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Adobe to Pull Plug on Flash


Monroe

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Maybe this is old news ... article dated July 25, 2017

http://www.oann.com/adobe-to-pull-plug-on-flash-ending-an-era/

Adobe to Pull Plug on Flash, Ending an Era

July 25, 2017

By Salvador Rodriguez

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Adobe Systems Inc’s Flash, a once-ubiquitous technology used to power most of the media content found online, will be retired at the end of 2020, the software company announced Tuesday.

Adobe, along with partners Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc’s Google, Facebook Inc and Mozilla Corp, said support for Flash will ramp down across the internet in phases over the next three years.

After 2020, Adobe will stop releasing updates for Flash and web browsers will no longer support it. The companies are encouraging developers to migrate their software onto modern programming standards.

“Few technologies have had such a profound and positive impact in the internet era,” said Govind Balakrishnan, vice president of product development for Adobe Creative Cloud.

Created more than 20 years ago, Flash was once the preferred software used by developers to create games, video players and applications capable of running on multiple web browsers. When Adobe acquired Flash in its 2005 purchase of Macromedia, the technology was on more than 98 percent of personal computers connected to the web, Macromedia said at the time.

But Flash’s popularity began to wane after Apple’s decision not to support it on the iPhone.

In a public letter in 2010, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs criticized Flash’s reliability, security and performance. Since then, other technologies like HTML5 have emerged as alternatives to Flash.

In the past year, several web browsers have begun to require users to enable Flash before running it.

On Google’s Chrome, the most popular web browser, Flash’s usage has already fallen drastically. In 2014, Flash was used each day by 80 percent of desktop users. That number is now at 17 percent “and continues to decline,” Google said in a blog Tuesday.

“This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash,” Google said. “They’re also more secure.”

Flash, however, remains in use among some online gamers. Adobe said it will work with Facebook as well as Unity Technologies and Epic Games to help developers migrate their games.

Adobe said it does not expect Flash’s sunset to have an impact on its bottom line. “In fact, we think the opportunity for Adobe is greater in a post-Flash world,” Balakrishnan said.

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  • 1 month later...

Just more planned obsolescence. At least it's not happening like right this second but you'll still need to make sure you have a powerful enough computer to handle all the new standards. Probably by 2020 most computers in use will have plenty of power but people like me just has another nail in the coffin. Although since we've got YouTube working properly with HTML5 and H.264 on Windows 2000, we should be good for a little while. :yes:

Not to make this a discussion about Windows 10 and how I won't use it, but since Microsoft had said it was the last Windows operating system they will make, it makes me wonder how they'll actually keep up with so many new standards. Or maybe Microsoft is going to ditch Windows all together in the future and create a new operating system. But if it's the former, why didn't they just leave stuff alone like Windows XP or Windows 7, operating systems most people want to use, and just follow a similar business model. I don't know if Windows 10 will have free updates or eventually charge people to update to a better core every so often, but if it's the latter, then to me they should just keep all of their customers happy and support several different platforms. It's certainly better than chasing them away to other companies. But that's my two cents. :dubbio:

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4 hours ago, Tommy said:

Just more planned obsolescence. At least it's not happening like right this second but you'll still need to make sure you have a powerful enough computer to handle all the new standards. Probably by 2020 most computers in use will have plenty of power but people like me just has another nail in the coffin. Although since we've got YouTube working properly with HTML5 and H.264 on Windows 2000, we should be good for a little while. :yes:

Not to make this a discussion about Windows 10 and how I won't use it, but since Microsoft had said it was the last Windows operating system they will make, it makes me wonder how they'll actually keep up with so many new standards. Or maybe Microsoft is going to ditch Windows all together in the future and create a new operating system. But if it's the former, why didn't they just leave stuff alone like Windows XP or Windows 7, operating systems most people want to use, and just follow a similar business model. I don't know if Windows 10 will have free updates or eventually charge people to update to a better core every so often, but if it's the latter, then to me they should just keep all of their customers happy and support several different platforms. It's certainly better than chasing them away to other companies. But that's my two cents. :dubbio:

Well I suppose its not like Windows, Adobe could claim "You want the patch so pay 1$". I mean Apple makes money with every new iSHIT so Microsoft that doesnt provide hardware(ok forget the Cloud I mean like Microsoft Laptops or so yeah ok they have Surface but its not a laptop like lets say Macbook or if they even call it like that).

so the sell software. Should mention to be correct here: Apple produces in china so its just the brainstorming and maybe a bit coding for the iOS that happens in the first world countries.

If you think about that theres not so much difference, except the ones say the sell "their" Hardware with an own system the others sell Operating system thats bundled with some random hardware manufacturer (except if its Lumia or Surface or "Apple" ofcourse and various others that support linux).

I know you need a better machine to support HTML5. The strange thing is the people that made this standard mainstream sell it like "its for lowlevel devices".

Thats not entirely true. 512 MB RAM and 800 Mhz CPU single core might sound "poor" but on a smartphone thats not the same like on a Pentium 3 or Pentium 4 machine.

CPU and GPU are far more connected(GPU is even in the CPU) in a mobile device. And such devices are small and need less power but still will already support HTML5 and also support OpenGL 2.0 standard if Im not mistaken.  

 

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Welp. Now Homestar Runner is right, Flash IS dying.

This is somber news for a lot of places that had been founded on Flash-based media. Myself included; over the years I produced my share of animations and interactive media in Flash. This might actually pose a problem for internet archivists, if there is no legacy support for old media created in Flash; how's anyone going to view the old stuff?

