Adobe signs the death for flash plugin

[tomsamson]

http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations...ash-focus.html

Adobe announces that they will stop further development of flash player for mobile devices (besides security fixes for existing versions).

Since internet usage on mobile devices is quickly outgrowing internet usage on desktop machines this essentially means Adobe is killing off the flash browser plugin.

After all these years of Adobe slowing down the development of flash and being way late at getting full gpu usage for all graphical operations going (hence helping bigtime in flash´s reputation getting worse and worse), they finally in 2011 have the runtime going to make proper use of the gpu, they even get unity and unreal getting flash export option for that runtime soon and what do they do?

They give up at this point.

Incredible how incompetent this Adobe leadership is, the leadership should get fired, not the employees below they want to fire now.

If anyone still cares at all about flash here, please go and write blog posts and comments about this wherever you see fitting, its insanity.

[mr_malee]

I agree with Grant skinner here

http://gskinner.com/blog/archives/20...st-mortem.html

games will continue to exist through Adobe AIR on phones, so I don't see a problem here. Full flash websites don't really make sense for a phone, they're designed as big experiences and you're not going to get that with a 3 inch phone screen.

If the flash players technology gets better because of this then I'm happy.

[tomsamson]

Regarding showing full flash websites or similar heavy content on smartphones, yeah, i agree, i never missed those on my smartphones either. But well, if it also means (ARM) tablets not getting a flash player for the browser anymore, then yeah, on those flash content in the browser would have made sense (if it ran well) and if Adobe doesn´t support that then they are really killing the future of the entire flash player, not just the "mobile" version.

I don´t think flash technology will get any better at all due to Adobe´s move; first their announcement will lead to massive distrust in them and using their tech from many who still had halfway interest in doing flash (web) projects and second:
Adobe made it pretty clear they want to focus on creating tools for html 5 content creation more and more, since it´ll take quite a few years till one can do everything cross browser which one can do today in flash i see them working on flash deploy to canvas etc as big step back instead of forward.
Not regarding "supporting open standards and the open web" but regarding what one can do with their toolset on most devices.

And well, the main strength left for flash even in its days of lacking performance was always that its available and running on most platforms, no?

When that´s gone i see way less of a reason for many to use it at all.

Me personally i´ll wait and see if the unity and unreal flash exporters will support deploying to air, too, if not, well, Flash is dead for me with this Adobe announcement.

How trust in a product and invest into it when the company making it themselves don´t do so fully?

You know, many years ago there was in between a hype for dhtml, ooh the next big thing, a few dynamic things possible on web pages with html/js in first big wave, many hating flash rumored this would kill flash. But there were no proper tools to make dhtml stuff visually and in less painful and well working way across browsers so that rage boiled to slower flame after a while while flash´s adoption grew exponentially as one could do way more with it and also in easier way.
html 5 is a lot further than the older html/js crap of back in the day but it would still go the same way, the main difference today is that the company behind flash is now into making the tools to kill off flash since they believe in the rage of it being outdated tech worse than html5, self fulfilling prophecy.
Well, in a few years no more plugins in browsers then and either html 5 advances or we do more advanced stuff all in native app form in the walled garden app stores.

I´m for creating native apps where it makes sense but i dislike it when its tried to kill all plugin tech touting html5 is so much more modern and better than all those while there is no better replacement which allows to do all they allow to do...

Well, now that Adobe is on the bandwagon its pretty much a done deal.

[TOdorus]

I don't share your view that a plugin needs to be able to deploy anywhere Tom.

Last week a two colleagues of mine got the feedback from a client that "they were all using IE7" in feedback of their webapp which they'll use inhouse and that it wasn't really running well in IE7. Since this was our first big HTML5 project we were a bit dissapointed, as the app was made to properly run on any browser including mobile ones. That the client insisted on using the one browser that is known for incompatibility stumped us a bit.

Than I see my girlfriend use her laptop to go to a site with games on it. My natural curiosity was looking if see was into Flash games (yay me), but then I saw it were all executables you need to download. Apparently she didn't mind having to download and install it.

The lesson I learn from these experiences, is that people don't really care about the technology, but what they can do with it. We all know that, but I didn't realize it was to THIS extent. So the whole "people don't want to install plugins" point is valid, until there is a payoff.

I still see a future for Flash gaming and novelty/gadgets. Heck, Facebook users are flooded with Flash games; they're quite used to it. I don't think that if Farmville stopped working for people, that they would mind downloading the Flash plugin for that. Same with Unity: promise them cool 3D content and people will be willing to download the plugin.

[tomsamson]

I would like to agree with you but there's a trend towards closed app store app delivery, browsers with less or no plugins and more closed down devices regarding file system access going on. I think the web as we know it and flash and generally speaking plugin content delivery has a few more years left in it at least on desktops ( if the plugin and browser providers don't kill it off earlier there, too), but on smartphones, tablets, tvs and other devices it seems to be a pretty done deal, already in action on more and more devices and applied on the others quite soon, too and then standing like that on most for the forseeable future.
Since i see average consumer Joes using more smartphones, tablets, netbooks or ARM laptops in the future than buying the large desktops many of us have now, well..

As bottomline probably best to enjoy what one likes while it lasts and if one works in this field best to also always keep an eye out for what's coming up on interesting middleware and languages sides and give that a try, too, never be too focussed on one option only.

[Incrue]

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/c...rt-flash/14834

windows 8 with two browsers, one of them with no plugins at all

[tomsamson]

Yeah, this is sorta old news though, i talked about that side here in a thread before, too.
That´s the point really, it isn´t about "just" getting rid of the flash plugin, it is about getting rid of all browser plugin support by Apple and starting with Windows 8 also by MS.