Flash was a proprietary technology that bootstrapped the early web but was doomed due to a combination of ongoing security issues (which pushed browsers to move it to a plugin and disable autoplay) and poor support for emerging platforms.

> Consumers for the most part have no idea what tech lies under the hood for the websites they visit.

The vast majority of of the tools and languages that lie under the hood for websites, especially on the frontend, is built on open source tech.

There are plenty of shady things that Apple has done, but it is ridiculous to blame Apple for single handedly taking down a doomed technology. This is an example of Apple's prescient side, not it's nefarious side.

Hehe. Not really. Jobs may have put one nail in the coffin, but Adobe killed flash. And flash was already dying because of abusive ads and HTML5 before Apple said anything. Here’s one of the Flash developers backing that up: https://m.slashdot.org/story/324267

This. Then Steve Jobs killed Flash.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100502021750/https://www.apple...

Eh, it was very much on the way out already, and mostly used for things which didn't have brilliant alternatives at the time (e.g. videos) and sites like YouTube had been experimenting with "HTML5 video". Few people really liked Flash (outside of usage for games, which was and remains a valid use case IMO), but it was just used because browsers just didn't support a lot of things, and once HTML5 took off Flash usage dropped. HTML5 killed off Flash.

This is why Apple could get away with just not supporting Flash, which certainly sped up this pre-existing trend, but the idea that "Apple killed off Flash" is a serious misreading of history.

What are you referring to when you say "when Apple killed Flash"?

The big outcry was back when Apple made it clear that they would never add Flash support to iOS. But that support never existed in the first place -- one can hardly "kill" something which was never alive.

Desktop Safari still supports Flash, for now. It's off by default (with a "click to enable" icon), but that's no different from how it's handled in other browsers. All signs indicate that they intend to remove Flash support with the next major release, but that just puts them on the same track as everyone else.

That wasn't what Apple (Steve Jobs) claimed... [1]"Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, the world is moving to HTML5." Also Flash doesn't crash Chrome, doesn't crash FF for ages either. No clue about Safari the quote was debunked by everyone, even Apple backtracked on it to a more "we meant Safari in certain cases" type of statement. we can all move along.

[1]http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/steve-jobs-unleashes-...

This old chestnut? This many years on and people still say this?

Adobe killed Flash through their own engineering incompetence, not Apple through policy. Apple's policy merely reflected the liability that the Flash plugin posed.

Adobe could not deliver a version of Flash on mobile that didn't chew up CPU cycles. They tried on Android, it was rubbish, and Adobe themselves deprecated it in 2012. That's only two years after Steve Jobs published Thoughts on Flash.

For Flash content to make any sense on mobile, with its lack of mouse pointer and persistent keyboard, developers could use Adobe AIR, a separate SDK from that used to make Flash web applets. One of the earliest apps ported from Flash to AIR, Machinarium, was a memory and battery hog — not even a new runtime could let Flash content from running unacceptably on iOS.

And all this in addition to Flash spinning up fans on desktops and laptops due to its inefficiency, let alone mobiles. Not to mention the security vulnerabilities in the Flash plugin and renowned instability that caused it to be the major source of browser crashes in Mac OS X.

Between Adobe deprecating their own mobile Flash plugin for running applets in Android browsers, the abysmal performance of Adobe AIR apps, I'm quite happy to say the one to kill Flash was Adobe, not Apple.

Can we put this one to rest at last?

> Yet their influence is so great that they can kill platforms just by not supporting them

Well, aside from not supporting a platform from a vendor that can barely support it themselves, I'd say Apple is more responsible for the rise in adoption of HTML 5 features (WebKit invented <canvas>, iPhone and Android together accelerated websites to display video in HTML players rather than depend on Flash/Silverlight, etc.) than the killing of something that was already dead.

Apple merely saw the writing on the wall. Perhaps they did contribute to making it happen quicker but it would always have happened.

This is such nonsense.

Flash was available on Android, has no company hobbling its development, and still ran like cold molasses. It was canned by Adobe years before Flash was discontinued.

Your arguments remind me of the same Adobe fanboyism with which Thoughts on Flash was met at the time it was published — a decade has passed, evidence has disproven everything you’ve said, and you haven’t caught up because facts mustn’t get in the way of decrying the Apple bogeyman.

It turned Windows machines into jet planes, practically sterilised MacBook users who mistakenly ran Flash applets with their machines on their laps, and ran so poorly on Linux that running the Windows version in WINE worked much more; the Android version was over before it started, but no, “Apple blocked muh APIs”.

