Adobe to end new Android Flash installs on August 15 - Page 2

Very slowly though.

Indeed. Steve saw what was invisible but blindingly obvious when once he saw it, and made products that helped you see it too.


Wait, Tallest Skil agreeing with something called "5"? Say it ain't so.

Thanks One day I swear I'll put my "talent" to good use.

You see, the **** up part is that most Flash websites were for desktop with a mouse. Even if your 3" or 4" smartphone could run Flash, you would never realistically be able to navigate a Flash website or even game. Because most of Flash from ground up is designed for rollovers and keyboard entry (like for button mashing in games like at Kongregate). Steve or someone at Apple did mention this. So even if you could run Flash, the website was still a crappy experience. In other words, double fail.

Well, everything is H.264 mp4/"m4v" anyway, except for Google who apparently is not willing to spend proper money on buying proper H.264 encoders (most YouTube in HTML5 is ,"sorry, video not available") on desktop ... strangely on iOS it does find the videos.

Quicktime for web? Don't need it, I deleted the plugin a few months ago and everything is peachy, except for YouTube and let's face it, naughty websites. Quicktime on Mac is still useful because it's the de facto thing for handling different codecs, which is important in the multimedia stuff. Like Animation, ProRes, Red, etc.

That was a quote from last year. Here's what their stance is now:

http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmedia/2012/06/impact-on-android-video-delivery/

"Does this mean Adobe is not committed to video on mobile devices? Absolutely not. We continue to innovate and solve mobile video fragmentation challenges. Specifically, on Android, we solve this with Adobe AIR, with high-end video features such as Adobe Access DRM.

We made the decision to discontinue support for Android mobile browser because of two reasons: 1) Premium experiences on mobile devices are typically being delivered through apps and 2) Mobile websites mostly rely on HTML5 based video delivery."

http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2012/06/flash-player-and-android-update.html

"The Flash Player browser plugin integrates tightly with a device’s browser and multimedia subsystems (in ways that typical apps do not), and this necessitates integration by our device ecosystem partners. To ensure that the Flash Player provides the best possible experience for users, our partner program requires certification of each Flash Player implementation. Certification includes extensive testing to ensure web content works as expected, and that the Flash Player provides a good user experience. Certified devices typically include the Flash Player pre-loaded at the factory or as part of a system update."

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplatform/whitepapers/roadmap.html

"For the past decade, Flash Player and, more recently, Adobe AIR have played a vital role on the web by providing consistent platforms for deploying rich, expressive content across browsers, desktops, and devices. Beginning as a platform for enabling animation, the Flash runtimes have evolved into a complete multimedia platform, enabling experiences that were otherwise not possible or feasible on the web.

Looking forward, Adobe believes that Flash is particularly suited for addressing the gaming and premium video markets, and will focus its development efforts in those areas. At the same time, Adobe will make architectural and language changes to the runtimes in order to ensure that the Flash runtimes are well placed to enable the richest experiences on the web and across mobile devices for another decade.

With the growth of competition in the browser market, browser vendors are increasingly innovating and providing functionality that makes it possible to deploy rich motion graphics directly via browser technologies, a role once served primarily by Flash Player. Increasingly, rich motion graphics will be deployed directly via the browser using HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and other modern web technologies. While the primary role of Flash Player as an engine for innovation on the web remains the same, what it is used for will change."

When the whole thing kicked off with Apple and Adobe, Apple stopped using Flash at a point where web video was pretty much entirely Flash-based. This left a gaping whole in web content for iOS users but nobody else really had anything competitive anyway so no big deal. HTML5 hadn't taken off so it's not as if Adobe had the option of dropping Flash because all that would have achieved is removing the only option for delivering rich content online.

As time went on, they rightly stuck to making sure publishers had the option to deliver rich content while the web standards groups slowly churned through their specs to the point that in 2011, HTML5 deployment for rich content was a reality.

