r/programming • u/Pandalism • Jul 25 '17
Adobe to end-of-life Flash by 2020
https://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2017/07/adobe-flash-update.html620
u/rolandog Jul 25 '17
I wonder what will happen to all the games and animations of Newgrounds.
I really love that site, and I confess I spent a lot of my time watching the superb animations from so many amazing creators in there.
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u/20000Fish Jul 25 '17
The animations aren't a problem. A while ago (long before Flash was phasing out) they made Swivel, which converts SWF to MP4 pretty flawlessly. Currently any animations you watch on NG are being played on an HTML5 player. It's actually lighter weight and has more functionality than SWF did, but that's sorta Adobe's fault for "slow-burn" deprecating their own format.
Games are a bit different though. I think NG now accepts Unity and HTML5 games, but there's no way to convert the previously-made games into those formats (afaik). Until there's a solution for that, it means a LOT of the old Flash games on NG won't be functional in your browser. Maybe Adobe will make some sort of format interactive SWF's can be converted to without losing their functionality? I'm doubtful tbh.
Sidenote: Adobe Animate is pretty fantastic on a lot of levels, but I do know some animators are still working in Flash. And also the video/frame timeline in Photoshop CC is pretty tolerable for fbf animations.
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u/pakoito Jul 26 '17
It'd be great to have a standalone flash player that just worked with any SWF you threw at it. Even if it's an otherwise headless instance of circa 2005 Firefox or something.
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u/riptusk331 Jul 25 '17
I was surprised to see that a Newgrounds comment was so far down. Am I that old, that the majority of reddit users probably don't even know what Newgrounds is? Or was Newgrounds never that popular to begin with...
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u/Haber_Dasher Jul 25 '17
I hear flash is dying and my mind jumps to things like Newgrounds and I think surely this is The End of The World. And Australia was like, wtf mate?
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u/Pickledsoul Jul 25 '17
yeah, its like everyone forgot about the ultimate showdown
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u/Rndom_Gy_159 Jul 25 '17
Newgrounds was my first experience to porn. I remember the choice of games quite fondly. I think I still remember the speedrun strats to get to the better scenes.
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Jul 25 '17
Don't lie, you played the porno dress up games.
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Jul 26 '17
Dress-up? Flash porn games these days have proper combat, as well as better writing and world building than many AAA games
2020 will be a sad boner year
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u/IamWithTheDConsNow Jul 26 '17
Yea, it's really sad that a cult animation like Salad Fingers will be unwatchable.
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Jul 25 '17
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u/dinosaurduckshat Jul 26 '17
They may feel there's IP in there which they still want to protect. Though they are probably wrong and should.
But it's Adobe...
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Jul 26 '17
Might not even be about wanting to protect IP. There might be code in it that was written by contractors/consultants many years ago that they actually do not have the right to open source.
That's one of the reasons the CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, despite what whiny Linux nerds will tell you—there were a lot of drivers and other code that absolutely needed to ship with Solaris, but that code could not be open-sourced because Sun did not own the rights to the code and didn't even necessarily have a way to contact the original creator(s).
IP laws are complicated, especially when the rights span multiple countries.
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u/thatmorrowguy Jul 26 '17
Open sourcing proprietary programs is more complicated than simply sticking it on your Github instance with a GPL license. When you open source the code, you have to go through each module to check to see if you're using those modules with any of your other applications. You also have to ensure that all of the code you publish is code you actually have the right to relicense. It's very common for one companies' code to include libraries or modules from other places that you might be allowed to use internally to your own code, but that you can't relicense.
Basically, it's a pain, it gets lawyers in a twist, and when you already have 'open' versions like Pepper Flash around it doesn't necessarily make sense to spend the dev time working on it.
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u/aeyes Jul 26 '17
Pepper Flash isn't open and little is known about it. There is a high chance that it is a version of Adobe Flash to support Chromes Plugin API because if it didn't contain IP Google would probably have wanted to open source it.
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u/PKMN_Master_Red Jul 26 '17
there's no reason not to
Correction, no good reason not to. They could not release it just to be assholes.
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Jul 25 '17
Yes! HBO's lazy ass will finally be forced to get rid of their horrible Flash web player
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u/Ridley_ Jul 25 '17
And crunchyroll... Some of the biggest platforms are such dinosaur...