Give it up: Flash died the death it rightfully deserved. It has its time. That time passed.

And yet Flash persisted across the web, until a giant like Apple decided to de-platform them in favor of its own lock-in solution.

Consumers for the most part have no idea what tech lies under the hood for the websites they visit.

It wasn't good on mobile. And at that point it was barely good on desktop, too. By good we mean: power and memory consumption, security vulnerabilities etc.

You just don't remember how badly Adobe mismanaged the whole thing.

The competition with native may have been part of the consideration, but this was far from the full argument. It was also much too bad. It was power hungry, as noted by others, because flash content tended to be driven by a million timers, but also, its interaction model was a disaster on touch screens. Even on desktop, one of the problems with Flash content was confusion about whether UI events were owned by some object inside the Flash widget or the enclosing browser. Plus, Flash was a whole universe of nonstandard UI elements that would have made uptake of the iphone interface more difficult.

There is no part of me that believes the idea that "Flash devs could have coded circles around objective C devs." If the mobile app explosion had happened in Flash, it wouldn't have been an explosion. It would have been a flop.

Not exactly comparable. Flash, at its height, had pretty much the "multimedia in browser" market cornered with draconian vendor lock-in effects. They didn't need to hurry that much with fixing issues, because what are you gonna do if you are not satisfied with the Adobe Flash plugin? Run your favourite Flash game with Microsoft Silverlight? Use the open-source plug-in that could only run some Flash 1.0 animations?

At least with browsers you can easily switch vendors (the whole point of standardization and techs like WASM), or even fork your own.

Even if I don't like Apple or Steve Jobs that much, I must say they did one great thing killing off Flash by not allowing it on the original iPhone.

Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one.

At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performance issues, etc. However, all of these things could've been ignored or overcome.

The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen.

Flash was also proprietary. It's closed-source, patent-encumbered, and has a single implementation. It's completely under the control of Adobe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard

> For those users, a lot of major sites still "don't work properly" today because of Apple's arrogance.

As Apple explained countless times, it is not because of "arrogance" that they did not support Flash. Adobe weren't able to supply them with a working mobile Flash runtime, and Flash's resource use was a big problem (memory, CPU, battery life), so it couldn't run on mobile devices. Recall that the first iPhones had severely limited RAM (128MB!) and CPUs, and even when, years later, Android devices with Flash bundled were released, they couldn't run it terribly well. Flash was also a massive security and stability headache: as Apple loved to point out, it was the single largest source of application crashes on OS X.

This is a thing that literally never happened. No one said anything like this until after "Thoughts on Flash"

This isn’t a correct take, and your facts are wrong. For one thing, Flash never existed on iPhones to begin with, so there was nothing to remove.

Adobe spent years talking about their plans to get Flash working on phones, but never succeeded, not on iOS or on Android. Come on — if Flash were really that great on mobile devices, why isn’t everyone still using it on Android? Answer — sucked.

Performance and stability sucked, security sucked. Apple said for years that their most commonly-reported crashes were caused by Flash. Flash was great for creators, one of the best such tools ever made, but after acquiring it from Macromedia, Adobe never improved the fundamentals.

Even more important, the interaction model didn’t work. Many Flash sites/apps depended on hover/mouseover which didn’t translate to touch screens. Neither Adobe nor anyone else has demonstrated how to make this work.

And as for destroying Adobe, well, they seem to be doing just fine, even though Flash has been gone for years. Apple never wanted Adobe to die, nor intended to. Steve Jobs made clear why Apple wasn’t supporting Flash on iOS, and his reasons still hold — https://newslang.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Thoughts-on-F...

Yes. Every SECOPS person let out a collective sigh of relief when the weekly p0 patches for flash stopped coming. Apple may have been trying to push towards 'native' apps but that was almost certainly secondary; safari was leading the way on html5 APIs.

Let's not pretend that the death of Flash was a tragedy.

Having been there at the time, this is the real answer. The Flash runtime had the distinction of being the #1 cause of crashes for Mac OS users, and Steve had f#@king had enough.

Lack of iOS compatibility was the nail in the coffin. Our web agency already hated Flash because it lacked any SEO capability, and the editor was shit. When the iPhone dropped it we had already been building websites without it for a couple of years. It was just a nice accelerator and allowed us to deny clients who requested Flash much easier.

Fast forward a couple more years and security became the main issue. Many of our clients were infatuated with their Flash websites and didn't want to move on. I just took down a Flash website (replaced with HTML/CSS/JS) in... 2022!