Adobe and Apple were both right. There wasn't an alternative to Flash to allow Adobe to drop it and Flash wasn't suitable for mobile devices. Adobe tried to improve what they had control over - Flash, Apple tried to improve what they had control over - Webkit.

In the end, they both come out on top. Adobe no longer has to deal with the arduous certification process for every Android device, security updates, being blamed for sluggish performance and security vulnerabilities. Apple (and indeed every mobile device manufacturer) no longer has to be concerned about their users missing out on rich content. There's no sense in turning this into a winner/loser scenario when they both stand to gain from the changes and each of their arguments were fully justified.

Uh huh. And Japan and Germany came out on top of WWII, as well. The Allies didn't win.

Not sure how AIR and Adobe DRM solves anything on Android... Except for packaging AIR into Android apps? And who uses Adobe DRM, let alone purchases anything much on Android? Maybe I'm missing something. If Adobe is so committed, why can't I easily view Flash videos from any website on any Android device?

Right, for all their hue and cry, Adobe failed for five years. Why can't Flash mobile deliver "premium experiences"? Why do mobile websites now use HTML5? Even so, a heck of a lot of desktop websites still need Flash video, heck, honestly, porn on mobile devices is probably Flash's best hope, and Adobe failed.

Right, and how many user-friendly, operating Certified devices are out there, I wonder? Also, has Flash Abuse changed, thanks to Adobe, for the mobile space? Not sure.

Yes and No. In say 2000-2006 there was some compelling Flash content and ideas, but AIR never really made it to the desktop, and Adobe Media Player and AIR did fade out of favour because Windows apps are so rampant. As for the web, well, the rest is history. Flash is a compelling multimedia platform for the ~desktop~ web. Not for handheld devices or tablets. It just ~never~ made the transition.

Highly dubious. The most relevant gaming market is mobile and tablet, or console at best. No Flash here. "Premium video market"? I don't even know what that means. Nobody will do "premium video" over 3G or 4G. For WiFi, well, mobile, tablet and PC can do everything Flash can do and more. So, not sure what Adobe is trying to do here.

Adobe's clearly grasping at straws. They're saying, well, HTML5, CSS3, JS and other modern technologies are where the action's at. And we're not in the game at all. But, we're cheering in the stands, yeah?" ..."And what it is used for will change"... What exactly is Flash now, in 2012, supposed to change to? At the end of the year can I buy Flash CS6.5 and it automatically creates standard-compliant, HTML5, CSS3, JS and non-JS websites? It's looking very grim for Flash. No site created now would even dream of being done in Flash. Videos, sure. But then everyone will be trying to do video for mobile from this point onwards, so in that case why the heck would you make Flash videos? Encode once, play everywhere.

That's true for video, which Flash could have hung on to past 2010, but if Flash video on mobile was truly successful, we would see more of that. But the BitTorrent scene, YouTube and so on was already moving beyond Flash and Adobe just didn't keep up. Apple improved Webkit ~and~ Apple apps ~and~ 3rd party apps. I'm not sure what Adobe Flash did in the past 4 years to be honest.

But I'm not sure if Adobe even "dealt" with that in the first place? What did their certification actually do?

Well, not sure about Adobe, but Apple certainly seems to be doing alright.

Just think about it... Ignoring mobile for a while, what tool is best for making HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript? A text editor/IDE, like Coda. Dreamweaver CS4 was the peak of Adobe's web tools. Sure, Photoshop is king, but Pixelmator and Keynote can do a lot of stuff too.

Like Microsoft, Adobe sat on their laurels in a crucial point in 21st century technology, ran a disgraceful smear campaign against Apple, and now, the time has come to pay the piper.
Edited by sr2012 - 6/29/12 at 8:22am

It's simple really. Once IOS devices became insanely popular, Flash was doomed. There are too many IOS devices running to be ignored by anyone running a web site. Besides there is a standard that can work on all devices so why support one that ignores an important segment of folks surfing the web. 

