[alwillis]

> It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash.

Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.

The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to the industry.

But if you read his letter, what he said made total sense: Flash was designed for the desktop, not phones—it certainly wasn't power or memory efficient. Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.

And of course Flash was proprietary and 100% controlled by Adobe.

Jobs made the case for the (still in development) HTML5--HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

What people don't seem to remember: most of the industry thought the iPhone would fail as a platform because it didn't support Flash, which was wildly popular.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

[johnfn]

> Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.

I’m really surprised anyone could say that. To my view, “Thoughts on Flash killed Flash” is about as true as “the sky is blue”. It’s fairly clear to me that without a strong stance, a less principled mobile OS (like Android) would have supported it, and probably Flash would still be around today. Apple’s stance gave Google the path to do the same thing, and this domino effect led to Flash being discontinued 7 years later. You say 7 years as if it’s a long time from cause to effect, but how long would you estimate it would take a single action to fully kill something as pervasive as Flash, which was installed on virtually every machine (Im sure it was 99%+)? You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.

[alwillis]

> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.

First, there's no way Flash would still be alive today; Apple might have sped up its demise but it had so many disadvantages, it was just a matter of time and it was controlled by one company.

Remember that the web standards movement was kicking into high gear around the same time; we had already dodged a bullet when Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.

The whole point of the Web Standards movement was to get away from proprietary technologies.

> You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.

Safari has never been the dominant browser; not sure why you think that. Other than the United States, iPhone marketshare is under 50% everywhere else.

Even in 2025, Safari's global marketshare is about 15% [1] and that's after selling 3 billion devices [2].

[1]: https://backlinko.com/browser-market-share

[2]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/31/apple-has-now-sold-three-b...

[com2kid]

> Microsoft attempted to take over the web with Active X, Silverlight, JScript.

Silverlight was a responsive to flash.

It was also remarkably open for the time, ran on all desktop platforms, and in an alternative universe Silverlight is an open source cross platform UI toolkit that runs with a tiny fraction of the system requirements of electron, using a far superior tool chain.

[afavour]

FWIW Google did support Flash on Android for a time.

[SXX]

Getting rid of Flash was never ever about using HTML5 for Apple. It was always to obviously to make battery life better and ofc adding more experiences to their walled garden store.

Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox. And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged. E.g like Screen Wake Lock API finally implemented in iOS 16 but to this day broken on Home screen. And like not quite obvious to use in Safari too.

Because working web standards support would make cross platform mobile apps possible outside of App Store.

[sgt]

> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features

I don't think it's lagging behind that much, and you could also argue that you don't need to implement every single feature blindly. A lot of features are strictly not needed, and if you do decide to do them - it needs to be done in an efficient way.

There's a reason why Safari is considered the most energy efficient browser.

[alwillis]

> And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged.

From "Every site can be a web app on iOS and iPadOS" [1]

Now, we are revising the behavior on iOS 26 and iPadOS 26. By default, every website added to the Home Screen opens as a web app. If the user prefers to add a bookmark for their browser, they can disable “Open as Web App” when adding to Home Screen — even if the site is configured to be a web app. The UI is always consistent, no matter how the site’s code is configured. And the power to define the experience is in the hands of users.

This change, of course, is not removing any of WebKit’s current support for web app features. If you include a Web Application Manifest with your site, the benefits it provides will be part of the user’s experience. If you define your icons in the manifest, they’re used.

We value the principles of progressive enhancement and separation of concerns. All of the same web technology is available to you as a developer, to build the experience you would like to build. Giving users a web app experience simply no longer requires a manifest file. It’s similar to how Home Screen web apps on iOS and iPadOS never required Service Workers (as PWAs do on other platforms), yet including Service Workers in your code can greatly enhance the user experience.

Simply put, there are now zero requirements for “installability” in Safari. Users can add any site to their Home Screen and open it as a web app on iOS26 and iPadOS26.

[1]: https://webkit.org/blog/17333/webkit-features-in-safari-26-0...

[alwillis]

> Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox.

Really?

Safari was first to ship :has() in March 2022; Firefox couldn't ship until December 2023.

I listed a bunch of web platform features Safari shipped before Chrome and Firefox [1][2].

Even now, Firefox hasn't shipped Anchor Positioning, Scroll-driven animation, text-wrap: pretty, Web GPU, Cross-document view transitions, etc. but Safari and Chrome have.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074789

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44067706

[leptons]

>but Safari and Chrome have

Not on iOS. On iOS, it's all Safari, all the time, for every web browser app. Apple forbids any web browser engine other than Safari on iOS.

[al_be_back]

> It was always to obviously to make battery life better

I don't think it was about saving battery power. Jobs was smart in convincing people to focus on web stack for apps - Flash was king of rich app experiences, and java [inc applets] for corporate apps. Apps went iOS native batteries got drained in other ways (large video & photos, prolonged use). Just think of the costs, energy and time spent over the next 15 years maintaining multiple code-bases to deliver one service. The web remained open, where as mobile went native and closed-in.

[toast0]

> Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.

That's a ton of ram. I recall spending a lot of time on flash websites in the early 2000s in college on the school issued laptop with maybe 64 mb of ram (and I think maybe pentium iii 650mhz so more cpu oomph)

[alwillis]

Remember that iOS, unlike desktop operating systems, didn't have virtual memory and could only run one app at a time.

[toast0]

One app at a time means even less memory pressure. Plenty for flash!

[GTP]

Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash, Adobe broke their agreement with Apple by releasing Photoshop for PCs before the version for Mac for the first time. This could sound as a conspiracy teory, and I don't know how much evidence we have that this might have been the reason (or one of the reasons) behind the decision. But, given Jobs' personality, I think this is plausible.

We should also consider that, having Flash support, would have opened the door to non-Apple-approved apps running on iPhones, something that Apple has always strenously opposed. All-in-all, at the time I got the feeling that the technical reasons provided by Jobs weren't the main reasons behind the decision.

[mrankin]

Flash and open source actionscript allowed devs to completely circumvent the Apple App Store. That was a direct threat to the iOS business model at the time.

[alwillis]

> Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash

Flash was never supported on iOS; Steve's letter was to confirm Apple wasn't ever going to support Flash on iOS; it remained available on MacOS.

I don't think the Photoshop thing had any affect on supporting Flash on iOS.

[GTP]

You're right, I did a quick search and apparently they still considered supporting it though [0], but they didn't they the results they were hoping for.

[0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/27/apple-tried-to-help-adobe-bri...