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

D.T. said:
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
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Wow they seriously need to up their pr game, is there contenr as out of date as their delivery platform
 
Basic75 said:
I'm surprised that it still worked, and it seems I'm not the only one.

Let me "guess", they are as crappy as the technology they are built with?
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why would the content of something be related to the technology that plays it..

As a Multimedia asset player and tool.flash was great... well so long as it was built well.

But as a Web based player is was full of security holes and had to die.
 
Onelifenofear said:
In some ways this is a regression..

While it was always rubbish as a modern web site tool as a interactive multimedia element tool there are a lot of things that cannot replace it ( well unless anyone else knows any better )

I could stream FLV videos ( Container for H264 Sorenson spark(!) or VP6 codecs )
you could layer Videos with Alpha channels and buttons and text or graphics over the top and scale it all.
pre load and play out of time - reverse jump to a specific frame and code jumps to markers and control it all with simple code.

Also can containerise all this as an Executable etc.

.swf was a fantastic container of things and they screwed it up but giving it too much access and filling it full of security holes.

Ah multi loading .swfs on .swfs was fantastic.

What else can do this?

Animator seems to be a Hamstrung version of Flash and Abode Director is no more...

https://tumult.com/hype is the nearest I have see for a HTML5 creation of this sort of stuff but it's odd to use

Anyways...even Habbo has gone unity.Perhaps that is a option. Has a great timeline will have to have to see what features it can replicate.
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Sounds like some real legacy stuff.
 
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.
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That only works if you have actually downloaded flash. I have not for years and haven’t noticed anything missing from web. Only a few sites still use it. Of greater concern is if you should be going to those sites at all as they are security risks, outdated, and who know what else?
 
thejadedmonkey said:
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.
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Nothing to do with this... it had massive security holes and memory leaks. It sucked on windows too. It just got over developed by countless coders who were piling rubbish on rubbish. There was an article on Flashkit(!) along time ago about it.
 
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A couple of days ago I woke up my computer, and in the middle of the screen was a big prompt to update Flash.

I stared at it for a couple of minutes, and then found the uninstaller.
 
MauiPa said:
That only works if you have actually downloaded flash. I have not for years and haven’t noticed anything missing from web. Only a few sites still use it. Of greater concern is if you should be going to those sites at all as they are security risks, outdated, and who know what else?
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They are mostly news media sites; stuff such as BBC, and so on.

Apart from that, I rarely watch anything on video and am not au fait with what is normal for visual media nowadays.
 
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.
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It does not work that way. Someone has to do it first, then everyone else can say: “Given that XXX has dropped support, we are also doing that.” It is rare that there is agreement to do anything upfront.

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.
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Yup and it took years for Windows-based laptops to drop floppies, but much less time for them to lose their optical drives. Someone needs to be first. Apple‘s move to all USB on the iMac is what finally pushed MicroSoft to get USB working on Windows.

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 cIarrying 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".
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Legacy support of 32-bit applications is a great example. Apple announced years ago that some future version of the OS would drop support for them. Then it started showing users which application had not been updated. It has been years in coming and provides real benefits. You seem not to understand that it requires a great deal of work to continue supporting 32-bit applications. Apple and macOS users are better off with those resources being spent somewhere else.

But Apple only sells a couple of apps of its own (Final Cut Pro X and Logic Pro X).
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Aside from the fact that the applications Apple sells are much more sophisticated than many from others (also including: Motion and Compressor), Apple had to port all the rest of its applications - everything else on the OS including: iWork (Keynote, Numbers, and Pages), iLife (GarageBand and Photos).


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.
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Problem is that if an application is so old that it takes significant effort to ensure it can be compiled to be 64-bit safe it means that it has not really been maintained anyway and will eventually die because other APIs it needs will change, but with no way for users to know when that will happen. Supporting 64-bit compilation is not hard with modern development tools.

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.
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The biggest problem with your argument is it is the same for every technology Apple wants to adopt. ”We cannot move drop Carbon support, because small developers cannot write Cocoa apps.” “We need to support Rosetta because developers cannot compile for intel.” A lot of the problems users experience on Windows systems comes from Microsoft‘s sort-of support for very old APIs and drivers. That is they take a long time to deprecate them, but stop throughly testing them as fewer and fewer applications (and no Microsoft applications) use them.

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.
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No, Flash is finally going away because the iPhone never supported it and Android did only for a short time. That meant that a very large percentage of potential users could not access sites that required it, forcing them to upgrade. That is the only reason that HTML 5 got enough oxygen to become solid enough to enable its use instead of Flash.
 
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Everyone is going on an on about the pages they surf. Not the issue. The issue is perfectly working servers and devices that companies have zero intention of updating to work without java/flash/activex. They will gladly sell you a new server. What you don't need it? Too bad. It's the ultimate line in the sand for small business and home hobbyists.

HP has a whole line of servers "Edgeline" that are current products and they require java or activex to manage. The rest of product lines were moved to HTML5 but they have custom firmware. Been asking for months hey why do they not have HTML5. Not even on their radar.....
 
rpmurray said:
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:
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Nothing is free and the sites rely on the ads to make money.

If people are going to use ad blockers, they should at least donate to the sites that they use most.
 
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RIP Flash. A pretty incredible app for its time that allowed vector animation and interactivity and generated a generation of exciting and creative websites.
 
Flash was always rubbish on mobile, but I am sorry for the many neat flash games I played from circa 2008-2012 or so...

Adult Swim had some cool games for example, as did Newgrounds though I think the latter have developed a player for the older stuff.
 
Bandaman said:
Google is doing this with Chrome.
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Finally. When Apple first refused to support it on iOS, Google pointedly supported it as a form of one-upmanship. Point scoring was more important than security and energy efficiency.
thejadedmonkey said:
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.
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This is a list of reported security vulnerabilities for Adobe Flash dating as far back as 2008: https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerab...&sha=ac2a72f983d2b7488412b74b424af6da7078c21a

Only Adobe were in a position to resolve those issues. If you were a responsible platform holder, would you want your users' security at the mercy of a single player whose priorities are not aligned with your own? And that's to say nothing of the Flash player being a huge resource hog. When device batteries drain too fast, normal users would blame Apple - not Adobe - for the problem.

Apple, unlike Adobe, _did_ work with the industry. Apple forked KHTML to create the Webkit browser engine that powers Safari and then open sourced it. Webkit became the underpinning for many browsers, and was eventually forked (as Blink) by the Chromium project that powers an increasingly large number of browsers including Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi.

They've contributed tremendously to the web standards that have allowed _all_ browsers to offer features that previously required Flash. Things like the Canvas API and CSS features like transformations, animation and transitions started out as attempts to offer web-native capabilities. Their rejection of Flash eventually lead others to do the same, and we've gotten massive improvements to ECMAScript and new technologies like WebAssembly to show for it. They took all the flack for making a hard call, and now _all_ web browsers are significantly more capable.

There are many criticisms of Apple, but taking Adobe's side in this whole **** show is... wild.
 
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