[60654]

About ten years ago Adobe made a strategic decision to kill Flash.

They stopped working on ActionScript tools (Flash IDE, AS3 compiler, etc) and switched all their web designer tooling (web animations etc) to Javascript. For a while they kept pushing out Flash security updates, but only because they had an enormous existing install base - but even so, that happened with a skeleton crew, and I'm not sure it's still being maintained.

So yeah, there's nothing stopping them now - because they already stopped years ago.

[kmeisthax]

Flash Player is still being maintained but only for the Chinese market and that contract expires next year. Adobe AIR is now owned by HARMAN because apparently a bunch of car infotainment systems used it.

Adobe's official answer to Flash on HTML5 was "rewrite your AS3 app in CreateJS and use Animate's HTML5 exporter to export your timeline as a series of bitmap spritesheets". This is not at all what Flash developers needed, but Adobe is a terrible steward of their own platforms, so its what they did.

As a result it forced a lot of Adobe's own customers to jump ship for greener pastures. The game developers jumped to Unity, the web developers to Lottie and GSAP, and the animators to Toon Boom.

[chrisco255]

Unity is way too heavy to replace the types of games that used to exist on Flash. And Lottie, GSAP, Framer Motion et al. don't really approach the comprehensive platform that was Flash. They're good animation primitives in their own right, but nothing to me has ever felt as intuitive as piecing a few key frames together in Flash and outputting a single file that could be dropped into a webpage with no scripting skills necessary.

[EamonnMR]

Playing with Godot is the first time I've felt like I had the power of Flash again. Though I never actually managed to write any games in flash, just animations, I had a pretty good idea of what you could do, and wanted to, but then flash died so I learned other tech.

[PaulHoule]

I've been thinking about mobile web UIs that lean heavily on WebGL and borrow ideas from video games and AR. I like the way some Nintendo DS games (say Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi) use touchscreens and also the Unreal framework's ability to animate humanoid characters.

I haven't seen it all put together into something that's really web friendly though.

[derefr]

> This is not at all what Flash developers needed

I mean, the product was already Adobe Animate for years at that point — a tool for animators, not IxD developers; where the intended export product is a video raw to be fed into AfterEffects, and any ActionScript support only existed to do things like character rigging automation, mouth-flap sequencing, etc. In other words, for replay-time (⇒ render-time) computation, not for interaction.

The Animate runtime had essentially, at that point, evolved out of being a software runtime per se, and had become something rather more like a custom demoscene "demo" runtime — an abstract machine tuned for compactly representing instructions to procedurally generate a video+audio stream when executed. Something more closely related to mod-tracker abstract machines than to a thing like the JVM.

I'm not surprised that everyone else left; the product for IxD folks ceased to exist in 2016, when it was renamed. That it still kind of worked if you did this or that was a coincidence, not intentional.

I am surprised that the animators themselves then left. What made them leave? The whole product still works just fine (if not better) for their use-case.

[Malic]

Car infotainment systems use Flash!?

That's ... terrifying.

[Matthias247]

What’s terrifying about it? Those are closed off systems hat provide exactly the user interface they are supposed to do. It’s not like they would run arbitrary code or are in any way modifiable by end users.

I’ve worked in Adobe air based infotainment systems 10 years back, and it was a great technology. Actionscript3/MXML was at that time far more advanced than JavaScript. It took maybe another 5 years and typescript and react to catch up.

[60secs]

Cars aren't closed systems. They have bluetooth/wifi. Increasing the attack surface on a vehicle security is negligence which can easily result in loss of property and life.

[YbW4PaUX7AjenKB]

Ah, yes, those closed off systems that are usually exploitable because no one designing them thinks about security... as shown by decision like using Flash.

[Matthias247]

At least in the projects I’ve been involved with a lot of thoughts went into system design and security. The flash layer is really just a user interface. It renders nothing else than whatever UI code was developed. To interact with other components in the car (whether it’s adjusting temperature or playing back music) it makes IPC calls to services which are responsible for that. So even media playback and potential associated security issues won’t have anything to do with the UI. It’s no better or worse security wise than if you would do the UI in QT or any of the proprietary frameworks that had been used before. It just provided way better tooling and graphical capabilities.

[cprecioso]

And also video game menus for most of the 2000s

[heleninboodler]

Not as terrifying as the fact that my new BMW has a node_modules.

[elzbardico]

Probably not modern systems. I hope.

[sidewndr46]

bitmap spritesheets? Wouldn't that be converting vector graphics into a bitmap format? So a huge step backwards?

[kmeisthax]

Yes. And also yes.

The graphics primitives the web provides are actually not that great at emulating Flash's specific graphics model. SVG and canvas differ from Flash in a few key areas, especially to do with masking; and WebGL/WebGPU are very low-level and rendering vectors on GPU is hell.

This could have been fixed by having Animate switch to an SVG+SMIL renderer for HTML5 projects, but Adobe wanted a quick fix to keep Animate relevant beyond Flash Player.

[InitialBP]

It's worth noting that there was a lot of pressure from the major browsers to deprecate flash due to security issues throughout the years. Flash produced a lot of great media but in the end it wasn't built with security in mind, and security is much more important today than it was 10 years ago. I don't know what it would take to revamp and then port flash over to some other platform, but I imagine that they'd be better off to just build a new system from scratch and aspire to capture a bit of that old flash magic.

List of CVEs for flash player - lots of 10s in there. https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...

[nimbix]

They made a suite of replacement tools under the name of "Adobe Edge", then they killed those as well.

[cogman10]

From what I've heard, it wasn't adobe that made that decision but rather apple. Apple disallowing flash on iOS was what caused adobe to kill flash.

[crazygringo]

Ultimately, it was Adobe. Jobs tried at length to get Adobe to produce a Flash runtime that was efficient enough for mobile battery use, and they just wouldn't/couldn't. So he just gave up and didn't support Flash. But he had no choice because it was such a battery hog, but end users wouldn't understand and would blame Apple for poor performance.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Adobe decided to promulgate a cesspool of insecure code. They did it to themselves.

[mrkramer]

>About ten years ago Adobe made a strategic decision to kill Flash.

And they did good. Flash was buggy af.