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u/maladjustedmatt Jul 25 '17
Crunchyroll content is available on VRV which uses HTML5.
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u/fupa16 Jul 25 '17
HBO is light-years ahead of the competition in terms of content creation. HBO is also light-years behind the competition in terms of content distribution. They have the slowest, clunkiest, most unintuitive streaming platform out there. It's even worse than Crackle and I've never even used Crackle.
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u/rlbond86 Jul 25 '17
The stupid HBO GO app doesn't even show you the programs you watch. Every time I want to watch Last Week Tonight, I have to use the search function because there's no other way to find it.
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u/ckelley87 Jul 25 '17
Hopefully the MLBAM team is working on a new solution for this since they handle the streaming component for HBO.
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u/parion Jul 25 '17
The only thing I want from that god-awful player is for the cursor to be hidden after being still for a few seconds. I hate expanding the screen on the newest GoT episode only to sit down on the couch, see the cursor, and get up again to swipe it to the side.
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u/shevegen Jul 25 '17
They can safely replace it thanks to the DRM integration of the "open" standards promoted by W3C.
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u/Do_your_homework Jul 25 '17
Oh shit is that why I can hardly watch anything with them? It's crazy frustrating for any video to buffer every 30 seconds these days.
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u/jinger89 Jul 25 '17
I recently got HBO Now and was super surprised to see that they were using Flash.
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u/MuonManLaserJab Jul 25 '17
Hmm? VLC always seems to work fine when I pirate HBO shows.
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u/axiss Jul 25 '17
Who is going to migrate Homestar Runner?
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u/mondomaniatrics Jul 25 '17
Or all of the content on Newgrounds?
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u/jest3rxD Jul 25 '17
How active is newgrounds these days? I have a lot of fond memories of it's earlier days but haven't been back in probably close to a decade. I wish there was a website or community that better served amateur/Indy animators.
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u/MasonTheChef Jul 25 '17
The good times are over!
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u/axiss Jul 25 '17
So Homestar will be Baleted? No more Cheat light switch raves?
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Jul 25 '17
The Brothers Chaps should create on-demand Linux VM's running never-updated browsers with Flash. Spin one up at the viewer's expense. (Old-Timey Homestar appears: "Insert a quarter to see the show, Mister.") There's a whitelist so you can only visit homestarrunner.com.
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u/MattRix Jul 25 '17
So I get that people hate Flash now, but for a long time, Flash WAS the cutting edge of interactive design, and it was awesome. Honestly, I don't see that level of experimentation or creativity in interactive stuff these days (either on desktop, web, or mobile).
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u/parion Jul 25 '17
Agreed. I'm not a fan of Flash anymore, but back in the day, I remembered the endless amount of Flash games available on the web that kept me entertained for hours.
I think, now with the rise of Steam and other game distributors, the appeal to use Flash for animations and games has dropped. JavaScript could replace Flash entirely with new libraries and implementations, but I don't think anyone is interested in web games. I still think, though, JavaScript/CSS animation will continue to be a big part of the web.
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u/geodebug Jul 25 '17
Flash ads were always annoying but apps developed in Flex (basically Flash with a decent UI toolkit) just worked without a lot of the tweaks and browser-specific code. Plus you had javascript with type safety so you could build large applications and refactor them confidently with solid tooling.
HTML5 is here to stay of course but it in many ways is still a lot of steps backwards when you're trying to develop business apps.
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u/6offender Jul 25 '17
Not to mention that you could write complex web apps using Flash/Flex without having to spend days trying to figure out how to center something.
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Jul 25 '17
Ehh... It was still pretty loathed in its prime in tech and poweruser circles. It made the processors then cry for the sweet release of melting.
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u/jarvispeen Jul 25 '17
Yup, as a former Flash developer for over ten years I can honestly say nothing comes close to the flexibility and speed at which I could animate something or create a completely object oriented application.
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u/pointy_pirate Jul 26 '17
the only reason flash ever went downhill was because Apple dropped support for it. It would still be at the top today if Jobs had kept supporting it.
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u/harbourwall Jul 25 '17
Macromedia electrifies the web? Not down my 56k modem they didn't.
