Adobe Is Finally Ending Flash Support... In 2020

[Apopas]

Actually flash games have kept it alive far too long, and there are still some old websites using it for players.

Most porn websites keep using it.

[caligula]

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

Java also had 3d support (JOGL, LWJGL) before WebGL. The Java implementation was lightning fast compared to JS crap. They demoed Quake2 in JavaONE in 2004 ( https://bytonic.de/html/benchmarks.html ) and it was on par with native C version. 10 years later some WebGL games appeared and they were slower than the original native c64 games. On high end Geforce hardware with 1000+ CUDA cores.

[caligula]

Surprising that so few mention it here: HTML5 VIDEOS ARE NOT ACCELERATED AT ALL ON LINUX. Only Flash videos are. There, think about it.

[grok]

Java also had 3d support (JOGL, LWJGL) before WebGL. The Java implementation was lightning fast compared to JS crap. They demoed Quake2 in JavaONE in 2004 ( https://bytonic.de/html/benchmarks.html ) and it was on par with native C version. 10 years later some WebGL games appeared and they were slower than the original native c64 games. On high end Geforce hardware with 1000+ CUDA cores.

Java is fast enough that software rendering should be usable, and I'm saying that seriously. Not too long ago I looked for flash games and found one that very obviously ran the doom engine (some simple military themed shooter) and it was 100% fast and smooth even on Flash on an aging PC. Keyboard input was a disaster though (only made for qwerty and even if you switch your OS to qwerty it's not very enjoyable. typical problems of not being able to do one of changing weapons, strafing, accessing the menu or even walking backwards).

OpenGL in the browser is a disaster IMO. You took an almost universal platform, be it Flash, Java or HTML5 and add hardware and software requirements and it doesn't work properly, at all or is very slow. At worse, it's effectively a Chrome-on-Windows game since it's made for Chrome's javascript and HTML5, and you need Windows for the high quality graphics driver. Might as well be a downloadable .exe made for DirectX 11.
Typical of modern days is announcements about supporting WebGL 2 : please tell us what are the hardware requirements. In older days every game or piece of software let us know if EGA, VGA, or 640x480 with 256 colors etc. are required.

Thin clients and VM are another environment where 3D is a rare and high end feature. Flash games ran/run on thin clients. I never got 3D working in Virtualbox (There is a solution as llvm-pipe is a software OpenGL implementation tuned for speed, might be good if you have an eight-core or at least eight-thread CPU, perhaps someone with a 3+GHz Zen or socket 2011/2066 CPU or i7 2600K can test if WebGL games are playable)

[L_A_G]

Good job Adobe... Except you should probably have done this at least a decade ago. Flash was cancer well before Steve Jobs trashed it in his public letter.

I however have a feeling that there's still going to be plenty of sites that rely on Flash when the EOL date hits, either due to the developers not wanting to move the site off flash or not having the budget to do so, meaning that Adobe may have to continue keeping up the downloads and making security updates. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if they get sued at some point in 2019 with the goal of forcing them to do just that.

Seriously, Flash is probably the best example of how even the worst technology can become practically unkillable if it gains enough momentum.

[Hi-Angel]

Surprising that so few mention it here: HTML5 VIDEOS ARE NOT ACCELERATED AT ALL ON LINUX. Only Flash videos are. There, think about it.

With r600g driver and chromium-vaapiᴬᵁᴿ HTML5 videos are very well accelerated.

[Mike Frett]

Most porn websites keep using it.

Yup and if people can't get their Porn ... watch out!

[kpedersen]

Great, unfortunately all the developers have flocked to Unity3D and are still churning out their sucky sh*t. Waiting for this to die off next

[schmidtbag]

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!

Haha I know right? I don't think Adobe realizes that they'd be a monopoly on Linux if they at least ported Photoshop. But that just got me to realize - Adobe's big money maker is when they sell their entire creative suite. What that means is if they did Linux support, they'd kind of have an obligation to port everything else. That would be very time consuming and expensive, so in that perspective I can see why they didn't. Even if they were like "let's just to PS and nothing else" customers would whine "you ported PS so why won't you do the others!?"

The sad thing is Adobe is of then the reason why so many people haven't switched to Linux.

[Hi-Angel]

The sad thing is Adobe is of then the reason why so many people haven't switched to Linux.

You're definitely overestimating Adobe's value. I can't imagine a single their product I would need myself. There's a GIMP in which I am well versed, Okular which supports far more formats than Adobe Reader, HTML5 in favor of which even Adobe themselves are dropping Flash.

May be I am a bad example — granted, for reasons of poor and bad childhood it's only 7 years as I have a PC, and I quickly dived into hacking about how things work, and within a couple of years I found myself on GNU/Linux. So, you could say I didn't have a chance to get used to Adobe's products. Besides I am not a 3D designer — may be their AIR and likes are the products you could be referring to?

In this case, there's always WINE around. Whilst not as good as native, but enough to satisfy someone wanting to use both GNU/Linux and an Adobe's product.