Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Apple Likely to Drop Adobe Flash Support in Next Version of Safari

Scepticalscribe said:
Fascinating to read sections on your own computer that you never knew were there, or even existed.

Anyway, I followed your clear, detailed instructions (and I like clear and umambiguous and detailed instructions ) and, to my considerable surprise, the Adobe Flash Player box was already unchecked.
Click to expand...

Oh excellent, so you've been doing what I suggested! Honestly, I might stumble on a site that requires Flash once every 3-4 months, and that's oddly enough, usually some local restaurant that hasn't updated their website in 10 years :D
 
  • Like
Reactions: Scepticalscribe
Perhaps we should have a funeral for all the wonderful simple games that have now departed this internet. It makes me want to set up an old computer for playing them again. Not that I would want it running on my network.
 
Shows how antiquated webpage developers are. No wonder we have so many problems with web browsers infecting our systems. The problem not on this end, squarely on the web developers. Nice to see Apple flexing some muscle to finish off applications like Adobe Flash.
 
Scepticalscribe said:
What do most Apple users use instead?
Click to expand...

...it's not what Apple users use its what is out there on websites. Most of that has gone now as virtually no mobile devices have ever supported it (...apart from a brief period when there was a Flash plug-in for Android - between security issues and the fact that a lot of Flash code was unusable on mobile screens, it didn't last long).

Thing is, back in the 00s, Javascript was horribly browser-dependent, CSS was half-baked (and most browser implementations were quarter-baked) and video/audio was... well, anybody here remember RealVideo? Flash was the best least worst solution for online video and rich internet content/interactivity, or even if you wanted a really professional-looking online document. The Flash authoring tools made it easy to create vector animation that would have been a lot of work in Java, let alone Javascript (assuming you could find a browser that actually supported SVG).

In that era I bought a "CSS Cookbook" from the normally reputable O'Reilly - even that recommended Flash as the only way of getting certain headline text effects short of resorting to bitmaps...

HTML5, CSS and Javascript have come a long way since then - and today's browser incompatibilities are nothing, nothing compared to the mess in the past (esp. now Internet Explorer is confined to a few corporate ghettos). There's no excuse for anything created from scratch in the last 5-10 years and/or is still a going concern to need Flash - but there's a lot of old stuff that will now be lost to posterity.

YaBe said:
"Flash is Dead" Steve Jobs.
Click to expand...

Let's translate that from "he would say that, wouldn't he" to reality:

The early iPhone and iPad didn't have the grunt to run Flash, plus a lot of "legacy" Flash apps/websites were unusable on a mobile screen: either the controls were too small and fiddly or sometimes because apps had implemented their own code for things like drag/drop in a way that simply didn't work on a touchscreen...

When Flash briefly appeared on Android, I had a bunch of sites that used Flash for educational applets etc. so I went into Best Buy* and tried them out on some Android devices - flat bust: some of them sort-of ran but would need a major UI re-think to be usable on a touchscreen. Android lost Flash support after a year or so and I suspect that was largely because it just didn't solve the problem of running Flash on mobile.

(* Best Buy appeared briefly in the UK around then - and lasted about as long as Flash for Android, but I don't think the two are connected...)
 
  • Like
  • Love
Reactions: iamPro, Marekul, parkds and 6 others
It would be finished by the end of the year anyway, deactivated or not installable, on all browsers.
 
I have found a year or so ago I switched from only using safari to only using chrome on my macbook pro. For some reason safari was causing serious performance issues while it was running, especially as I recall while playing youtube content so I just gave up on it. That combined with my mail app randomly popping up on the screen for no reason. Only happens when I use gmail, if I get rid of gmail and use icloud account instead the mail app works properly...usually while I am in full screen mode so it takes up half the display and I can't figure out how to get rid of it easily when it does. I feel like Apples software is becoming so crappy that no one will actually care what they do with safari (either that or I am the only one who is having these strange problems)
 
I'm ditching Safari. Not because of Flash but because Apple has removed support for the Ad and tracking blocking extensions I rely on. Apple says it's all about security but they're now allowing me to be spammed with ads and tracked, but hey, at least the browser is secure even if I no longer am. :rolleyes:
 
  • Sad
Reactions: LV426
Several years ago I removed this stuff from my computer because it was causing problems. Today I keep seeing warnings that my flash needs to be updated. Hahahaha.
I don't need adware on my computer. And my check-box is unchecked - has been that way.
 
Wow I thought Safari dropped support for it a long time ago. I don't use the browser, but I'm surprised it still supports it.
 
kingtj said:
Like a lot of people, I'm glad Flash is finally seeing its dying days. But these "push backs" to force a type of code to get phased out only work well when the entire industry is in agreement. Apple has always been one to embrace changes that involve "out with the old, and in with the new" before most of the industry. They were the first to remove the 3.5" floppy drive, and among the first to remove the optical CD/DVD drive, for example.

Problem I see now is, Apple makes these grand plans to phase out older software technologies but the third party developers are the ones left carrying the load of re-writing everything they've done, in order to comply. It's pretty easy to just rip out all 32-bit application support from the new OS X and call it "progress". But Apple only sells a couple of apps of its own (Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X). All the small devs who wrote for OS X because they loved the platform but barely made enough money to justify the effort are much more put upon to rewrite what they did. And larger developers have to look at the cost/benefit ratio of doing a rewrite. In at least some cases, they're going to decide it's the straw that broke the camel's back for them, and just migrate to Windows only.

Flash is finally going away as much because Windows users have mature HTML5 compatible browsers and would rather not run clunky plug-ins as because Apple dictated it sucked and they wanted it banished.
Click to expand...
The most ironic part is that Flash didn't suck on Windows. It did suck on OS X because... Apple wouldn't open up the APIs that Adobe needed to make it work well. Then, Apple opens up the APIs, and a few months later proclaims that Flash sucks.

If Apple had worked with the industry instead of against it, we would probably still have Flash, and so many games and apps would still work.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back