I'm still not confident in HTML5's ability to replicate everything Flash could do. Particularly in terms of vector animation and interactivity. I say this as a guy who's been experimenting with HTML5 to make web-based games, as well as incorporating some of HTML5's animation features in web design. In time, perhaps, we'll see a true Flash equivalent in those fields.

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> Right and now flash is also dead for youtube.

Only for embedded according to that Youtube message....

> we've got YouTube working properly with HTML5 and H.264 on Windows 2000

This is news to me. Can you provide a thread post link to details?

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9 hours ago, Tommy said:

Just more planned obsolescence.

That is the wrong term. Planned Obsolescence is when a product is created with the plan baked in from the get-go that it will become unusable at some point. So this can't really be applicable to Adobe since it was not them who even made Flash in the first place.

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Oh, you mean because it used to be owned by Macromedia and then Adobe basically bought them out and took it over? That would make sense but what I was driving at when I said planned obsolescence is that many older devices basically depended on Flash to give them the capability to watch or interact with multimedia, especially and particularly on the web. Like YouTube basically axing Flash. Since I'm no expert when it comes to this field...is this one of the main reasons that YouTube applications spanning from many older devices like earlier iPod touches and even more recently, the Nintendo Wii, no longer work, because they continue to change their technology that delivers their content? Did these applications use Flash to deliver videos to you on these devices? And those are honest questions because I really don't know and am assuming. But if that is the case, either you have to plunk down more money on new devices in order to continue watching something that worked perfectly fine in the past or you're just up a creek in a boat with a hole.

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Flash was too innocent when it came into being, or after its separation from Shockwave. Macromedia had put in the ability to not only have local file access but their own scripting language. Once this happened, Flash became a problem. Macromedia did remove the local file access in SWF but not Projector. Then they removed it from Projector in the MX 2004 version. (Projector was the ability to compile an .exe from your Flash movie. I would put it on the same terms as what an HTA is to HTML/ASP.) Then later they removed Projector.

They never did remove ActionScript, and this was the main issue with Flash. Since the SWF was compiled, it hid what script it had inside of it. The SWF could be decompiled but not on the fly in a browser or at runtime. People even figured out how to code it so the SWF couldn't be decompiled properly.

It became pretty much void that Adobe could not remove the ActionScript from Flash and only would continue to patch it to fix exploits or other bugs. The writing was on the wall and it was already a dead product for many years now. The problem was that it was the best at certain things up until just recently. While there had been many ways to provide fancy graphics or do video playback, there was nothing better than it functionality wise. Things are a lot different now that HTML5 is defacto staying around and is proven enough to take over that responsibility from Flash. So now Flash can go away.

I do not know how the Wii or iPod works, but Flash won't stop immediately. Anything that runs on projector or local files would still work. SWF that is linked to embedded SWF would still work, providing the files are still on the server. Same for anything else it links into, such as images, XML/flatfiles or a database. I'm sure that there will still be extensions for browsers that allow Flash content to work, it is just that Flash will no longer be maintained. Big websites that keep up with trends won't use it anymore, but if your browser still supports it and you go to a site that has it, it will still work.

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9 minutes ago, Tripredacus said:

I do not know how the Wii or iPod works, but Flash won't stop immediately. Anything that runs on projector or local files would still work. SWF that is linked to embedded SWF would still work, providing the files are still on the server. Same for anything else it links into, such as images, XML/flatfiles or a database. I'm sure that there will still be extensions for browsers that allow Flash content to work, it is just that Flash will no longer be maintained. Big websites that keep up with trends won't use it anymore, but if your browser still supports it and you go to a site that has it, it will still work.

And you're absolutely right on that. It's actually kind of like Windows XP, it won't stop working but using it in modern settings, it's likely to start becoming unusable. The most common setting is for people to use their devices on the internet so even though local things will still work just fine with flash, as you said, using it on big websites that follow trends will mainly make it useless to have. I suppose something like YouTube you could always download the videos using one of those online capture services. Not sure exactly how safe, legal, or morally right it is, but it is an option nonetheless.

@jumper

I completely missed the replies above. :unsure: But as I posted in the thread, I do have this working. The only issue I'm facing though is that right now sometimes YouTube videos start flickering or go black all together but I think it might be due to my PC because it didn't do this until I backed up my profile, built a new machine with a few new pieces of hardware, and reinstalled Windows and my Firefox profile. I have read of other people saying this happens to them on modern OSes as well. But that's a little out of scope of this thread so we can discuss it more in the link I posted if you wish. :yes:

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On Windows 10 mobile, for example, you cannot play Flash games from within the browser, however, you can download many of them from the store - which means getting some web wrapper and playing them from within the app. Dunno how this works.

Besides, I'm observing some things retro gaming/ emulation scene, and I have no doubt that someone is working to preserve flash games. Many of them were single player, so you can run them from local drives, so for this keeping older browser for this purpose +some internet archive would be enough.

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After installing the Flash update on Monday, now in Firefox it is set to prompt instead of enabled, which was my old setting. I only had Flash configured to deny/prompt for local storage. So it seems that that update change a setting in my browser without asking or notification.

Also the prompt has changed, it says now Flash will slow down my computer.

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On 20.9.2017 at 3:52 PM, Tripredacus said:

 

They never did remove ActionScript, and this was the main issue with Flash. Since the SWF was compiled, it hid what script it had inside of it. The SWF could be decompiled but not on the fly in a browser or at runtime. People even figured out how to code it so the SWF couldn't be decompiled properly.

 

If we go by that rule PHP would be as a big problem as all .exe files and actionscript.

No thats surely not the main issue. And btw: Apple planned the kill on Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash).

So thank the Apple Company that youtube wont work anymore on devices that dont properly support HTML5.

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