I think it would have been muchmuch better, had Adobe open-sourced Flash and turned into a standard (like ECMA or something).
This could saved everyone in the industry a huge amount of effort porting, rewriting, etc. stuff to work on a platform where every browser does things in its own (horribly) inconsistent way.
And Flash was proprietary. And its behavior was opaque. And it didn't mesh at all with the rest of your browser/website experience, as it was an embedded thing.
It's not Flash's fault that it was misused. Flash was a great tool for creating and sharing resolution-agnostic high quality multimedia content using incredibly small amounts of bandwidth. You weren't supposed to build entire websites with it.
I really think from a business perspective Adobe bungled just about everything with Flash.
When the tide was turning against them with the rise of iOS, they should have full open sourced Flash player and made the authoring tools free to use, and encourage competing authoring tools.
Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers. Adobe's authoring tools would likely be best-of-breed and indispensable for high end web dev. All the security and performance and interoperability problems could have been solved over time. Flash is not all that different from an SVG to be honest.
One counterpoint to make: Flash sites were to my knowledge static layouts, the very opposite of responsive design. That is a big industry shift that Flash never made.
Instead Adobe threw in the towel and encouraged breaking a large portion of the old internet by deprecating it.
I think moves like these amount to hundred billion dollar drags on the economy. In a sense we're all a little bit poorer as a result. It's like digging a hole and filling it back up again. It's economic activity that benefits no-one.
And that's the point, flash has some real drawbacks and since it's not an open standard with multiple implementations, it stagnated while Adobe thought it had no competition.
What part of Adobe's past are you referring to? The part where they support open web standards? Or are you merely referring to Flash, that component that was doing more for "standards" back when browsers weren't.
IMO flash didn't fit into the open web vision, if I wanted to make my own browser, it couldn't gain traction until adobe decided to release flash for my browser
The mistake Adobe made was in canceling Flash instead of open sourcing it. Publish a spec and the let browsers implement the client side, then you can keep selling tools to make animations without everyone having to deal with the bug-riddled proprietary player Adobe clearly had no interest in properly maintaining to begin with.
It's kind of astonishing that all these years later we still don't have something equivalent in browsers. In theory they're Turing-complete and you can do whatever you want, but where's the thing that makes it that easy?
It was licensing issues. Their audio system used some proprietary stuff, for instance. I remember reading somewhere (perhaps here) that some of the Adobe Developers wanted to open source flash in the 2011-2012-ish time period, and it was the licensing that prevented them from doing that. Can't find the reference though (sorry!).
Now most people just do things in other languages. Flash was a very nice platform to target though. It got a lot of things right.
Flash was never a web standard, there weren't enough independent implementations, it was proprietary only, and it had mountains of security issues. I agree with trying to not break the web, but the death of Flash on the web was great, and the only tragedy is that there's still not a great, reasonable FOSS solution for running arbitrary swf files offline.
Flash was arguably never part of "The Web" in the first place. Not the open web anyway. It's a proprietary technology with a single implementation controlled and developed by a single company (Adobe) which is now ending support for it.
I still believe that Flash conceptually was a brilliant idea done terribly. It was slow, buggy, under developed functionality and a security nightmare.
But the idea of having a single file that could bundle, code, audio, graphics that was dead easy to build and could run independent of specific browsers and operating systems.
That is something magical. It is harder to build that kind of content today and near impossible to implement it on that scale today than it was 20 years ago.
Theoretically you could run a Flash file on a Linux system via Konqueror browser and it would be identical to that on Internet Explorer on Windows 98. This is something we have lost.
It is a shame that Adobe/Macromedia treated it like absolute trash. A free/open solution that had the same good properties would have been brilliant but it never happened. Instead we have the whole HTML5+ stack. I mean it is cool and has done some amazing things for the web, but it is also a massive pain to manage. One browser update and boom, something has broken - time to get digging on what happened! Now it works on Chrome but not Firefox!? Oh dear.
I don't miss Flash itself, I mean to be charitable, it was a mediocre product at best. But that vision implemented in a sensible fashion could have been wonderful. Could have allowed for the decentralized web to continue on a bit longer than it has.
Adobe could have fixed that part.
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