“Sources close to Adobe that have been briefed on the company’s future development plans have revealed this forthcoming announcement to ZDNet: Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations.. . .”Flash on mobile has always been a sore spot. Its battery hungry nature, a legacy of Flash applications that are incompatible with touch interfaces, and generalized animosity toward Flash’s uneasy integration with the ethos of open standards of the web have given Adobe an uphill battle on the new frontiers of mobile. The fact that Apple decided to shun Flash-on-iOS certainly didn’t help.
Devices that supported the ‘full web,’ Flash and all, had bragging rights, but debatable advantages over Flash-less devices, especially as more web developers supported HTML5 for crucial features such as streaming video (lest they miss out on iOS users, largely). If ZDNet’s rumor is true, then Adobe’s finally throwing in the towel. And none too soon. The longer Adobe tried to hold on to Flash, the longer it would be distracted from offering tools that mobile developers might want to buy for the looming HTML5 future.
it sounds like the person writing this article has never actually USED flash on a mobile device.
battery usage was no greater than other tech doing the same job (watching videos streaming over wi-fi within a browser is ALWAYS going to kill your battery life – plugin or not) and touchscreen support has always been there (since at least the early 2000s) and worked perfectly well.
So if the experience was that good, why in your opinion, are they cancelling it ?
Adobe doesn’t have the resources to make hardware-accelerated Flash players for every mobile device out there.
For desktop machines, it’s different: there are far less flavors of hardware, and all the major OSs have libraries for hardware-accelerated video, and therefore Adobe can built on that. But on mobile, I suspect the situation is different: each vendor has its own media player with embedded hardware acceleration for video, which is not exportable as an interface to other applications, and so Adobe cannot use it for Flash accelerated video.
Mobiles certainly can play hardware accelerated videos a long time now, as well as do hardware accelerated visual fx. Even my old N82 can do 3d graphics and hardware accelerated video. But does it export a video driver? most probably it does not.
I must be living in some alternate reality.
CPUs: Intel or AMD
GPUs: Intel or AMD or nVidia
OTOH in the mobile world…
You do realise that intel, amd, nvidia make hundred of different CPUs and GPUs right? This boils down to literally thousands of combinations.
OTOH in the mobile world… they all use socs. These are the snapdragon, hummingbird, OMAP, Tegra and Apple’s A lines. But guess what? These socs are made up of the same thing: an ARM cortex CPU and either a PowerVR or Nvidia GPU.
There’s simply no comparison between mobile and desktop.
Edited 2011-11-09 13:59 UTC
It’s not only the latest smartphones that must have Flash. There are older smartphones and other devices with web browsers too. The variety of mobile hardware is far greater than for desktop machines.
I think he was talking about the amount of incompatible hardware within the mobile and desktop ecosystems, and the availability of open standards.
On mobile platforms, even for basic things such as handling multiple interrupts sources and displaying 2D graphics, there are at least three competing standards (Qualcomm’s, Ti’s, Nvidia’s), and possibly multiple incompatible variations of each. And it seems that only Ti open up their specs.
Edited 2011-11-10 06:45 UTC
A desktop CPU is fast enough that desktop flash doesn’t _require_ GPU acceleration. Playing fullscreen HD-video might take 80% CPU without acceleration and only 10% with, but it actually works. On the mobile device, acceleration is required.
That’s only the case if you can get the absolute latest version of the Flash run time which isn’t possible on every OS because of Adobe.. otherwise you’re screwed. Depending on the CPU clock speed you cannot even play 720p content smoothly never mind 1080p which isn’t possible at all. So yes there are more than enough systems where GPU acceleration is a _requirement_ to be able to view the content at all never mind with a good smooth experience.
I can answer that….Apple. right now the entire industry has iEnvy for the iMoney and iMargins that Apple has and Apple has said no flash, therefor it shall be. Not because anybody actually sat down and weighed costs VS benefits (every test I’ve run so far has HTML V5 sucking MORE of everything) its simply a matter of follow the iLeader and hope that by iCopying one can get some of that sweet iProfit.
Got news for them though, those ultrabooks (Apple Air ripoff) and expensive tablets are gonna go NOWHERE fast. Why? Are they not any good? Nope I’m sure they are quite nice, but Apple is as much about brand as it is product. You can try to sell a $100k Camaro and its still a Camaro, whereas folks will see a $100k Ferrari and not bat a lash.
Finally let me say for all those cheering HTML V5? You’ll be sorry! Thanks to everyone bowing before Apple the codec SHALL be H.264 so it’ll be just as proprietary if not more so than flash, both Apple and MSFT have a history of giving the MPAA whatever they desire so there WILL be a protected content version of HTML V5 and it’ll probably be nasty, and because of MPEG-LA (which both Apple and MSFT are a part of as well as licensees of) you can give up on a FOSS OS version that is legal.