Sorry Mike but Apple should get ALL the blame. How dare they dislike, and refuse to support, a tightly proprietary software that is a battery and memory suck on devices with limited battery and memory. Shame on them

The fact that Adobe is finally giving up cause they can't make a well working mobile Flash player on any platform just backs up Apple's reasoning.

A good while back (I don't remember how long ago it was, now), I stated in these forums that Flash had a life expectancy of 2-5 years. It's starting to look like it's going to be closer to 2 years than 5, at this point. Another year and it will largely be abandoned on the desktop.

But, but, but.... What will all the Fandroids come up with as a replacement to whine about that iOS doesn't support when Flash is officially gone? I guess there's always that "sheeple that follow crapple" statement that is overused.

Indeed. It's happening faster than I expected. Abandoning the web for apps. Abandoning desktops for laptops. Abandoning laptops for iPad. Abandoning tablets for 4" smartphones.

A few clients came to me recently and were like, "We want an e-commerce site. Then maybe later apps". Then it hit me a few days ago. Why would you not just make a web app to start off, cut out all the desktop-webby-fluff-crap, go clean, lean, tight, right, sweet with the web app that runs on browser and mobile? Boom! Perfect entry. Then when business kicks in you can start doing apps.

Web apps are the perfect starting point for everyone trying to get into the "Internet Commerce Age". You don't need to source the very tight iOS/Android dev market, and you don't need to waste endless time and money trying to make "a web site with shopping cart" which by the time you finish looks like it was made in 2004... Because "full e-Commerce websites" are either very expensive and time-consuming to get right, or so cheap and nasty it looks like a granny from Eastern Europe made it overnight.

Tricky times. Maybe I'm inspired by Steve, trying to see the very bloody obvious that's invisible to everyone... until they see it for themselves.

 

It's not about feeling superior. It's about accessing videos and content you were able to access on the desktop, on your mobile phone. Neither apple nor adobe has made this ubiquitously possible. Not every site supports H.264 and not every flash site supports mobile encoded video content, so you can stop thinking YOU are superior for dissing Flash. 

I am so ready for Flash to just die completely. Even on my Mac, it lags and is buggy. This includes running it under Windows 7 on VMware so it doesn't matter what platform you are running, Flash simply is a broken relic that needs to be put down. So many other video options that play smoothly and allow full screen, fast forwarding without hiccups and doesn't try and crash your browser. This is a good thing. 

Damn.... this is only going to make ad providers jump ship on flash faster.  I miss the days when click-to-flash had the side effect of blocking a huge percentage of ads....

Nah, because the Androiders who (now used to) do that couldn't care less about the actual argument. Flash-hating will always be in vogue.

Steve so right on many levels

I'm with you on that one. Flash has always been awful.

Especially the folks who "spend more" as orbit thought..

What I figured out was that the Flash supporters, if not pushed into the future, we're going to cling to aging de facto standards like Flash forever, and Adobe would hold back the future adoption of truly open standard (as opposed to de facto, proprietary) Web technologies. The interesting thing is that by opening up Web standards for OS and hardware makers, it allows for deep integration with devices. for example, HTML5 supported video codecs like H.264 enjoy smooth and energy-efficient playback in iOS devices, whereas Flash will always have to go through Adobe's layers of code, and one thing Steve never liked about Adobe (and before that, Macromedia) was the lack of parity the companies gave to developing Flash on different platforms: usually, Windows won over Mac OS, and mobile Flash was always lagging the desktop versions.

Entertaining forum gloating aside, this important step in the increasing irrelevancy of Flash is a win for everybody, even Adobe, if they could see far enough into the future.

I too wish Steve Jobs was around to see this day.

Wars are generally fought with opposing goals, Apple and Adobe were working to a common goal taking separate approaches.

