL, I'm going to be taking language courses and corporate training that require Flash for years to come.

HTML 5 games exist. Here is one: https://tetris.com/play-tetris

 

[hot-gril]

HTML 5 games exist. Here is one: https://tetris.com/play-tetris

They do, and of course you can write a game with anything, but it's hard. Flash made it much easier back then than it is today with modern tools, and there was a huge abundance of Flash games. Even middle/high school kids could make decent stuff with it.

 

[hot-gril]

A little perspective...

Flash was released by Macromedia 25 years ago, which was purchased by Adobe in 2005. At that time the web was in an uncomfortable transition from a text-based environment to a multimedia environment. The demand for rich content was strong except nobody knew quite how to do it. The eventual winner (HTML-5) was still years away, so for a decade Flash was about the only reliable way to get video & multimedia online. Flash dominated "Web 2.0" for years and professional Flash websites were stunningly impressive indeed. Its downfall is well-documented in Steve Jobs' open letter and elsewhere, but in the years before many young adults reading this were born -- Flash was ubiquitous online and in many ways was the backbone of the public internet.

I never found Flash to actually improve the quality of a website, even back then, except for certain things like games that really had to be done in it. Sure it maybe looked prettier but always lagged and/or didn't run as intended.

And there were tons of great Flash games. Huge quantity and lots of quality among it. As I said, there's no replacement for that – making a game is now harder than it used to be, a rare trend.

 

[Seoras]

Android next!

 

[hot-gril]

+12 years too late.

If you had a laptop, you knew Flash was crap. The most annoying intro animation when visiting a website was enough to make your CPU spike and make the cpu fan run at max speed (and your battery to drain).

Flash used, like, 1/1024 the CPU that many modern websites like Facebook and Twitter do with their heavy JS. Why, cause CPUs were that much slower back then. Not defending the use of Flash on sites, always disliked that too, but the web is still trash.

 

[4jasontv]

If only websites stopped using it. I stopped using Flash a while ago and yet I have visited so many websites (e.g. banks, car sites) that need Flash, so I just end up leaving.

If neopets can do it, any site can.

 

[amartinez1660]

Good riddance to Flash, RealPlayer, Divx, SilverLight, and all of the other crap codecs and plug-ins that made early multimedia such a catastrophe. Some of it may have been necessary, but in the end it seem to serve everyone except the end-user.

May I add, there was xvid too right? I was too young and clueless to understand what was going on though. And Silverlight? Good god, what the heck was up with that... my experience with anything related to it was installing things to install more things until it would calm down for two days, when it would prompt another install. It would buffer and los forever too. I don’t really know what it brought either.
Hated it, ran away.

 

[hot-gril]

Hey man, respect your elders.

DivX is a huge part of h.264; without DivX, none of any modern video encoding would be possible.

RealVideo was a PITA, but so was everything back then. They were WAY ahead of their time, and pretty much paved the way for modern interactive video content.

Silverlight .. idk never used it.

Flash, well, flash. It basically made web apps before there was even such a thing. Hugely innovative, basically facilitated the interactive apps and web we know today. But Adobe kept it around for way too long. Should have been obsoleted 10 years ago when Jobs wrote that letter.

The problem with all of them was the super invasive installation. It was never an on/off switch.

Also, I treated a lot of those (esp Xvid and DivX) as some peasant things I didn't have to bother with cause Mac OS X Tiger could play videos out of the box.

 

[JCCL]

Remember when people called Apple stupid for not supporting flash?

Now think about when people are going to call Apple stupid for removing the lightning port.

Why - most people are pushing for USB-C....the lightning port is one of the most hated things of an iPhone. I could do with only having wireless as I barely every use the lightning port since my iPhone X.....only for the occasional fast charge when I forgot charging earlier and need to leave in a hurry. But that's being solved with faster wireless charging. Not a fan of the propietary mag-safe charger either tough.

 

[amartinez1660]

As expensive as it's going to be for me and others, I hope Apple kills the lightning port soon. And yes, Apple is going to get criticized heavily for it, but I agree it will be for the better.

May I ask in reality, what’s so bad about the lightning port?
I have a Magic Trackpad, a full sized and a small sized Magic Keyboards, a Magic Mouse, an iPhone X, an iPad Air, AirPods Pro case, AirPods Max and the Apple TV remote all of which charge neatly through their lightning ports, the plug is tiny and the socket too. The “plugging it” is as frictionless as it can be, the tip is short and close to cylindrical, the pins are short.
I also don’t see how a USBC port would fit on some of those...

The only USBC connection for gadgets I have is for an iPad Pro and it’s by far the least friendly to plug, even that connector being about 5+ years newer than lightning, it is a whole lot more clunkier and prone to not sitting 100%. Happens very rarely, granted, but I have woken up with the iPad uncharged thinking the connection had sit properly (only a handful of times though).

I have a feeling that changing all those gadgets to USBC, not taking into account costs, will make things a lot more bulkier and cables handling a bit less friendlier.

I understand I’m in the big minority here, so I’m definitely not grasping the benefits of changing it all to USBC.

