Adobe Announces Flash Distribution and Updates to End

The end of an era.

Adobe has announced today it will stop distributing and updating Flash Player at the end of 2020 and is encouraging web developers to migrate any existing Flash content to open standards. Apple is working with Adobe, industry partners, and developers to complete this transition.

Full story:
https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html

Was about time.

Flash served good for what it was intended for initially but then became overbloated
and today we have even better tools.

for sure making pure flash websites was a dream - no HTML browser bridges and that garbage.

adobe already killed macromedia director so flash is just a logical next step

As a Linux user for a long time, all I have to say in this regard is: Many thanks to HTML5 and Google!!!

I don’t understand how people can say this. Nothing is more bloated than HTML5. Web APIs (maybe with the exception of WebGL) are garbage, performance often is much worse than Flash, and support is very mixed across browsers. As much as people complained about Flash, it was something that “just worked” and content loaded relatively quickly. HTML5 is a hodgepodge of APIs in various stages of specification, implemented at least three times over by different vendors with different quirks. It’s insanity.

Plus, with WebAssembly there will be a comeback of plugins, but you won’t know they’re plugins. You’ll be downloading megabytes of WASM libraries instead of downloading Flash once. That’s bloat.

As a Linux user for a long time, all I have to say in this regard is: Many thanks to HTML5 and Google!!!

What are you thanking Google for? You should be thanking Apple. They killed it by not allowing it on iOS. At the time their argument was performance (moot now). Of course, at the time HTML5 couldn’t solve the problem either, so people were forced onto native Apps.

Flash is pretty death, why end to 2020 ?

It has taken years to be able to do things that were relatively easy to do with Flash, but now is far more complicated.

I agree with this statement. Things just worked with Flash.

As artists have you ever tried to put a video on your site to be played by these html5 open standards? I’ll give you a hint, you either need to use a service (e.g youtube, vimeo - big cons) or make 3-4 different versions of your video, manually detecting the browser. I’m not even going to mention encoding process as only viable way is to do it through command line for variety of reasons. This is insanity.

Then as webdev, no matter what you cook up, you better test on 4-5 browsers(including IE, Edge) and all your devices (androids, ipads, iphones) just to notice that simplest of things cause an exception. These open standards are nothing but a fragmented mess and only way to be efficient web developer today is just to build your projects on well established frameworks. Your site will require 2-20 js libraries that you probably have no clue about. In Actionscript you needed no external help, you could design any functionality right there. These libraries and frameworks change from year to year and are so hard to keep up with.
A typical user will say - i’ll just use wordpress. Well in a year you will either be compromised or you will get a mail from admin saying that WP you use is hacked and you need to update or they will block your traffic. It’s lovely.

I could rant on, and I’m all for open standards, but things are so fragmented and cluttered. They have some serious catching up to do.

And compared to what I see on many “modern” web sites, it performs better and uses less resources. Remember how we didn’t get Flash on the iPhone because it was using too much CPU, memory and battery? HTML5 certainly has caught up in that regard, my current phone is faster that my laptop was 10 years ago (when the initial iPhone came out), yet there are plenty of web pages that bring its to its knees and drain battery like crazy.

The only bad thing on Flash it was the lack of indexation for crawlers.

Oh, not just that. Flash was bad for screen readers, did not allow bookmarks, etc. Don’t get me wrong, there are many things wrong with Flash, but unfortunately it seems that the follow-up HTML/JS technology is now repeating the same mistakes.

‘I’ just thank to google because 95% of the multimedia content ‘I’ see comes from Youtube.

Ok, thanks to Apple also then, although seeing embedded QuickTime content in Linux was a headache worse than Flash.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTBt9jLXYqo-emAL5KvCsDNztatB9U6UrQQJGipTsWiLaG5AMYA-Q

Well, both HTML5 and Flash have problems with cross compatibility but I agree testing cross browser is torture!

well sorry flash at one point became a resource sucker. it also has a hefty impact in PCs.
I quite clearly said that during that time developing with flash was quite nice because you knew it would work unlike the html debugging nightmare and adjusting to different browsers - dear lord.
during that time flash was amazing I started coding for web when Netscape and internet explorer were the kings - that was the late 90s.

but things developed also on the other side. HTML then is not what we have today. CCS responsive design and so many things are high improvements. how you code a website is a different story which I found it so funny when they compared how many copies of Doom does the index page of a website use up in data size.