It gives publishers an option for DRM video and makes cross-platform apps easier:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/samples-mobile.html

It's what companies like Netflix or DirectTV deliver:

http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/casestudies/air/direct-tv/pdfs/direct-tv-casestudy.pdf

"We could have streamed the video with QuickTime, but we couldn’t have delivered such rich interaction. We could have deployed to multiple environments using Java, but without the great customization. We could have used HTML, but getting full-screen video would have been a problem and there would be no picture-in-picture feature. So it is really a combination of all the functionality that Flash Professional, Flex, and AIR bring to the table that makes this project so compelling.” The same code base is deployed on the Mac and PC, and it even works on Linux®"

They posted images saying they loved Apple, most marketing videos they send out they use Apple products. They were just making noise about dropping Flash not being an option and they were right. They shouldn't have gone the route of suggesting it was about Apple's control but still, it wasn't an option until recently. Look how long it has taken to get a video tag on the web, why would Adobe have believed anything major would happen with web standards in the short term?

I don't think there's anything to be gained by making Adobe out to be the enemy, the Mac platform would be much weaker without their presence on it.

Car dealerships seem to really like using flash on their websites to show the diffent models, change the paint colors, use the hover features, etc.

 

At least Flash works well on the desktop computers:

 

http://nanofunk.net/mac-osx-lion-10-7-system-freezes-kernel-iosurface-buffer-allocation-size-is-zero-console-message/

 

If you are using Flash on your desktop, be sure go to system preferences & update to the latest version.

Well in a way they did. Look at all the cars, cameras and consumer electronics that came from those countries once the US helped them rebuild their infrastructure after the war.

 

Perhaps that explains why we never saw a Vietnamese auto industry materialize. The US lost that war.

Really? Just how was Adobe working with Apple?

- Working to make Flash the universal standard while it ran like Crap on Macs

- Offering Mac Photoshop users free cross-grade software so they could switch to Windows, but not the opposite

- Mac versions of Photoshop and Creative Suite running miles behind the Windows version

- Taking years to adopt Apple technologies like Intel native apps, etc

- Optimizing the heck out of the Windows version so that it ran faster than the Mac version even when the Mac had faster hardware.

It has been at least 15 years since Adobe was on Apple's side. And you can't argue that it was because of relative sales volumes because for most of that time, Adobe's Mac products outsold their Windows products.

Cool. That is the first I heard mention of it. I haven't kept up with this version of developer releases. That was one of the things that I noticed right away when I got my iPad. So are they just going to allow access to the camera roll? It would be cool if you could also access email attachments or even sand boxed app documents like iWork of PDF Pro.

Flash should be accessible to over 90% of the Andriod camp forever as only 10% have or can even upgrade to ICS without upgrading to one or two particular devices.

Remember, you thought it important enough to reply.

On the Samsung S3. I received one for work last Monday. Wednesday they sent out an email notifying all 20k mobile phone users that all Andriod phones were disabled as of midnight because some pre-installed app on some phones had copied and transferred our entire corporate contact database to a server in China. Oh well I got a few hours to play with it. Even better I got an iPhone on the way.

First, I am a programmer, instructional system designer and educator.  I try to find the best tools to fit various hardware, be it Mac, PC, or mobile devices.  I have programmed in Flash, and was well aware that Flash support was coming to and end for (at least now) Android Jelly Bean 4.1.  Don't have any feelings one way or the other - I just adapt to the needs of my learners.

 

Some comments have mentioned they don't see Flash unless it pertains to games or ads.  Currently, many distance learning programs export a swf file.  Some examples are Adobe Captivate, Articulate, Lectora, etc.  They have read the writing on the wall, and have made an effort to generate other exports (HTML5, ios, etc).  The HTML5 exports are .. well ... terrible at this point.  But if you don't know CSS, javascript, C#, etc, this is at least an honest effort.

 

Another interesting comment is devaluating the Android operating system.  As most in this forum know, OS X Leopard has BSD code.  Android is a Linux-based OS.  So they really have something in common.

 

So am I a fandroid?  I own an iPhone 4, iPad 2, have just preordered the Samsung Galaxy S 3, have two pcs and one notebook.