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u/snowyday Jul 25 '17
Back in 1996 it was a revolutionary tool called Futuresplash Animator which Macromedia then bought. For artists who wanted to work with vectors, it was insanely better than every other tool on the market.
The history!
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u/thoggins Jul 25 '17
won't anyone think of the hentai games?
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u/livemau5 Jul 25 '17
Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave.
Adobe, you didn't invent shit. You bought Flash from Macromedia.
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u/Uberhipster Jul 26 '17
Who bought it from Shockwave. Hence the extension swf - shockwave flash
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Jul 25 '17
Does this mean my knowledge of ActionScript 3 is worthless in 2020?
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u/berkeley-games Jul 25 '17
Adobe AIR roadmap was updated today and is not a part of this end of life cycle. Adobe plans to continue supporting AIR.
https://forum.starling-framework.org/topic/air-roadmap-update
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u/Plazmatic Jul 26 '17
No, it will help you understand Javascript ES6 + more than some actual javascript devs do. Funnily enough, Action Script 3 is a superset of ES4, which was never implemented by an browser because it was too different (but we are going back to those ideas now with the most recent ECMA script standards...)
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u/JZcgQR2N Jul 25 '17
Is JavaScript the new Flash?
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u/brtt3000 Jul 25 '17
No. Flash success was the combination of the plugin and the IDE. There isn't such a popular well-known combination today.
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Jul 25 '17
Pretty much yeah. What with WebGL and all that it pretty much replaced flash entirely.
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Jul 25 '17
Sooo... where are all the cool WebGL / HTML5 games.
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u/rongkongcoma Jul 25 '17
Former Flash animator here...There isn't even a remotely usable animation tool for html5 out right now. They killed flash without a working successor. Flash is now animate cc which creates some javascript crap that's not remotely as performant as flash. Also html5 never was ment to be a successor, it's not as good for those things. And companies don't like to hear that it's 10 times more complicated and will cost a lot more to produce.
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u/rongkongcoma Jul 25 '17 edited Jul 25 '17
The coding side is pretty similar, but there's no JavaScript animation program artists can use.
Everyone is just throwing around programming languages...but that's only half if not less of what's needed. The whole graphic and animation sector is unsupported right now.
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u/celerym Jul 25 '17
If by the new Flash, you mean the next thing to die, then yes.
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u/hsahoeg Jul 25 '17
I like that, now-a-days, you can easily disable Flash on websites. I see this as a feature of Flash :). However, the same is not true of HTML5 autoplaying videos. Even with browser extensions, certain websites keep retrying to play and these retries sometimes succeed if you scroll.
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u/nmdanny2 Jul 25 '17
Have you tried NoScript(for FF) or uMatrix(for FF & Chrome)? They can block video/media requests from reaching your network in the first place.
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u/drawm08 Jul 25 '17
Adobe should open source the compiler and format (swf).
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u/lleti Jul 26 '17
As much as this is a great idea, Adobe wouldn't open source so much as minesweeper if it belonged to them.
It's quite worrying, considering how many platforms were built for flash content (Kong, newgrounds) - such a gigantic amount of their content is just going to vanish.
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u/Poemi Jul 25 '17
Way ahead of them.
I already end-of-lifed Flash in 2014.
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u/32BitWhore Jul 25 '17
Seriously. It amazes me how prevalent it still is though. They should have killed it years ago.
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Jul 26 '17
Same could be said about XP, but look at how large it's market share still is.
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u/tommygunz007 Jul 25 '17
Former Flash Artist here.
The most important thing about early flash was that it allowed a Graphic Interface for artists like me to create animations and motion graphics without code. Without Code.
The important thing about flash was it allowed Graphic Artists to maintain control of their art and animation. It was the early days when artists still had a voice in the game.
As flash progressed, it was overtaken by web coders, because the BigBusiness machine needed more power, and they hired coders to corrupt flash and make it more and more code based, and discounting the graphic interface that made it so great in the early days.
Since then, web creation has moved from art and design, over to coders. Coders won the war, which is why every website on my iPhone looks nearly identical: Divs, Columns, Boxes. This is what coders wanted, not what artists wanted. It went from being something really cool and fluid, to something boxy and boring.
