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

[NightFox]

In the mid-1980s the BBC and British Government ran The Domesday Project over 2 years, documenting life in late 20th century Britain. The whole multimedia project was stored on Laserdisc, compared to the original Domesday book written 900 years earlier. Going into the 21st, the government realised there was no longer any technology available to read the laserdiscs and the BBC ended up having to track down second hand ones. Meanwhile, the 900 year old original manuscript remains fully accessible.

I wonder how much internet content will effectively be lost forever when Flash dies?

 

[nt5672]

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.

Me, too. I have all kinds of problems with Safari. Links won't activate, pages won't load, etc.

 

[LV426]

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.

Apple did absolutely the right thing in removing the ability to install arbitrary plug-ins. Safari extensions are safer and put you as a user at less risk of poor or malicious coding. Isn't that the way things should be?

There are plenty of properly vetted Safari Extensions that can block ads. I would have a wretched browsing experience if I didn't use one.

 

[brinary001]

Why update the site when you can rake in cash as long as possible for the same old content?

🤑

Sure that might make sense for public, outward-facing sites, especially if they host ads. But our company continuing to use Flash for their internal sites makes no sense whatsoever lol

 

[Michael Scrip]

Blast from the past here (21 years ago!!):

Flash is Evil

Bet this guy is laughing.

Wow... I almost forgot about splash screens.

"Click here to enter site..."

I already came to your site... why is there an additional barrier?

 

[JosephAW]

Me, too. I have all kinds of problems with Safari. Links won't activate, pages won't load, etc.

I've never adopted Safari. Always been a FF users. Yeah I'm sure Safari is great now but why change?

 

[henryhbk]

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.

Well not really. They released a somewhat popular smartphone some years back that didn't support it so many of the websites not wanting to ignore the iOS population had to accommodate. If your site depended on flash, your site was probably painful anyway. Remember even ADOBE said they were killing it off. As for the 32-bit, yeah, some people had to rewrite, but to be honest for most devs (I am a dev) it doesn't require code changes. Most people don't do operations at the level of word length (most of us use higher level libraries, and as long as the library we use is 64-bit we are fine). And it's hardly a new thing (they said they were doing this years ago (and windows had a more painful transition with forking windows users into different OS SKUs, while apple at least had a crazy accommodation for both at once)). You are correct that little niche apps might not make the transition (annoyingly Apple's own QT player 7 being the poster child) but almost anybody running new applications is already on 64-bit. Literally the only thing I run routinely that isn't is QT player 7 (Grrrrr - No Apple I don't want to launch FCPX just to concatenate 2 movies together...).

 

[Swift]

What do most Apple users use instead?

Nothin'. HTML 5.
[automerge]1579810499[/automerge]

Chrome is fine, and certainly as pointed out above there are other options that aren't Safari __or__ Chrome, but here's a better way to determine if this is even a concern:

In Safari, go to Preferences >> Websites, and in the left column you'll see two sections, General and Plug-ins, under the latter, look for Adobe Flash Player, uncheck it - in the main panel you should see "Adobe Flash Player" is Off.

Now surf away! See if during your normal usage, anything is an issue, i.e., missing content, broken navigation, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, etc. If not, stick with Safari, and enjoy your new security improved web experience

I've used Brave, which is what Chrome would be if Google wasn't an advertising company that never wanted you to have any other app open. It's very fast.

 

[mi7chy]

Flash was relevant for viewing accelerated videos back in the Windows XP days but has been replaced with embedded YouTube and VP9 codec support which offer a better experience for desktop and mobile.

 

[SSDGUY]

In other news, I prefer Safari's interface and features, but dropped it in favor of Chrome due to Safari's incredibly slow performance.

 

[FaustsHausUK]

I've used Brave, which is what Chrome would be if Google wasn't an advertising company that never wanted you to have any other app open. It's very fast.

Safari is my main, Brave is my fallback. I love Brave so much.

 

[coolfactor]

Me, too. I have all kinds of problems with Safari. Links won't activate, pages won't load, etc.

Nonsense. Give us some examples.
[automerge]1579819512[/automerge]

In other news, I prefer Safari's interface and features, but dropped it in favor of Chrome due to Safari's incredibly slow performance.

Slow where? Give us some links.
[automerge]1579819737[/automerge]

And yet there are STILL an alarming number of sites out there written in Flash, including internal training sites hosted by my employer... We're a huge company too with 250,000+ employees

Like come on guys, you've had a decade now. No excuses.