 

[mazz0]

The lightning port should have never existed to begin with. It was like the 2012 version of ADC.

Oooh, totally disagree. Remember this was before USB-C came out, so the alternative was micro-USB, which is a horrible plug. Non-reversible, and a pain in the arse to line up and insert smoothly.

 

[2010mini]

Removed that from my Macs years ago.

 

[mazz0]

For most things, yes. There's still no good alternative to Flash for games or other static interactive content. I know that despite the EoL, I'm going to be taking language courses and corporate training that require Flash for years to come.

I think that’s unlikely. Companies aren’t going to want to keep Flash installed when it’s no longer receiving security updates even if they can (which would take some fiddling anyway since the major browsers don’t support it), so in turn companies providing corporate training, language courses, etc will either switch away from Flash or lose almost all their customers (so one would assume the vast majority will choose the former). And there’s a perfectly good alternative for all those uses cases in HTML5.

 

[Populus]

May I ask in reality, what’s so bad about the lightning port?
I have a Magic Trackpad, a full sized and a small sized Magic Keyboards, a Magic Mouse, an iPhone X, an iPad Air, AirPods Pro case, AirPods Max and the Apple TV remote all of which charge neatly through their lightning ports, the plug is tiny and the socket too. The “plugging it” is as frictionless as it can be, the tip is short and close to cylindrical, the pins are short.
I also don’t see how a USBC port would fit on some of those...

The only USBC connection for gadgets I have is for an iPad Pro and it’s by far the least friendly to plug, even that connector being about 5+ years newer than lightning, it is a whole lot more clunkier and prone to not sitting 100%. Happens very rarely, granted, but I have woken up with the iPad uncharged thinking the connection had sit properly (only a handful of times though).

I have a feeling that changing all those gadgets to USBC, not taking into account costs, will make things a lot more bulkier and cables handling a bit less friendlier.

I understand I’m in the big minority here, so I’m definitely not grasping the benefits of changing it all to USBC.

I’m afraid they might be talking about the port-less iPhone, which is even a worse situation...

 

[hot-gril]

May I ask in reality, what’s so bad about the lightning port?

Paying $15 for a charging cable that always breaks.

 

[hot-gril]

I think that’s unlikely. Companies aren’t going to want to keep Flash installed when it’s no longer receiving security updates even if they can (which would take some fiddling anyway since the major browsers dint support it), so in turn companies providing corporate training, language courses, etc will either switch away from Flash or lose almost all their customers (so one would assume the vast majority will choose the former). And there’s a perfectly good alternative for all those uses cases in HTML5.

Corporate training in Flash will maybe go away because browsers will prevent using Flash altogether – but not until then.

Some language courses will probably still use Flash for a while. They just don't have the resources to do otherwise, and there's not much competition for less common languages. Like, I can basically only learn Armenian interactively in one place, and it's free and sort of a charity, and it uses Flash, the alternative being a PDF textbook.

There are also Flash-based online textbooks with the stupid "pay to turn in your homework" features that professors seemingly hold onto as class requirements despite all the reasons not to. Not even for obscure subjects, just calculus and stuff.

 

[amartinez1660]

Paying $15 for a charging cable that always breaks

Ah, true, I get that. Myself I have been lucky to have had lightning cables since they came out and have never had any of them break, even after several years of use.

But I have seen others, especially at the office, have a graveyard of peeled off cables or have that one single cable that’s grasping at straws to be functional and has to be properly tumbled so it has enough electric contact. Wonder what makes them break like this.

 

[4jasontv]

Oooh, totally disagree. Remember this was before USB-C came out, so the alternative was micro-USB, which is a horrible plug. Non-reversible, and a pain in the arse to line up and insert smoothly.

Lighting does have reversibility - but do you really consider it reliable? Every lightning cable I have clicks back and forth like a toddlers first light switch.

 

[hot-gril]

Ah, true, I get that. Myself I have been lucky to have had lightning cables since they came out and have never had any of them break, even after several years of use.

But I have seen others, especially at the office, have a graveyard of peeled off cables or have that one single cable that’s grasping at straws to be functional and has to be properly tumbled so it has enough electric contact. Wonder what makes them break like this.

The Apple-made ones seem to be deliberately weak. The certified third-party ones can be strong, but I've even had issues with those randomly not working later on due to DRM glitchiness. Concluded that the best option is those $1 bootleg cables that get blacklisted eventually but not quickly enough to cost a lot to replace.

The port itself is also prone to lint buildup that prevents charging, requiring periodic cleaning. And the cable heads can become degraded no matter how strong the cable is, since the pins are more exposed than with USB. Overall not that problematic but super annoying when it is a problem.

 

[Yebubbleman]

::salutes to Adobe Flash Player:: So long, Flash Player! It's been real!

 

[4jasontv]

Hey man, respect your elders.

DivX is a huge part of h.264; without DivX, none of any modern video encoding would be possible.

You make a good argument for 2 year software patents for original work and 1 year for derivative works which cite an existing or expired patent. Flash should have been free years before Adobe got there hands on it.