why adobe flash is no longer being used? For that matter what does it even do ??
In: Technology
So you probably use Chrome or maybe Firefox. Chances are you’ve installed an extension or two? Like an adblocker? Scary right? You don’t know whether you can trust the author to not do bad things to your computer either intentionally (malware) or unintentionally (security hole).
In the 2000’s, you had to install extensions called plugins to do things you now take for granted, like watching videos, playing 2D or 3d games, or even listening to music files. Anybody could write a plug-in and they could be risky since you didn’t know if you could trust what you were installing. Sometimes plugins would also force you to install weird toolbars on your browser or make you get pop ups on every site you went to. It was also a pain in the butt to find the right plug-in for the site you were using, make sure it was up to date, etc.
Flash was a very very popular and trustworthy one of these plugins that revolutionized media on the web and became a standard.
But now browsers can do all the things Flash can do without plugins, which means none of the risky drawbacks that come with plugins. So it’s better and safer to just do it the browser way instead of the plug-in way.
It’s interesting seeing all these comments on the history of Flash but I haven’t seen any mentions of Macromedia. Flash was developed by a small company and bought by Macromedia, an Adobe competitor who made multimedia authoring tools. Back in those days, multimedia meant CD-ROMs, something like a primitive modern website only static and housed on a CD. Macromedia seemed to see the writing on the wall and crafted Flash into the spiritual successor to their Director tool, which was mostly used for Cd-ROMs. They took Flash from obscurity and into ballooning popularity until Adobe bought them in 2005. Flash had become Macromedia’s crown jewel and for the most part Adobe axed all their other tools after the merger, so the general consensus was Adobe bought Macromedia to control Flash.
I’ve always wondered what would have happened if Adobe hadn’t bought Flash. In don’t think they were the worst steward of Flash but I always got the impression they let many aspects of it languish. Certainly, most of their other products (looking at you, Photoshop) have not progressed much during those 15 years. Seems to me that Macromedia were Adobe’s chief rival and because they were allowed to merge, we all got many years of Adobe market dominance where they just sat on their laurels and let the profits roll in.
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Other people have covered the what was it aspect, I’ll cover why it’s no longer being used. I worked at Apple when a lot of this was happening.
When Apple was developing the iPhone, they wanted to provide the best mobile computing experience they could. At the time, something like 90% of desktop Safari crashes originated in the Flash plugin, and it was a driver for calls to AppleCare, which was costing Apple money. And because it was a buggy mess, it was a primary vector for malware and other noxious code that wanted to gain access to your computer.
And it sucked power like nobody’s business, a Flash supporting browser could drain a laptop battery in a few hours; translated to a phone with a much smaller battery you’d need to plug the phone in by noon, which was something that was going to cause a PR shitstorm if the iPhone shipped that way.
All this probably wasn’t helped by the fact that there were engineers on the Apple payroll whose job was basically to babysit Adobe and try to clean up their buggy mess.
So the decision was made to not support Flash on iOS. It got a lot of criticism at the time, and Android actually tried to use “we support Flash” as a marketing point, but they ran hard into the battery drain issue and it got quietly shunted aside.
With mobile refusing/effectively unable to support Flash, and with an increasing percentage of website views coming from mobile platforms, Flash became less viable for websites: they’d be cutting off a lucrative chunk of their potential market since Apple users are more likely to pay for other things too. They could still use it for desktop systems, but they’d need to provide a mobile version too which doubled their workload, so a lot of them just dropped Flash in favor of the new HTML 5 which was adding support for a lot of things Flash had been used for, like video.
And that’s how and why Flash died.
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To really understand flash, you’ve got to understand what the internet was like before flash.
Up until the late 90s, web pages consisted of formatted text, images, links and external content. That’s not to say that web pages couldn’t have audio, or video or interactivity or dynamic content or whatever. They could and did. But it was all achieved with external content. That is content that was downloaded by the browser but then handed off to a plugin of some sort to actually process the data and display it to the user.
