Adobe Is Finally Ending Flash Support... In 2020

[caligula]

Once smartphones and tablets started outselling desktops and laptops, Flash usage declined insanely fast. I very rarely encounter anything that requires Flash anymore.

Kind of a shame - Flash was great for a lot of things and in the early 2000s made the Internet a lot more fun, but Adobe just did such a terrible job maintaining it. If they worked on security, GPU acceleration, and ported it to more platforms (such as 64 bit Windows) it'd probably still be popular. I don't really understand why Adobe bought out Macromedia. I guess Dreamweaver (and maybe the vector technology in Fireworks?) were what they had the most interest in, but that hardly seems worth buying out an entire company. I always wonder where Flash would be today if Macromedia were still around.

Didn't they replace Flash with 'AIR' ? Well, Flash, Java, and JS/Web 2.0 have the same goal. They made the right choice. We don't really need almost similar competing technologies fragmenting the web.

[schmidtbag]

Yeah, point is that it would be a mindboggingly massive investment.

Not really. Macromedia did all the hard work, Adobe just had to maintain it, which they did a very poor job of. Besides, Adobe added 3D to Flash, even though nobody asked for it and very few people used it. How is that a lesser investment?

Don't forget - there's also the Flash editor from the Adobe Creative Suite. That's an expensive piece of software and would easily cover the maintenance costs. If Adobe kept people's interest in Flash, it would've kept the cash flow going.

[TheLexMachine]

Didn't they replace Flash with 'AIR' ? Well, Flash, Java, and JS/Web 2.0 have the same goal. They made the right choice. We don't really need almost similar competing technologies fragmenting the web.

AIR is an off-shoot of Flash and is more of a replacement for Shockwave than Flash itself, because it's used to make media-oriented applications that run outside of a web browser, much as Shockwave was once used for that in the 90's.

[Anvil]

not many sites i visit now really uses Flash, only 1 i can really say does an thats Australian News Websites, not all video's on them use HTML5

[polarathene]

Once smartphones and tablets started outselling desktops and laptops, Flash usage declined insanely fast. I very rarely encounter anything that requires Flash anymore.

If they worked on security, GPU acceleration, and ported it to more platforms (such as 64 bit Windows) it'd probably still be popular. I

Have you heard of Adobe AIR? It's an app version of Flash, supports desktop and mobile platforms(runtime packaged into app) along with GPU accel and security. I made an e-learning software for tablets and PC with it back in 2013.

[polarathene]

Adobe added 3D to Flash, even though nobody asked for it and very few people used it. How is that a lesser investment?

It had support for running Unreal Engine well before webgl had any equivalent iirc. That didn't seem to work out to much beyond the demos from the looks of it

[ElectricPrism]

Not really. Macromedia did all the hard work, Adobe just had to maintain it, which they did a very poor job of. Besides, Adobe added 3D to Flash, even though nobody asked for it and very few people used it. How is that a lesser investment?

Good thing they made intelligent strategic use of that money instead of invested it in Photoshop on Linux. What a disaster that would have been!

Hmm so if 5% of the 2,000,000 estimated steam linux users purchased a photoshop subscription at 19.99/month that'd be errr.... 100,000 subscriptions at 19.99 a pop.


Oh, a measly $1,999,000.00 a month to support a platform. Or err.... only $23,988,000.00 a year using that metric.

Yup, you heard it here folks, 23 million dollars a year is chump change to Adobe apparently. Somebody needs to talk to their engineers about stopping snorting cocaine of teenage stripper's asses and get them to do their fscking job. (This isn't a joke, I did work at an Adobe engineers house where apparently cocaine is the currency within the house.)

[GI_Jack]

Its time to Open Source the player/browser plugin for two reasons

1. it can be ported to other archectures
2. people can submit bug fixes.

[GI_Jack]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHQLQ1Rc_Js

[Duve]

Its time to Open Source the player/browser plugin for two reasons

1. it can be ported to other archectures
2. people can submit bug fixes.

This is one of those things that are best left dead and buried. Anyways Adobe as sort of beat you to that, just about everything that made Flash unique has either been pushed into standardization (ActionScript) or has been completely replaced with web based equivalents.