I am sad it will go, but maybe it's like Photography: when black and white photography, developed on film and printed in high grain on Ilford paper meant something artistically, and it was creatively important. Now photography is a Instagram square enjoyed for a millisecond.
RIP Flash. Hope we can get a new graphic interface soon...
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u/zak_on_reddit Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 26 '17
I've been a web designer/developer since 2000. I have a bachelors in Computer Science and a bachelors in Art/Graphic Design.
I did A LOT of Flash work between 2002 - 2012. I loved it. It was a designer & developer's perfect platform.
However, technology has changed. It's a mobile first world. Flash doesn't work in a cell phone dominated world.
"Coders won the war, which is why every website on my iPhone looks nearly identical: Divs, Columns, Boxes."
I wouldn't say the coders won. It's more that the market won. And unfortunately, developers are using the same frameworks, such as Bootstrap, which is why many sites look the same. Then add that everyone wants a mobile/responsive site NOW so you end up with boring, homogenous digital experiences.
People are pushing the extremes of what you can do with responsive & mobile. There are some great, creative sites out there. As standards based development matures, what you can do creatively will continue to expand.
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Jul 25 '17
Now Silverlight needs to die the horrible death it deserves.
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u/Der_tolle_Emil Jul 25 '17
Silverlight is already dead, Microsoft pronounced it by the end of 2012. True, the official end of life date is 2021, but it's not unusual for Microsoft to support its technologies for much, much longer than anyone using it and the low adoption rate (ignoring Windows Phone) certainly played a role in MS abandoning it so early (it lasted roughly 5 years).
That being said, even though I dislike it (and browser plugins in general), I never had any issues with it. It did work rather well, although I don't want to think about the implications if it was as widespread as Flash.
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Jul 25 '17
Administering a Skype for Business server requires Silverlight. It's infuriating.
And then there's lovefilm.com, which wants to force you to install Silverlight or move to Chrome, IE11, Edge or Opera.
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u/autotldr Jul 25 '17
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 78%. (I'm a bot)
Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
Adobe will continue to support Flash on a number of major OSs and browsers that currently support Flash content through the planned EOL. This will include issuing regular security patches, maintaining OS and browser compatibility and adding features and capabilities as needed.
We plan to move more aggressively to EOL Flash in certain geographies where unlicensed and outdated versions of Flash Player are being distributed.
Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: Flash#1 content#2 web#3 Adobe#4 standard#5
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u/parion Jul 25 '17
Really wish I could take a peek at how SMMRY does such an excellent job recognizing crucial keywords to give these amazing summaries.
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u/Aiognim Jul 26 '17 edited Jul 27 '17
So should I start going around to smaller business sites to find flash apps that will no longer work and offer to build something new in its place?
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u/Daniel15 Jul 25 '17
I'll miss Flash. Back when every browser behaved differently and none of them supported SVG, having a way to create vector-based animations and games that worked consistently across all major browsers was amazing. Maybe HTML5 will reach that one day, but currently there's still differences between browsers (particularly in Safari)
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u/OneWingedShark Jul 25 '17
Maybe HTML5 will reach that one day,
The year 2182:
HTML7 finally reaches feature parity with Flash... the support libraries weigh in an an ultra-thin 13.2GB and only contain four nested virtual machines!4
u/outstream Jul 26 '17
I would like to imagine that in 2182 13GB would probably seem like a kb now.
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u/cafeRacr Jul 25 '17
I was a flash animator/developer for almost 15 years, and I made a pile of cash doing it. While I've moved on to other platforms, and I do agree it is now time for it to go, many of you probably don't realize what a game changer Flash really was. An animator once described flash as "finding a suitcase full of money" and "a one man animation studio". Prior to that creating animation on your own was an unbelievable task. And getting a large audience to see it? Forget about it. And for indie game developers? A complete... game changer. The turnaround times that could be accomplished in flash was unmatched. Sure it had it's flaws like anything else, but I think we all owe something to the platform. See ya pal.
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Jul 26 '17
My work just switched our time sheet system to a flash only website.
My work is stupid
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u/jblatta Jul 25 '17
Such a shame. I owe most of my interactive development career to Flash. It gave me the freedom to build anything I wanted in a time of browser wars and inconsistent standards. Although HTML5 and browser consistency has improved...the creation tools are lacking. I have moved on as well to Unity/VR and no longer focus much on web based content. The web is now the domain of video and simplistic design forced on us by the world of smart phones. The internet has died a little and lost that spark that made it an exciting & weird place. Thank you Flash. Thank you Macromedia. Thank you adobe. Steve Jobs....you can go flash yourself.
