[johnzim]

The inexplicable need to make the browser a second OS with worse everything boggles my mind. Especially on mobile devices which prize battery life.

It won't give users choice because we as an industry have again and again just chosen what's easiest for us instead of best for the customer.

We'd 100% still be using Flash if Apple hadn't refused to support it because of the battery and performance issues.

This forum spends a lot of time talking about the E**ification of everything and how user hostile many companies business practices are and then cheers tearing down the one walled garden a non-nerd can, by default, have a reasonable experience in.

[arp242]

> We'd 100% still be using Flash if Apple hadn't refused to support it because of the battery and performance issues.

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.

[ghusto]

I'm more or less with you, except for ...

> We'd 100% still be using Flash

Oh no? I remember that whole thing, and being thoroughly confused. I was able to watch videos on websites on my Android phone that iPhone users couldn't, and it had no noticeable effect on my battery life.

I'm not saying we should all go to defend Flash, but I strongly suspect Apple killing Flash had a lot more to do with the fact that using Flash got around App Store policies (you could do _a lot_ using Flash), than battery life.

[faeriechangling]

It maybe also had to do with Flash being one of the most insecure pieces of software ever devised?

It also had to do with Macromedia, at the time the iPhone was released, not giving every platform equal support? So Apple might have been in the position of negotiating with Adobe to get them to support iPhone? I can hardly blame them for pushing open standards like HTML5 and their own app store instead.

I honestly would give them more shit for moves like not supporting WebP seemingly to spite Google.

[ghusto]

Hilariously, the moment they start supporting WebP, they're hit with a zero day exploit ... from WebP

[ilkke]

And by "battery and performance issues" you mean "people being able to play an insane number of games in the browser and Apple not getting a cut of the ad money". Flash was running just fine on Android with much humbler specs than then-current iPhone.

[martimarkov]

There was no App Store when the iPhone came out so not really a valid point

[callalex]

Calling Flash “running just fine on Android” is extremely revisionist.

[Aerbil313]

There is a need for instant-install software and instant-access data. That is web. The web will be a second OS, because it needs to be, and well, it already is. Worse-everything won't be anymore as the web fully matures.

[smoldesu]

> We'd 100% still be using Flash if Apple hadn't refused to support it

I mean, that's hyperbole. Even in a flash-dominated web, there was still tons of non-flash technology being developed and distributed. In 2023 it would definitely be obsoleted, if for no reason other than Adobe having no incentive to keep it around. Apple's decision feels tangential relative to the progress of internet bandwidth, delivery technologies and even just the plain advent of YouTube obceleting 90% of the places Flash was used.

Flash would be dead today even if Apple did adopt it, because nobody in the industry wants to pay arbitrary taxes or kiss the proprietary ring. Their freedom on the web let them evolve and pick competitive replacements; Flash's death is hardly a defense of iron-fist ecosystem enforcement.

[johnzim]

I take your point that it's been a long time - in the intervening 17 years that particular technology would probably have died out on its own, but the primary complaints about the modern web stack on desktop aren't dissimilar from those that pertained to Flash in the day: memory hungry, power inefficient etc.

We're _still_ pumping out solutions that are easier for us and worse for customers on desktop and that's without the problem of software-driven user tracking, which was still just larval when the App Store opened up. In fact the only reason things aren't even _worse_ on desktop is that non-mobile devices are a much smaller % of where people spend their time, and therefore a smaller target with a more technically proficient user base.

There's an open ecosystem available to people where you can load any old crap onto your device. It's even cheaper than iOS. Please just let most of (not all, some crap still gets past App Review) the junk alight there and give people a choice to buy entry into the walled garden.

[smoldesu]

> and give people a choice to buy entry into the walled garden.

No, that's Apple's decision. The garden plays by Europe's rules, or people don't get a choice at all.

De-facto monopolies are not inherently justified. Feel any way you will about it as a consumer; Apple uses their power to exercise anti-competitive control over their ecosystems. Governments will now step in to regulate the market Apple has failed to make competitive.

[theshrike79]

It would most definitely still be alive. Source: I worked for a company whose web UI was 100% Flash/Shockwave.

If Steve Jobs hadn't publicly come against Flash and by extension forced the hand of everyone else, I'm pretty sure they'd still be using Flash just because change is hard.

The company went so far as to ship a specific browser to customers that could still run Flash instead of spending resources to rewrite the crappy UI =)

[smoldesu]

> If Steve Jobs hadn't [...] forced the hand of everyone else

Steve Jobs called where puck was going. Everyone knew the problem; clients were falling behind in capability, and web content was getting more advanced and bigger. 99% of the things we use the modern web for have solved this problem with HTML5 and Javascript. The other 1% got locked behind a novel invention called "The App Store", a new way to pay 30% of your digital revenue to support APIs you ought to have access to in the first place. That sad fact is the reason why every Mac is loaded with Electron apps and WebViews for basic messaging and music players. Apple might even try to fix it if they didn't make so much money selling memory upgrades.

If Apple's goal was to build on the web instead of gimping it for their own exploitation, they would have a leg to stand on.