 

Adobe purchased Macromedia in 2005 (yes, looked it up).  In another seven years, I have no doubt javascript and css will be replaced by something else.  As mentioned in the first paragraph, programmers don't (or at least shouldn't) lament; rather they should learn to change with the needs of their users, and the accompanying technology.

The irony of all this is that despite all this Adobe Flash has never been better and mobile devices are considerably more powerful than they were in 2007 when people claimed that Apple was not allowing it for no other reason than to be dicks.

I said they were working to a common goal, not working together. Apple was trying to offer mobile users the best web experience, Adobe was trying to do the same but from the point of view of allowing publishers to provide them rich content that web standards couldn't do at the time in a reliable way.

When Apple opened up access to hardware acceleration, Adobe improved Flash within a matter of weeks:

http://www.macrumors.com/2010/04/22/apple-opens-door-to-hardware-accelerated-decoding-of-h-264-in-flash-and-other-platforms/

Flash doesn't work too well on Windows, it doesn't block background loading like the Mac. If you open a Youtube video in a background tab, it starts playing. People have developed extensions for FF and Chrome to stop it happening. It crashes on Windows too:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/rErLtVD9It4

I don't recall that being the case, it seems it's not now but they'll always find a way to get you to pay for the cross-grade anyway. You can't cross-grade old versions:

http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/policy-pricing/order-product-platform-language-swap.html

It shouldn't be an issue at all with the cloud license they offer.

Some of this was down to Apple's choices. They threw their entire OS out and started over. They expected Adobe to support Altivec and then ditched the entire architecture. Adobe has a massive codebase, they can't just rework it on a whim, they have to do a lot of testing to make sure it's rock solid. They certainly could have moved quicker but I don't see that it was malicious.

Perhaps my memory is off but i seem to recall that an Adobe employee blog basically spelled out why Flash on Macs was so far behind Windows, specifically naming the lack of access to HW acceleration and then shortly after Apple opened it up.

Client-side PHP perhaps. It saves data translation when communicating with the server (assuming the server is using PHP) and is object-oriented. CSS could be nothing more than an array of values, which is much more flexible as they can all be animated easily and shared using variables. No JS frameworks needed. To animate a style, you just change the style array values, not the object.

Markup would be done in a separate format like how Apple makes .nib files but you wouldn't write these by hand in the same way you don't write PDF, Word, Illustrator, Indesign markup by hand. The layouts you create in these files have expansion properties for dynamic content and selector IDs. The IDs that are handled by PHP. The executable parts are then entirely separated from content and the content is separated from style by design - MVC. This helps with languages. The layout designing would have to be supported in the browser itself and can be mapped to a database so that styles could be nested by users but again, not using code to prevent security vulnerabilities.

It would support arbitrary data in a container so a user could embed a vector, text, an image and video without having to know what markup defines each.

There would be the possibility to compile bytecode (encrypted bytecode too) for deployment and offline storage in a sandboxed space.

This is pretty much how Adobe Air will be built. It offers the possibility of appifying the desktop web experience like the mobile one so you can get a Netflix app or New York Times app that is easy to develop but offers the ability to monetize content. It would still allow the web to work as normal but there's no distinction between app and site. Right now, sites can't do that because there's such a big difference between the client-side and server-side models. They should be the same.

Better yet, just remove it completely from your Mac. It seems ideological, but I am realising the tangible benefits of doing that.

I hear the iRaqpad and iRaqphone is doing quite well, since the US won that war.

Hmm... Imagine if that happened with an iPhone. "AppGate", "AppleGate", "iPhoneGate"... Entire web servers would buckle under the load of the online vitriol.

That's a fair point, but Steve had a counter-intuitive view. Programmers should ~drive~ the right technology ~for~ their users. Not merely adapt.

Yes, but that was a bogus argument.

Even after they had access to hardware acceleration (in the way they wanted it) on the Mac, it sucked. And before they started using hardware acceleration on Windows, the Windows version was still better.

