Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

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Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby Kuragari » Tue Jul 25, 2017 11:30 pm

Given that there were and are a fair number of games here that used Flash, I figured this was something people here might be interested in.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technolog ... smsnnews11

Adobe Systems Inc's Flash, a once-ubiquitous technology used to power most of the media content found online, will be retired at the end of 2020, the software company announced on Tuesday.


Adobe, along with partners Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc. and Mozilla Corp., said support for Flash will ramp down across the internet in phases over the next three years.

After 2020, Adobe will stop releasing updates for Flash and web browsers will no longer support it. The companies are encouraging developers to migrate their software onto modern programming standards.

“Few technologies have had such a profound and positive impact in the internet era,” said Govind Balakrishnan, vice president of product development for Adobe Creative Cloud.

Created more than 20 years ago, Flash was once the preferred software used by developers to create games, video players and applications capable of running on multiple web browsers. When Adobe acquired Flash in its 2005 purchase of Macromedia, the technology was on more than 98 percent of personal computers connected to the web, Macromedia said at the time.

But Flash’s popularity began to wane after Apple’s decision not to support it on the iPhone.

In a public letter in 2010, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs criticized Flash's reliability, security and performance. Since then, other technologies, like HTML5, have emerged as alternatives to Flash.

In the past year, several web browsers have begun to require users to enable Flash before running it.

On Google's Chrome, the most popular web browser, Flash’s usage has already fallen drastically. In 2014, Flash was used each day by 80 percent of desktop users. That number is now at 17 percent “and continues to decline,” Google said in a blog on Tuesday.

“This trend reveals that sites are migrating to open web technologies, which are faster and more power-efficient than Flash,” Google said. “They’re also more secure."

Flash, however, remains in use among some online gamers. Adobe said it will work with Facebook as well as Unity Technologies and Epic Games to help developers migrate their games.

Adobe said it does not expect Flash’s sunset to have an impact on its bottom line. “In fact, we think the opportunity for Adobe is greater in a post-Flash world,” Balakrishnan said.
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby BlueLight » Sun Jul 30, 2017 10:52 pm

Ah man! Flash is getting the axe.... Again!...
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby AcetheSuperVillain » Tue Aug 01, 2017 4:05 pm

Tom Fulp's response: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1424896

He's got some links in the article, so might be worth reading it on NG

Yesterday Adobe announced they will end support for the Flash player in 2020. This means they will no longer make updates or patches for playing Flash content in a web browser and the individual browsers are onboard with removing Flash completely by the end of 2020. This means you will have no way to view an SWF file in a modern browser going into 2021.
A lot of people get confused by what this means, so I wanted to clarify a few things:
1. Adobe will still support Adobe Animate, their re-branded version of Flash. You can still use it to make animation but you will share it in video format vs SWF. Most animators are already doing this. Just about every animation you watch on NG is now an MP4 loading in an HTML5 video player.
2. No, people don’t need animation software that exports animation in HTML5 format. We just need animation to be in video format. We created Swivel for this many years ago and it’s super popular.
3. Newgrounds supports games in HTML5 format, which is becoming increasingly dominant. There is a big question of whether we will be able to preserve the 80,000+ games that were made in Flash. At the least, you could download and play them in an external player but we are hoping to have a solid web-based option by the time 2020 rolls along. Options include javascript that can interpret and run an SWF file, software that can convert existing swf files to javascript or something using WebAssembly, which is still maturing. A lot has been happening in this space but nothing is perfect at the moment.
4. The Audio Portal will be fine, with an HTML5 audio player.
5. The Art Portal has always been Flash-free.
A lot of people still don’t realize that NG has been transitioning away from Flash for many years now and 2020 won’t be as bumpy as some may think. The end of Flash won’t be the end of NG.
On the plus side, I got mentioned in NY Mag and was part of a Twitter Moment.
Some other things to note:
1. Flash was never the reason for bad advertising on the web, bad ad companies were. Most ads are now using HTML5 and the irony is they are larger files and often consume more resources than Flash did. We also have new problems, for example Flash-based ads were never able to steal focus from your browser and force the page to scroll back to the ad. HTML5 ads that do that have been cropping up on NG this past year and we have to chase them down. We’re also seeing more ads that do forced page redirects. This is why it’s a great idea to become a supporter, so you can browse NG ad-free and ultimately help us run less ads for everyone else.
2. Flash as a security threat was kind of a meme. Yes, Flash had vulnerabilities that needed to be patched and it was a bummer that it was a closed system. However your OS and your web browser also have vulnerabilities that get patched, as does all software. It became a popular thing to complain about but the reality is most people were getting their viruses and malware somewhere other than through an SWF file.
3. It really bothers me when people cheer the death of Flash. I totally get why it's time to move on but you shouldn't cheer the death of something that empowered so many people and brought so much joy to the web for 20+ years. I think it's a bandwagon that a lot of joyless people have jumped on, sorry if you're one of them.
Hope this clears up any confusion! If you appreciate our ongoing efforts around here, please become a supporter! For $3 a month you can browse ad free, get a ton of perks and contribute to the exciting future of NG.
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby Exer » Sun Aug 20, 2017 3:57 am