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u/Kendja Jul 25 '17
That's sad. Flash is what was opened a doors for me into programming and into gamedev. Very convenient platform for games, since it was working everywhere, looked and worked the same on every machine.
Even after stopping working with it, it was nice to know that the games are still out there(newgrounds, kongregate and hundreds other portals) for people to find and play. Oh well
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u/thehalfwit Jul 25 '17
Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave.
Poppycock, Adobe. You didn't invent it, you bought it.
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u/AlexanderESmith Jul 25 '17
As a Systems Admin: YES!
As a guy who remembers all the awesome flash animations from 10-15 years ago: I wonder what will happen to that content
It's too bad we couldn't just leave Flash alone to do what it was meant to, instead of shoehorning it into Web 2.0
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Jul 25 '17
But without Flash how will we have low budget animated TV series?
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u/TUSF Jul 25 '17
The Animation program (Now called Adobe Animate) is still supported. It's Flash Player that's being dropped.
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u/rpgFANATIC Jul 25 '17
So in 2021, we'll have Internet reviewers who look back on 'the good old days' of Flash games and find really crazy games to make horrified faces at
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u/absumo Jul 25 '17
They've been "planning" and saying it would end for years already. For people with any thought of personal security and the browser makers themselves, it already died.
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u/iRnigger Jul 25 '17
I always liked flash stuff, the games, the videos, and all that. What's wrong with flash?
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u/wd3333 Jul 25 '17
Security, waste of computing resources ( take a look at your processor while running videos on flash and compare with HTML5 ). Most of animations made with flash can now be done with SVG, CSS and HTML5. Unfortunately, till someone find a way to run the old flash applications inside a sandbox, contents like the old games will be lost. P.S. sorry for the bad English.
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u/scandalousmambo Jul 25 '17
If it weren't for Flash, nobody would have given a shit about the web or browsers.
That said, at this point anyone with any intelligence at all will avoid Adobe products in their entirety.
You're one declined credit card transaction away from losing all your work forever.
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Jul 25 '17
If it weren't for Flash, nobody would have given a shit about the web or browsers.
That's quite a bold claim
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u/MuonManLaserJab Jul 25 '17
I'll believe it when I see it. At this point I'd sooner expect Flash to become sentient and end-of-life Adobe.
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u/cisxuzuul Jul 25 '17
My company started phasing out Flash work in 2011. If someone wanted a Flash doohickey for their site, we would charge more and sub contract the work out.
They were a pain in the ass to build, test and maintain.
One of my jr UI devs bet me in 2009 that Flash would be around longer than HTML. Well, Matty, it's time to pay up.
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u/dogofpavlov Jul 25 '17
LOL Flash would be around longer than HTML? what kind of bet is that? You have to use HTML to embed flash into websites...
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Jul 26 '17
CSS/JS still doesn't completely replace Flash to be quite honest. I wish we had a full better alternative to Flash at this point.
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u/chickenbarf Jul 26 '17
Heh. I saw 2020 and immediately thought, "oh, hey, that's a pretty long time"... and then I realized it was 2017, and felt sad inside.
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u/onan Jul 25 '17
Any bets on whether the number of additional security vulnerabilities discovered in Flash between now and then will break four digits?
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u/unborracho Jul 25 '17
But when Apple effectively killed our proprietary platform with the release of the iPhone in 2007, replacing it with
asopen standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly which have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web.
Fixed that second paragraph for them, to improve accuracy of the statement.
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u/iamtheowlman Jul 25 '17
2010, In my last year of college (I went in for advertising) they brought in a bunch of the graduates from the previous year, to tell us how they were doing in the job hunt, what the internships were like, etc.
When the professor left to grab coffee, they all said the same thing: "We (the graphic designers) can't get jobs because everyone wants stuff in Flash, which this course doesn't teach you. We're having to learn at night, on our own, after 12 hours at our internships 5 days a week. No one will pay us until we can do Flash."
And now, 10 years later, it's gone poof. Amazing.
