[niftich]

Steve Jobs killed Flash by banishing it from iOS, and then WHATWG, the Chrome team [1], and Mozilla [2][3] started rushing to cram [4] all sorts of JS APIs into the web platform instead. Still, it took almost 5 years to catch HTML5 up to the capabilities provided by Flash [5] -- and that's if all vendors agree on which APIs to support [6]. Mobile Safari right now lags behind, which is not to the detriment of Apple: every developer wanting presence on iOS will adopt Apple's preferred workflow, and to date they have had no strong incentive to promote web-based apps, unlike their rivals Google and Mozilla.

Adobe tried to play it cool by pivoting to AIR, a Flash-to-Native generator, which luckily they already had. Meanwhile they put out a press release trying to position their upcoming tools as the preferred toolset for HTML5 production, but this mostly hasn't panned out.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12174503#12175561 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12131403 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12192509#12194161 [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12129691#12135175 [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12259435#12259940 [6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12758085#12760949

[nashashmi]

I liked flash a lot. But the problem with Adobe/Macromedia was they never gave it too much development time. It took a long time for flash to start using the GPU. It took a while for flash to start its way towards mobile, before abandoning mobile.

Flash could have been a platform that apps could have been built on and displayed in an app store, but they never promoted anything close to it. Flash could have been a complete browser, but they never cared. Flash could have been a cloud desktop (like Goowy Desktop [bought and shut by AOL]). Flash could have been an OS (like Chrome OS or Android OS). Flash was already a pretty good PDF reader and worked faster than Adobe PDF in the browser, but no one knew.

Flash had so much potential, but Macromedia did not have much money to invest and Adobe bought it without any imagination.

All efforts in Flash went to waste and set the industry 5-10 years behind ... so far behind that we now have to wait for HTML5 to be better ... slowly.