So you have a spec that sucks more memory and CPU, controlled by companies that don’t care about any kind of freedom, except the freedom to get your money, will be patented up the ying yang and probably locked down by the *.A.A thanks to MSFT and Apple both supporting kernel level DRM. Are we sure this kind of progress hasn’t been dictated by Dilbert’s PHB?
Well not much of a difference here, H.264 is already fairly standard in Flash streams… (and yeah, which seem to be easier on CPU)
It likely won’t go away, will have always ridiculously good support overall (and for good reasons, it is the standard of digital TV)
(OTOH, with “non-H.264” browser already having >50%… http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-ww-monthly-200807-201111 )
Um, please pass whatever you are smoking to the next person. Because you really couldn’t have just typed that right? You do realize that touch support didn’t come to Flash until v10.1.53.64 (June 2010). So please, give Doc Brown back the DeLorean, get out off Marty’s lap, and puff, puff, pass, man, puff, puff, pass.
Well, Flash 8/9 was on the Nokia Internet Tablets circa 2006 onwards. It did sucked balls though, and never really worked very well.
You’re thinking of *multi-touch* support. Just plain old single-touch support (via mouse events, which still worked fine on touch screens) has been present on Flash for as long as such devices have been around (2002 for Windows Tablet PC, 2003 for devices supporting Flash Lite).
You’re smoking some really good shit.
I have used Flash on 3 Android devices I own and although it is usable it’s by no means a great experience and it does negatively impact battery life.
You would certainly never chose to use a Flash app in a browser over a native app if one was available.
In contrast most HTML5 apps work very well in browsers (ironically the best browser for HTML5 apps is actually mobile safari).
That’s been my main feeling with a huge amount of the talk I’ve heard in light of this announcement. To be fair, flash on android had a pretty rocky start. And I feel like that’s what a lot of people are basing their opinion on. Either using it once and uninstalling, or just having read reviews of those first beta releases.
But a couple versions down the line and it was a surprisingly good experience. I’ve actually played a fair amount of flash based web games on my phone, and the performance has been great. Anecdotal evidence and all, but I’ve found it to be a really useful addition to the mobile browsing experience.
Looks like this is the end for mobile Flash. We should all celebrate. Mobile Flash was mostly a poor experience and is being replaced by open standards. Who in their right minds (other than Apple phobes) could dislike this development? Apple should be congratulated for leading the push to move beyond Flash but mostly we should just forget about Flash and just move on.
All hail The People’s Company of Apple.
Now we wait until Apple start suing phone manufacturers with phones without Flash-support for patent infringement.
EDIT: I just checked and my old Nokia 3210 did not support Flash either. Prior art, what I brilliant and amazing foresight of Nokia.
Edited 2011-11-09 13:54 UTC
I, like many others, was leading the push a year before Apple…
I’m actually kinda disappointed by this.. since there’s no TCP socket support in HTML5 (WebSockets require a wrapping proxy), i built a version of my app in flash, and it worked wonderfully, was fast and reliable. The Flex UI widgets didn’t seem to work too well on an Android device, though, and i heard they were making mobile/touch-friendly versions of them, but i suppose this means it’s all deprecated in favour of AIR. Shame, i would’ve liked to have a single client running on desktop browsers and phone browsers…
Flex is a decent enough language to deal with, although this was my first //really proprietary// system and documentation/googleability was incredibly low compared to ordinary c/c++/php/whatever for any common framework.
TCP support is also a security hole waiting to happen. Just think of recent problems with TLS/SSL BEAST.
That is why WebSockets does not use plain TCP and did not get deployed at first. It was disabled by default on at least Firefox and Opera.
I know having raw TCP support in HTML isn’t a good idea.
I do like the way Flash gets around it: it makes a request to the target on port 587 before initiating the TCP socket, and expects an XML security certificate permitting the connection. That means you have to authorise it on the server-side, but aside from that it doesn’t actually interfere with the stream. So if you wanted to make e.g. a web-based IRC client, you could use a standard IRCd and no websocket proxy, just run an authenticating script on that port to demonstrate you consent to the connections.
Anyways, raw TCP is a legitimate feature that Flash has over HTML, and Flash is still worth considering in certain situations.
Actually Flash and Java are still vulnerable to the security bug the old websocket protocol revealed.
If someone has a ‘transparent proxy server’ and it contains a header-injection bug (not all that uncommon especially if you don’t keep up with security updates).
In that case it is possible to use Flash or Java to make it look to the proxy like a connection is being made to google.com and to insert malware in the page that will be cached by the proxy.
Thus exposing all users behind the proxy visiting google.com to the malware.