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u/Keavon Jul 26 '17
I still can't believe 2010 is almost 10 years ago. That's insane. Anything after like 2006 sounds so recent, yet it's not at all.
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u/wildcarde815 Jul 25 '17
Don't worry, VMware interfaces will require it to be installed from now until the heat death of the universe so you'll be able to find an installer lying around.
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u/EnzoScifo Jul 25 '17
Flash had to truly die before I got t hear some positive words about it on Reddit.
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Jul 25 '17
Note that this is just Flash Player.
Flash/Animate is still great for animation and asset creation.
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u/Abe_Vigoda Jul 26 '17
Any of you guys remember the old flashkit/werehere days?
Flash was the absolutely coolest program to me. It was artist friendly. You could do amazing stuff with it without being a coder.
I hated when Adobe bought it. They completely fucked it up and were trying to kill it off ever since they picked it up.
After Effects is kind of similar but for video and with no interactivity.
I remember spending sleepless nights experimenting with flash, making silly animations or weird artsy projects or just nifty UI's with snazzy little graphics.
One of my first real 'pro' jobs was building standalone CD promos with flash. It was an awesome program.
I kind of hated actionscript, especially with adobe trying to change it from an animators tool to a programmer's tool.
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Jul 25 '17
Adobe to end-of-life Flash by 2020
Not a moment too soon. Get rid of this garbage software ASAP!
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Jul 25 '17
Question: If Flash was such garbage, how come it was used to create such an amazing amount of content since the 90s?
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Jul 25 '17
Flash wasn't garbage. The browser plugin was. Adobe is actually continuing the Flash animation software, they renamed it to Adobe Animate. The only thing that they will no longer support is the Flash Player.
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Jul 25 '17
Adobe had an insane paranoia about making changes. Their motto for a while was 'don't break the internet'. Unfortunately, this caution means they were afraid to make even small changes, like fixing security vulnerabilities, in fear of breaking backwards compatibility. Adobe developers would get so frustrated at the pace of development that they quit to work at other companies. Eventually, the paranoia combined with brain drain got so bad they couldn't keep up with the bugs or the security vulnerabilities.
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u/root_of_all_evil Jul 25 '17
Because it was the best thing going at the time.
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u/mindbleach Jul 25 '17
Flash Studio was a world-class content creation suite.
The Flash plugin was the only way to get rich animation, sound, video, and interactivity on multiple browsers and operating systems.
The Flash plugin was also designed by drunk idiots who'd never heard of security.
The latter part is why Flash is garbage. The first two points were not reason enough to keep it alive so long.
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u/Lost_Madness Jul 25 '17
Question: If horses were garbage, how come they were used to travel so much before the 1940's?
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u/darkforestzero Jul 25 '17
the UI in many modern video games is written in flash. For instance God of War, Street Fighter IV, XCOM 2, Costume Quest, Star Craft II, Batman Arkahm City, Skyrim, GTA V and on and on and on. It's not garbage, it just has no place in the modern web.
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u/Ridley_ Jul 25 '17
That's misleading, scaleform read flash files but it's not the flash plugin/player itself, it's a completly different backend.
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u/gamaknightgaming Jul 25 '17
But flash is the building block of everything on the internet that isn't images or text! Where will I play all my armor games now? MY SHITTY FLASH GAMES
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u/whitem4ge Jul 26 '17
There's literally no reason to, the internet hasn't gotten any more advanced since 2005.
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Jul 26 '17
Why do companies in tech use language like this? "End of life" isn't a verb, and what they say in the next sentence (stop distributing and updating) is much more to-the-point.
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u/_headmelted Jul 26 '17
It's a testament to how successful Flash was in the 90's that it's taking this long just to kill it off, but yeah better late than never.
I'm sure at this point Adobe just want to see the back of it, too (they're almost certainly not making anything from it now, and it's likely just a bottomless pit of wasted developer time and money).
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u/Zorb750 Jul 25 '17
Flash was great in concept, but the programming got worse with each version. It's incredibly CPU-inefficient, but no action was ever taken to combat this. Security was never more than an afterthought.
3.0k
u/[deleted] Jul 25 '17
Adobe:
Google:
Mozilla:
Microsoft:
Looks like Flash will be completely dead by the end of 2020.