Because your IT department consist of the same type of folk that think that "MAC" is a company that offers an expensive, proprietary platform that is not compatible with the rest of the world. 🤣

 

[Bill Av]

Nonsense. Give us some examples.
[automerge]1579819512[/automerge]


Slow where? Give us some links.
[automerge]1579819737[/automerge]


Because your IT department consist of the same type of folk that think that "MAC" is a company that offers an expensive, proprietary platform that is not compatible with the rest of the world. 🤣

It's true, but it can be fixed. I disabled the content blockers and auto-play settings on certain sites (**cough** AV Club **cough**) and then the sites started to function properly. I'm no expert, but my guess if that you block their ads, they block you or slow you down. Seems fair.

 

[Internet Enzyme]

I don't use safari because I can't watch Youtube in 4k on my 5k iMac. 🤷‍♂️

i personally bypass this by searching for videos on the youtube website in safari and then opening the actual video hyperlinks in this app called “iina”. It’s a good quicktime alternative that can playback streams of video

 

[Appleman3546]

I am surprised that this did not already happen when flash support disappeared for phones

 

[BGPL]

<HTML5>

I wonder what the malware developers will use once this is gone?

Absolute trash software and long overdue for the waste bin.

</HTML5>

 

[mrr]

I remember back in 1995 when a new startup company called FutureWave came to do a presentation at the LA Macintosh User Group to demo SPLASH a new animation program to create vector animations for web splash screens. Everyone, especially the creatives in the room, were blown away by the high quality easy-to-draw and easy-to use vector animation tools that could create high quality splash screen animations that were only 8k in size! We all walked out with a copy. The web just got interesting...

 

[macizcool]

I deleted ALL Adobe software and plugins about 5 years ago, and it has been a wonderful experience.

 

[fairuz]

My Fortune 500 employer still has a lot of mandatory training classes in Flash.

Same, and many sports streaming sites require it. I don't care, will use another browser for that occasional need.
[automerge]1579831529[/automerge]

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.

Compared to today's HTML5-based sites, Flash wasn't slow anywhere. It was like 100X faster than what we have now. This is what made me upset, people saying HTML5 alternatives were faster when they actually started slow as a dog and are only tolerable now due to hardware improvements. Like, Hangouts brings some modern PCs to their knees, so imagine running it on the PC you used to run AOL's Flash-based video chat upon. Also, nothing has replaced the Flash creativity tools.

It deserved its fate because it was proprietary, had many security flaws, and didn't transition well to mobile, but it was great for the time.
[automerge]1579832093[/automerge]

You aren't kidding. There's a ton of historical content that drove the internet to where it is today that will be lost if this occurs.

Some of it is nostalgia for me, but the historian in me feel like this is a bit of an unintentional book burning. Or perhaps, more akin to society losing a language?

We will still have the content, but it will be nigh unreadable for content that required server side support.

I have a multi-GB archive of flash content that doesn't need server side support that lives on an old Windows VM, but that's only a shadow of the flash content whose decedents are quite a bit of contemporary pop culture, and modern UI/UX design.

Virtualization is so advanced now that book burning isn't an issue. The issue is that nobody can create new games with the same ease they used to. Way more games are full of greed now.

 

[fairuz]

I've never adopted Safari. Always been a FF users. Yeah I'm sure Safari is great now but why change?

because they've crappified Firefox
"We care about your privacy" followed immediately with "check out these site recommendations based on your browsing"

On the other hand, Safari is going against ad blocking for no apparent reason.

 

[4jasontv]

Apple did absolutely the right thing in removing the ability to install arbitrary plug-ins. Safari extensions are safer and put you as a user at less risk of poor or malicious coding. Isn't that the way things should be?

There are plenty of properly vetted Safari Extensions that can block ads. I would have a wretched browsing experience if I didn't use one.

You also get issues like in Chrome, where they won't approve plug-ins that enable certain features on YouTube.

 

[thewhitehart]

So long, “Buffy’s Swearing Keyboard”! You won’t be forgotten.

 

[jonblatho]

Sure that might make sense for public, outward-facing sites, especially if they host ads. But our company continuing to use Flash for their internal sites makes no sense whatsoever lol

I was being facetious. In any case, a company will often have little interest in updating its training content, even if it’s a fully internal system, unless and until they have to, because otherwise it’s a waste of money and they can just require you to complete your required training on a supported device.

 

[Kevbasscat]

Remember there was an app on iOS that played flash? I think it was called Parrot?

There was one called 'Photon Flash Player." I used it for many years, and it worked well.

 

[Winni]

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.

https://www.habbo.com/community/article/26309/habbo-2020

Flash was an awesome tool for software development. Just look at games like Machinarium or Rebuild that were built using Flash technology.

The problem with Flash, however, was that it was mostly used for streaming crappy advertisement videos or other nonsense, so people started hating the technology - not because the technology itself was actually bad, but because it was so horribly abused for annoying purposes.

On a related note, I wonder why people still use Java and how Google could be so stupid to build an entire mobile operating system with a Java VM at its core that causes all those performance issues...