This can be done as a drive-by attack from within the browser (flash and java and the old version of the websockets protocol) of a users behind that same proxy.
So let’s say one of the users behind the transparant proxy (the user can not see it, he/she might not even be aware of it’s existence) visits attacker.com.
Some code executes in the browser of that user and makes a connection to attacker.com (in the case of flash, it will check if attacker.com has an XML file: it obviously does) but injects some extra HTTP-headers to make it look like it is connecting to google.com to the proxy and the page returned from attacker.com is the normal google.com page but with malware included.
That page will than be cached in the transparent proxy and served to any user behind the proxy who wants to visit google.com
That is why the newer websocket protocol has some extra encoding.
I’ve not read the detailed information about the vulnerability or the specifications, but this is how I understand it.
The developers of Firefox and Opera felt that introducing more ways to attack such parts of the would be a bad idea. So they disabled it by default until the WebSocket protocol was fixed.
Edited 2011-11-09 23:48 UTC
Flex is a framework, built on to of Actionscript, and so therefore, Actionscript is the language. Actionscipt can be used to write Flex apps, but then it can also be used to write pretty much anything you care to against the Flash runtime (so long as what you “want” is supported”.)
I’ve made some pretty fancy BlazeDS/Flex apps myself, to demonstrate for example that browser gan be notified real time from JMS queue. Had invisible Flash app on otherwise regular HTML page and when message arrived into JMS queue on the server targeting specific client/browser, Flash called javascript function that updated the HTML DOM leaving user with impression that he has realtime and live HTML page.
That however was just a demo and usable ONLY in intranet. So I would not deploy such an app into uncontrolled environment like public internet. First reason would be limited server resources, as every browser would have live TCP connection back to the server.
Such a functionality in public apps however should be implemented with AJAX or some other means to poll the server for updates. There might be more elegant ways but live TCP conection is not one of them. Possible but not feasable.
Edited 2011-11-09 13:04 UTC
Jobs was right? You mean Flash on mobile devices really did stink? It really did drain batteries on precious mobile devices? Wow. Oh well, chalk another up to the dead guy.
Well, by Jobs’ own doing, Flash on Apple’s mobile devices doesn’t exist at all.
So now Adobe are changing their tools so existing flash code can run on devices without flash player, I wonder why they might want to do that?
Personally, I’ve not had good experiences from Adobe across a number of products and I’d like to see proper open standards on the web but…
That means HTML 5 not being butchered by Microsoft/Apple/MPEG LA and I see Apple’s behaviour as disingenuous and hypocritical.
The following quote is the kind of thing that makes my blood boil, Apple want all the benefits of open standards but still lock people into their expensive and proprietary systems. They even do it with hardware ffs.
Taken from:
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
“…Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain.
First, there’s “Openâ€.
Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.
Apple has many proprietary products too… (excuses) … HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.”
Neither did any other plugin. In most cases saying no to old tech pushes new tech forward. This is a good thing.
No, Jobs was full of crap. This was not an opinion based on technical merit. Flash was no better or worse than most native (as opposed to plug-in) software-based technology. But Flash posed a threat to Apple’s application platform, which is why Jobs had to kill it. He couldn’t have the Apple App Store filling up with Adobe apps.
Just remember that Adobe is just discarding the flash player, you know, that runtime that only cost them money but they had to maintain since there were no alternative if they wanted to sell their authoring tools. They are just doing the perfectly obvious next step and will rely on targeting their authoring tools towards generating code/content that runs on a HTML5 platform. As such everyone will get the same experience (of for example dense all-flash homepages and banner ads) except it will run on more platforms, but will also in a lot cases will run slower and will be trickier to selectively block.
I still view this as very desirable progress, but cheering this as a blow to Adobe or the type of content that flash enabled is just misguided.
They’re not even so clearly guilty of enabling it… did we already forget (well, I hope I will some day) Geocities and gif-overloads?
No one is going to recode their websites. If they would, it would have been done already. For some, flash content coding was paid for to an outside firm and until the mobile market gets a big push once again, you will need a desktop to view certain content and the differentiator of those platforms is going to shrink.
Why is this? Microsoft and Apple. They want their mobile products to be competitive. Microsoft wants to stop the bleeding of Windows as the dominant platform to view the web. Why not toss Adobe a bone to make it happen?
Everyone is ‘re-coding’ their websites. The services part of my business is limited not by a lack of customers but by a lack of interactive designers and html5 developers with the skills to service those customers.
When Apple said ‘no’ to Flash there was a steady stream of customers transitioning from Flash to HTML5. When Microsoft said ‘no Flash in Metro’ it become a a flood. This announcement is just Adobe accepting reality and doing what they need to do to protect their business.
That’s not to say there won’t be Flash sites around. There will be, probably for at least a decade, until Flash stops being supported on modern browsers.
