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adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot.

adobe was the death of flash. Macromedia had a better handle on it, and when adobe bought it, then ran it into the floor and gave up early, leaving it to rot. I don't think they could even open source it, with all the other companies' copyright work they shoved into it, like dolby

chongli 3y ago
Adobe is the Autodesk of the creative side of things. They've swallowed up almost everything in the space and exist only to collect rent. When something requires finesse, such as Flash, they fail miserably.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  oh god, autodesk. don't remind me. exactly correct.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    Yeah fusion 360 doesn't even support HiDPI scaling to this day.. wtf
    - chongli 3y ago
      Of all the software to benefit from HiDPI, I would think CAD would be near the top of the list! Totally inexcusable!
kmeisthax 3y ago
The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege. The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is specifically to keep Unity off the Flash platform. This, predictably, causes huge backlash from Flash developers - even those who don't care about cross-compilation. So they kill the revshare... as well as any plans to fix Flash Player's problems. This all happened a year after Steve Jobs posted "Thoughts on Flash" and tried to ban Adobe AIR apps - and all other third-party development tools in the process[0]. We'd learn way later on that preceding this, Apple had begged Adobe to ship them a Flash Player build that would actually work on iPhones, and their attempts were... anemic[1]. [0] This was only stopped because the Obama administration threatened an antitrust lawsuit. [1] While the iOS ports of Flash Player haven't been publicly released, they did ship NPAPI Flash plugins on Android, which were just as bad as Jobs had claimed. Actually they probably were the same codebase given that jailbreakers were able to get them to work on Safari.
- cubefox 3y ago
  I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually slower than Flash.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    Flash was software rendered almost exclusively. It also had quality options that let you scale the software renderer down a whole lot. But it still required a beefy CPU to push all those pixels. On mobile, you don't get a fast CPU - you get hardware accelerated EVERYTHING. Everything has to be done on GPU. Hell, iPhones still have dedicated JPEG decoders in them. And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even more so with Flash Player's rendering quirks. Adobe's official solution to hardware rendering on Flash was Starling Framework, which rendered all your assets to bitmap textures and then gave you a DisplayObject-compatible API that triggered Stage3D renders under the hood. In Ruffle we use a tesselation library to render on GPU. This preserves vector scalability but it has other issues. Most movies work fine with it, but we have to waste time tessellating[0] assets, and in certain contrived cases we tesselate things wrong and movies look polygonal. [0] Which we hid behind existing Flash preloaders. We don't even support progressive download yet! But the alternative was Homestuck hanging your browser for minutes on end.
    - NovaDudely 3y ago
      I always remember Flash being really fast at the vector calculation but and absolute hog on output rendering. So higher screen resolution hammered the CPU even though everything was setup.
    - rincebrain 3y ago
      I want you to know that I laughed very hard at finding a comment complaining about Homestuck in Ruffle unexpectedly here, thank you. To be fair, on the single 100 mbit link the site used to be on, for new things being posted, that would be historically accurate...
dylan604 3y ago
If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare as people were trying to do much more complicated things that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece of tech than one has fond memories of is clouding judgment I'd say.
- Bakingpotato 3y ago
  less rose tinted glasses and more the insanity of people entrusting logins and security to flash player to start with, or even adobe for adding that in. Yknow. if it was riddled with bugs and all that, you might avoid such a thing, for say, a banking page. Macromedia designed flash to be a web based animation system, not a full web stack. The very fact that these things were attempted is insane enough, and whats worse is the people who were surprised when it came crashing down. all this talk about security and flash's being bad at it, and you forget what flash really was for. It wasn't for blaring ads (you can do that without flash) and it wasn't for secure logins anyone who did use it for those was a money maker or a madman.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence, just as ActiveX and Java applets were. The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e. botnets, crypto malware) just wasn't existing or at least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter bullshit back in the early '00s.
  - anthk 3y ago
    Blaster. Sasser. Malware everywhere. IE with Active X was hell.