Setting up a browser in the late 90s was a mission. You’d start with both IE and Netscape. You’d need both because scripting worked differently on each browser and thus an interactive webpage built for one browser wouldn’t work on the other browser without being ported – something many web page builders never got around to doing.
Speaking of scripting, you would probably want to install a couple of extra scripting engines because web page builders could use any scripting language they liked, but neither browser supported all the common scripting language out of the box.
Then, you’d want to install a runtime environment (such as JRE) to handle applets. Applets were perhaps **the** way to handle graphics heavy interactive components in your webpage before flash.
Then you’d want at least four different media plugins – quicktime, real, windows media and something to handle MPEG formats. Because each plugin only played its own formats and of course, web page builders each had their own preferences..
Then, you’d want to get a bunch of codecs for each of your plugins. Because not only could web builders choose any container they liked for audio/video, they could encode the contained media with whatever codec they chose. Chances are that every new webpage you went to would have the audio / video in a container/codec combination you’d never encountered before so it would take half an hour of messing around to get the page to display correctly.
There were other common plugins you’d need to, like the acrobat reader plugin (pdf was just starting to hit the mainstream), shockwave plugin (released in 1995) and so on.
And after all that, every third website wouldn’t work because it required some exotic plugin or codec or whatever. Trying to view interactive web content in the late 90s S U C K E D.
Then, along came flash. It had actually been around for a few years already, but suddenly around 2000/2001 all the web pages were flash pages. No longer did you need to install multiple browsers and for each, several plugins and dozens of codecs. You just installed one browser and one plugin (flash) and boom! your computer could display every website, everywhere, everytime. It just worked. You can see the attraction.
At it’s peak, flash was installed on something like 92% of all computers. Something like 99% of all web connected computers had flash running. It was too tempting of a honeypot. If you could find a security vulnerability in flash, you could break into any computer, regardless of the operating system. Unfortunately this is what happens when a single piece of software captures a huge marketshare. And it’s always an expensive nightmare to fix. Similar thing happened to windows when it first grabbed a huge share of the OS market and it took Microsoft probably 5 versions over 15 years (and heaps of money) to fully get on top of the security issue.
Then came HTML5 that built a lot of the plugins into the browser. This has reintroduced the problem of unsupported codecs, which makes the step from flash to HTML5 a backward step in some respects. But the codec ecosystem is much more dominated by a few players (webm and mp4 h264) these days, so it’s less of a problem than it was in the 90s.
With alternatives that were kinda better and kinda not much worse, and a product that was still years away from fixing its security issues, developers started to move away from flash. And as they did, the pots of money that could be made from selling developer tools dried up. And as it did, so did Adobe’s enthusiasm for the product.
Flash was a rich media plugin for the early days of the internet when browser technologies and standards were far, far more primitive than they are now. In that era, browsers were generally only good for reading text, following links, and executing extremely simple javascript instructions or server calls. To watch a video, you had to actually download the file and play it back locally on your machine with your local player. Interactive content did exist, but was incredibly obtuse to build and maintain using the HTML and JS of the era, with very limited graphics rendering capability or dynamic content.
The principal thing Flash did, other than be one of the first easy-to-use in-browser video stream plugins, was make it easy to build interactive content and animations. Timeline animations and Actionscript were simple to use, easy to pick up by kids, and resulted in a huge boom of content on the internet, at a time where the only content your average person could ‘add’ to the internet would be a forum post on a BBS. Now you had a raft of games, videos, animations, voicework, just this huge flourishing of amateur content built by people for other people.
As internet standards caught up, Flash became obsolete as a way to develop rich media, as it was slow and proprietary. After a point there was nothing Flash could do that you couldn’t do yourself with a bit of work in JS, and its ubiquity resulted in it being targetted constantly for attack by hackers. There was an era where the easiest way to compromise a machine was to feed it a fake Flash plugin update and get the user to update, or sneak a malicious flash microapp into an ad delivery network that would auto-load on a user’s machine and compromise it. The final nail was when Steve Jobs refused to implement flash support in the iPhone.
It was never more than an intermediate stepping stone technology that helped bootstrap browsers into the multimedia delivery apps they are now, and for the time it did it’s job well.
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