Because Microsoft knows Flash is a disaster and creates nothing but problems.
Microsoft has no problems with flash on the Desktop. Most systems that access flash content are MS based. If content continues to be developed for flash and mobile devices like Android and BB can access them, that takes away Microsoft’s dominance over providing the one and only OS for content. They win in this game.
Turn off flash on your mobile device and browse your favorite sites again. Now if you don’t use it or cannot turn it off because it’s not offered, then you don’t have a valid perspective on the mobile front.
On the desktop front, turn it off and see how HTML5 rich the web is now and who is “winning”.
They finally admit that flash is unfix-able.
That’s BS. What they’re saying is that they can’t get past the walled gardens to make Mobile Flash a legitimate platform in its own right. The gatekeepers (Apple, etc) won’t allow it.
Why would they need Apple to legitimate their platform?
I think they weren’t able to overcome the bugs and the battery drain.
They can’t ship on iOS unless Apple allows them to be part of the App Store.
Nonsense. Apps that play animations/videos/sounds have the same issues with battery drain. This is not a technical issue. It’s a platform battle. Adobe lost because it doesn’t own the stores from which these apps are distributed.
You mean that the Android market ain’t enought for Adove?
You clearly understand little of software.
A native app – such as that written in Objective C – is aggressively optimized through the toolchain and compiled directly down into machine code long before it winds up on your device. When you run it it executes directly on the CPU and has virtually direct access to various device drivers. This is pretty much as efficient as it gets.
A Flash app has very little optimization at built time and during execution it uses a combination of interpreter and JIT to run the code. Even a simple computation takes an inordinate amount of time (relatively speaking) as it needs to be interpreted, types are constructs with annotations, and access to devices is done through several API laters (especially in a browser).
Animations and media are even less efficient, especially when their interactive. The amount of heavy lifting that needs to happen to draw something and respond to events is by no means trivial.
Adobe simply could not optimize Flash to the extent it needed to offer a good experience, they’ve recognized that, and their moving on to areas where their much more competitive.
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Prove it. I’d like to see a comparison of common animation/media scenarios relative to Flash.
Yet, the opening lines of the above are also about Adobe packaging the output of their tools as “native” apps – essentially self-contained Flash runtimes.
And when you’ll stumble on such, you most likely won’t even notice it; you’ll be praising how “native” it runs.
It’s not only about technical reasons, also stems from how Apple throws stumbling blocks on their platforms for things which don’t fir into the walled garden (plus, what flash does – most notably, video with arbitrary animated graphics on top; if that’s a good idea is a separate issue – is hard and power-hungry everywhere; also often doesn’t map very cleanly into available APIs/interfaces)
No. It’s the truth. Besides the other issues of not keeping the run time up to date everywhere and limited platform support. Using Flash in itself creates a walled garden.
Thank you, Steve Jobs, for giving Flash the kiss of death. Yes, I know HTML5 will suck just as much once web devs start to misuse it just as they did Flash, but at least I won’t have to run a plugin just for the privilege. Now, before any of you label me an Apple/iOS fanboy, both my smartphone and tablet are Androids, and I don’t own a single Apple product. I do have Flash installed on my desktop, but Flashblock is on at all times, except where Flash is absolutely required.
If you’re wondering why I hate Flash, my reasons have nothing to do with politics:
– It is insecure
– It is controlled by a single vendor, which means you’re always at the mercy of Adobe as to whether or not a device can view ‘the entire web’
– It is bad for accessibility
– It hijacks my right mouse button menu
– It is made by Adobe… ok, so maybe it’s just a LITTLE political
Will HTML5 be able to replace Flash for all purposes? Honestly, I don’t care. So maybe I won’t be able to play a few lame ‘match 3’ games without Flash, and devs might have to write a few apps natively instead of trying to make EVERYTHING run on the f**king web, whether it belongs there or not… whatever.
Microsoft is rumored to be killing Silverlight :
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/will-there-be-a-silverlight-6-a…
They already more or less announced as much when it comes to the browser plugin, and their rather thorough and deep embrace of HTML5 in Windows 8 certainly suggests that this move is real. Silverlight is important for a couple of things though, Windows Phone and Visual Studio Lightswitch (a spin of VS that uses a point-and-click approach to quickly generate CRUD Silverlight applications) being notable examples.
On the other hand it is pretty instructive to notice that Silverlight and .NET development against WinRT in Windows 8 share most of their technologies (.NET with a XAML UI using Expression Blend for design) and seem to fill much the same niche, so I would guess that anything that uses Silverlight outside the web today can migrate to WinRT instead in the future without too much trouble, which suggests that Silverlight going away is natural.
Edited 2011-11-10 12:56 UTC