chongli 3y ago

Adobe is the Autodesk of the creative side of things. They've swallowed up almost everything in the space and exist only to collect rent. When something requires finesse, such as Flash, they fail miserably.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
oh god, autodesk. don't remind me. exactly correct.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  Yeah fusion 360 doesn't even support HiDPI scaling to this day.. wtf
  - chongli 3y ago
    Of all the software to benefit from HiDPI, I would think CAD would be near the top of the list! Totally inexcusable!

kmeisthax 3y ago

The problem was that Flash Player needed significant rewrites and Adobe didn't want to pay for them. Or at least, not without finding a way to get more money out of game developers for the privilege. The story starts with Adobe. They proudly announce AS4, along with an "FP Next" intended to run it. Then they also mention new revshare rules mandated on anyone cross-compiling 3D game engines to Flash Player. This is specifically to keep Unity off the Flash platform. This, predictably, causes huge backlash from Flash developers - even those who don't care about cross-compilation. So they kill the revshare... as well as any plans to fix Flash Player's problems. This all happened a year after Steve Jobs posted "Thoughts on Flash" and tried to ban Adobe AIR apps - and all other third-party development tools in the process[0]. We'd learn way later on that preceding this, Apple had begged Adobe to ship them a Flash Player build that would actually work on iPhones, and their attempts were... anemic[1]. [0] This was only stopped because the Obama administration threatened an antitrust lawsuit. [1] While the iOS ports of Flash Player haven't been publicly released, they did ship NPAPI Flash plugins on Android, which were just as bad as Jobs had claimed. Actually they probably were the same codebase given that jailbreakers were able to get them to work on Safari.

cubefox 3y ago
I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually slower than Flash.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  Flash was software rendered almost exclusively. It also had quality options that let you scale the software renderer down a whole lot. But it still required a beefy CPU to push all those pixels. On mobile, you don't get a fast CPU - you get hardware accelerated EVERYTHING. Everything has to be done on GPU. Hell, iPhones still have dedicated JPEG decoders in them. And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even more so with Flash Player's rendering quirks. Adobe's official solution to hardware rendering on Flash was Starling Framework, which rendered all your assets to bitmap textures and then gave you a DisplayObject-compatible API that triggered Stage3D renders under the hood. In Ruffle we use a tesselation library to render on GPU. This preserves vector scalability but it has other issues. Most movies work fine with it, but we have to waste time tessellating[0] assets, and in certain contrived cases we tesselate things wrong and movies look polygonal. [0] Which we hid behind existing Flash preloaders. We don't even support progressive download yet! But the alternative was Homestuck hanging your browser for minutes on end.
  - NovaDudely 3y ago
    I always remember Flash being really fast at the vector calculation but and absolute hog on output rendering. So higher screen resolution hammered the CPU even though everything was setup.
  - rincebrain 3y ago
    I want you to know that I laughed very hard at finding a comment complaining about Homestuck in Ruffle unexpectedly here, thank you. To be fair, on the single 100 mbit link the site used to be on, for new things being posted, that would be historically accurate...

dylan604 3y ago

If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare as people were trying to do much more complicated things that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece of tech than one has fond memories of is clouding judgment I'd say.

Bakingpotato 3y ago
less rose tinted glasses and more the insanity of people entrusting logins and security to flash player to start with, or even adobe for adding that in. Yknow. if it was riddled with bugs and all that, you might avoid such a thing, for say, a banking page. Macromedia designed flash to be a web based animation system, not a full web stack. The very fact that these things were attempted is insane enough, and whats worse is the people who were surprised when it came crashing down. all this talk about security and flash's being bad at it, and you forget what flash really was for. It wasn't for blaring ads (you can do that without flash) and it wasn't for secure logins anyone who did use it for those was a money maker or a madman.
mschuster91 3y ago
> If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence, just as ActiveX and Java applets were. The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e. botnets, crypto malware) just wasn't existing or at least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter bullshit back in the early '00s.
- anthk 3y ago
  Blaster. Sasser. Malware everywhere. IE with Active X was hell.