Mercy killed? Flash was great. There were so many inventive games and animations in that era. Apple didn’t mercy kill anything - they just removed a threat to their walled garden ecosystem using their anticompetitive position, but dressed it up as a security issue.

I’m amazed by the retconning of Flash into a great system.

I agree that some of the content produced in that era was great and it was nice to have tools available, but using Flash and doing the whole browser plugin thing was not great at all.

It’s actually great now that we have actual standards compliant ways of doing animations and other things in the browser without restricting it to one company’s little domain that must be used as a plugin for browsers.

Adobe said it was only because of mean old Apple that they couldn’t get it to run on the original iPhone. When it finally came to Android around 2010, it barely ran on a 1Ghz Android phone with 1GB of RAM.

Mind you that the first iPhone cake with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz processor.

An iPhone with the theoretical specs didn’t come out until 2011.

Also see the first “iPad Killer” the Motorola Xoom’s marquee feature was suppose to be that it could run Flash. But Adobe was late releasing the Xoom in the unenviable problem of that you couldn’t view its home page on the device.

Yeah it was superb for the layman.

If there's ever a project for an alternative OSS Flash authoring tool, something intended to be as accessible as Flash 5 or so, I'd love to contribute somehow

Nah, Flash was awful. Terrible performance on low end devices. Unforgivably terrible for web video. Nightmare on Linux. Nightmare in enterprise environments.

There were cool games, but there still are cool games. And the indie/hacker/homebrew gaming ecosystems are bigger, richer, and more accessible than ever (due in no small part to the web, both as a gaming platform and for learning/community).

Flash the authoring suite was great

Flash the player was insecure unoptimized laggy garbage

Flash was bloody awful.

Websites that only ran on a proprietary plugin and broke browser accessibility provisions were not something I fondly remember.

Its successor is closed apps where you also can’t use ad blocking.

Mercy.

Flash had an awesome ecosystem. But it was too fragile, and Adobe is too incompetent of a company to be a good steward of that kind of tech.

As someone who did a bunch of work on Ruffle a while back, "mercy kill" is almost the correct word. There's about a decade it spent rotting before the actual kill, and Apple's not the one who fired the final shot. I've heard stories from both the Apple and Adobe side on this, but basically both companies wanted Flash on iOS and neither of them were capable of actually shipping a good version of it.

Apple begged Adobe to ship a working Flash mobile build at least four times and each time they rejected it for all sorts of various UX or performance issues. At one point Apple asked for and was delivered Flash Player source code, which they reportedly couldn't get to compile. Adobe tried to brand Flash as an open standard, and then went over Apple's head by just shipping an AIR runtime that could be packaged into an IPA and submitted to Apple. Jobs then wrote the infamous "Thoughts on Flash" letter, which was really there to justify going scorched-earth and banning all third-party development tools. This only lasted for about three months before the Obama DOJ threatened to sue[0].

Also, Steve Jobs was probably pissed off that he couldn't get the CEO of Adobe on speed-dial. At that point in time everyone involved with shipping iPhone software was in his contacts and in regular contact with him. Google logo looks weird on the phone screen? Have Jobs call Page and get it fixed in 10 minutes.

As it stood after that moment, Flash was a viable development platform for iPhone apps and remained so for many years. This is entirely separate from its use in the browser. Practically speaking, you have probably played plenty of Flash games on iOS without even knowing it, because all the hard work of building touch-friendly UX and a performant UI was shunted over to the developers of individual games rather than trying to make, say, the core Flash rendering model GPU capable[1].

Adobe then shipped Flash Player for Android to huge fanfare, and it sucked just as hard as it did on Apple's dev iPhones and was unceremoniously canned a year later.

At this point it was obvious Flash Player needed a rewrite, even within Adobe, so they announced "FP Next" along with an AS4 language for new movies to run in. Except the Adobe execs were angry about the cost so they tried to shake down their customers for the funds. They wanted any cross-compiled 3D engine code to have to pay a revshare to Adobe. Everyone jumped ship to Unity, so Adobe canned the revshare requirement... and FP Next/AS4, the thing that was supposed to modernize Flash's aging codebase.

And then right after Adobe starts disinvesting from Flash, a bunch of CVEs land and all the browser vendors pushed hard to actually, once and for all, excise plugins from the browser. That was the actual mercy kill, but it was preceded by almost a decade in which all the people who knew how Flash actually worked didn't have the budget to fix it, and all the people who wanted it fixed didn't have the expertise to do it.

[0] For the record, Obama was the guy who saw Zuckerberg illegally buying Instagram to keep people from moving off of Facebook and said "sure thing, wave it through".

[1] There's an AS3 project called Starling that gives you hardware rendering by pre-rendering a bunch of assets in advance into bitmaps, which kind of betrays the whole point of Flash. But I also can't imagine Adobe doing it any other way as the Flash renderer was both highly optimized and bespoke.

> Flash was great.

It had a great number of CVEs, you mean?

_modern_ HTML and JS have eclipsed flash in all meaningful ways.

You’re entitled to your opinion, as is everyone else and my opinion is that flash was dogshit and I’m glad it had a bullet put in it.