Furthermore, they always had access to hardware acceleration - they just had to use Apple's APIs. They wanted to bypass Apple's APIs and have direct access to hardware acceleration. This would have made their security issues even worse with very little performance benefit.

It may have still sucked in comparison to Windows and sucked overall but it was still much better on resource usage with the HW acceleration which means that Adobe was correct to point out this issue. That makes the argument very valid.

 

Actually, I found that the best solution is to move the Flash plugins from the main /Library/Internet Plugins folder to a separate Plugins folder inside of the iCab web browser.

 

That way, you still have one browser that can run bonafide Flash. By moving the Flash plugins out of the main Library folder, web browsers like Safari and Firefox will believe that the plugin isn't installed and will never render the content.

 

I think I am firing up iCab 1-3 times a month to access Flash-based content. Without a doubt, at some point in the not too distant future, I will realize that I haven't fired up iCab for several months.

I just have the projector downloaded. If I really want to see a Flash element, I download it and view it there.

*shrug*

I hate that Safari 5.2 and 6 have removed the Activity window, but I'm also viewing far fewer Flash elements that can't be "legitimately" downloaded than five years ago, of course.

I'm going to miss all of those Flash-based ads everywhere.

Yes, the browsers entirely not rendering Flash (and Java, I hate Java apps) is exactly what I want. Tell you what, my quality of life has improved. As for a backup for viewing Flash-based content, at first I kept Chrome around or what not and then a few months ago I just decided, anything that really needs Google or Flash, outside of do-or-die emergencies, screw it. I'm purging Google and Flash from my life as far as possible. Bought Pixelmator, hope never to touch Adobe stuff again, in this case not out of spite but personally because of cost and I don't want to pirate software or content ~anymore~.

Well, that's the steps I'm taking, will it pay off? Maybe it already has. The moment I turn off AdBlock in a web browser on Mac or iPad, I am absolutely blown away how nonsensical the web has become. Like the post-PC, there is a "post-web" ecosystem forming. I'm not talking Web 2.0 or 3.0 or whatever, but literally post-Web.

Just look at a website ~ when was the last time you actually managed to find exactly what you wanted or do what you wanted without wading through superfluous content, ads, clicks, surveys, logins, etc. I'm not saying we should rush things but Steve said, "focus is about saying No, and when you say No you piss people off". Web developers must learn to tell clients "No", because most clients are only now "getting" the "Internet". And the post-Web ecosystem is here. Web developers must educate clients on this.

Eg. Like I mentioned above, just make a decent but lean web app that runs on desktop, laptop, mobile and tablet. Done. Then see where to go from that. Don't make the "full e-commerce site with blah blah blah" then ~later~ panic about a "app".

I just got Dirt 3 Showdown, nice, and they have some stats thing you can access on a website... Mostly with Flash. No thanks. Multiplayer? Xbox Live subscription needed. No thanks.

Keep it simple, and as we see from Apple, beauty in simplicity is what the world so desperately craves for in this day and age where every second of life is crammed to the brim with unimportant rubbish.

And that's why Flash is dead to me. The philosophy behind me has come to an end of its usefulness.

They're going to remove it? I'm on 5.1.7 and using it to download stuff: I highlight a line in the Activity Window, Cmd-C, go to the Download Window and Cmd-V. Works like a charm, though not on Windows, even if web developers try to hide stuff or don't want people to download a picture I can still get it. What to do without an Activity Window?

Things are changing, and not for the better with todays termination of my beloved iDisk and Gallery. But I digress.

It's a pain. The only option is Safari-based option is to enable dev mode, try to highlight the general area and then use Web Inspector to hunt down the specific line in the code so you can copy it and then open directly. That's for trying to find a direct link to a video. Images a little simpler as they are usually in an images folder that is easier to sort through. Still a huge PITA.

The only viable option at this point is to have a 3rd-party browser installed so you can use it instead. Hopefully someone will create a Safari Extension that resolves the issue.