Wow, that's pretty crazy. I guess Adobe Animate can still be used for animations, but I guess people making games will have to learn something new.
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby AcetheSuperVillain » Sun Aug 20, 2017 5:40 pm

I think the plan is that Animate will be able to make interactive content as HTML5.

It's annoying that everyone is saying "Oh good, now that we have HTML5, we don't need Flash" when HTML5 is wildly inferior to Flash.
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby Renara » Sun Aug 20, 2017 10:10 pm

There will still be third-party players, though I'm not sure about browser plugins, so that it may mean downloading flashes to play them.

The SWF format was actually published in full a while go (it's how I was able to support LZMA on the forum), so in theory anybody could make a replacement plugin if they wanted to. I did wonder what it would take to write some Javascript that could play SWF files; performance wouldn't be amazing, but it should have all the necessary drawing capabilities now, and ActionScript actually only has a few differences to Javascript, the main task would be replacing the API which has a few things people commonly rely on.
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby Zeus Kabob » Wed Aug 23, 2017 9:33 pm

Honestly I'm very surprised that we haven't seen a program that matches Flash's capabilities crop up over its very long life. HTML5 plus Javascript is functional, but not as efficient as Flash. The problem with HTML5 plus JS is that it's harder to sandbox it so that it can't access content on the page. This is a general problem with HTML, and it limits the ability to host arbitrary (user submitted) HTML5 games on sites.
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby Renara » Sun Aug 27, 2017 7:23 pm

Zeus Kabob Wrote:Honestly I'm very surprised that we haven't seen a program that matches Flash's capabilities crop up over its very long life. HTML5 plus Javascript is functional, but not as efficient as Flash. The problem with HTML5 plus JS is that it's harder to sandbox it so that it can't access content on the page. This is a general problem with HTML, and it limits the ability to host arbitrary (user submitted) HTML5 games on sites.

It's not impossible; you can for example shove HTML5+JS into an iframe within a window, though that isn't pretty.

The main issue is cross-site scripting issues with scripts and cookies, i.e- the risk that an uploaded game could try to spoof some core part of the site or even other games. I've been looking into ways to avoid those issues off and on; best way I can see would be to automatically give each forum user their own sub-domain and restrict content to those domains, so browsers won't allow cookies from one user to be loaded by games uploaded by another. It's doable, in fact the hosting side is very easy with nginx, the only real issue I've run into is the amount of work to get phpBB to support it all properly, along with the other laundry list of phpBB stuff I still need to finish to move us onto phpBB 3.1 :)
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby ANooB » Wed Aug 30, 2017 6:49 am

Flash was supposed to die roughly a year ago when Google stopped supporting it. It's still kicking and is my preferred platform for interactive hentai.
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby DuskyHallows » Mon Sep 11, 2017 2:56 pm

As someone who still works with Flash, I can attest that there really aren't any HTML5 based alternatives for game development. Unity is often proposed as an option, but that feels like using a rocket for your morning commute when you already have a car which does the job just fine. There's a weirdly obsessive short-sightedness when it comes to Flash that just because it has flaws it has to go. Great, get rid of it, but it needs a viable replacement that doesn't have the same flaws or else nothing is being achieved.
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby Vaniloth » Sat Sep 23, 2017 5:10 am

ANooB Wrote:It's still kicking and is my preferred platform for interactive hentai.

Got dat right lol. I remember so many flash games a few years ago, but now it's pretty much used in an occasional hentai
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby GoRepeat » Sun Sep 24, 2017 2:49 am

DuskyHallows Wrote:As someone who still works with Flash, I can attest that there really aren't any HTML5 based alternatives for game development. Unity is often proposed as an option, but that feels like using a rocket for your morning commute when you already have a car which does the job just fine. There's a weirdly obsessive short-sightedness when it comes to Flash that just because it has flaws it has to go. Great, get rid of it, but it needs a viable replacement that doesn't have the same flaws or else nothing is being achieved.


Haha this is probably the best description of Unity I have read.
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Re: Adobe to pull plug on Flash, ending an era

Postby AcetheSuperVillain » Sun Sep 24, 2017 1:28 pm

I did like Flash, but I enjoy riding the rocketship to work now. I've always wanted to work on the moon anyways.
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