Future of Flash

[mustpax]

"19 out of the top 20 device manufacturers worldwide have committed to shipping Flash technology on their devices"

It would be more wise to actually wait till you can deliver a decent Flash implementation on a mobile device before touting your mobile position. Because your mobile position right now is that you have been promising the world but not delivering jack.

[xenthral]

"deliver a decent Flash implementation on a mobile device before touting your mobile position."

I wish they'd do the same for desktop too. Flash doesn't really 'run' on my 64 bit ubuntu , it sputters and crawls and fucks up in a plethora of ways.

[davidedicillo]

I completely agree. If there is something that I like about Apple is that they don't brag about things they haven't done yet. Get over with this philosophy of prototypes. Flash on mobile phones is as good as Microsoft Courier. The day I will see 19 out of the top 20 device manufacturers worldwide run Flash with no problems I will complain about Apple not being the 20th.

[kiiski]

Flash runs just as well on my nokia n900 as it does on desktop, So I don't think the problem is at adobes end. Of course, I don't even remember when was the last time I actually needed to use flash (on mobile or on desktop).

[zwetan]

you can find already a lot of videos showing flash player 10.1 running on Android, and next week with Google I/O you will see even more I guess and user will be able to download a preview (or beta) of that.

[there]

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1337216

[jcl]

It's funny to see Adobe listing things like Gnash, Haxe, and Red5 as advantages of Flash, after impeding their early development.

[Qz]

It's not like Adobe is the only tech company guilty of that.

[swombat]

They might have open-sourced the code of Flash, but getting bugs fixed and critical enhancements implemented in the Flash player (or in Flex) is still a lengthy, opaque process that takes years. It took them 3 years to add a global exception handler and fix the scrollbars in Mac, for pete's sake!

As a Flex developer, that pisses me off to no end. I work in Flash all the time, and I use it because I have no choice, to do what I want to do, but I hate Flash because Adobe is so glacially slow at implementing small, obvious fixes to make my work easier.

[pan69]

Is that a Flash Player or a Flex framework thing?

[ianbishop]

I wonder how many times Adobe has these same arguments pasted all over their site. The exchange has been had. If you tried any harder to push your relevance, you might even come off as a little desperate.

[Qz]

Is there something in what they said that you disagree with?

[WilliamLP]

Their new slogan should be "Flash: at least you're still locked into it for the next half decade if you want to support IE 8."

[jasonlotito]

Or if you need features that are still not present in HTML5. Flash is used for more than playing videos and simple games.

[frou_dh]

Despite all these high figures and percentages, I still typically find Flash annoying, bar video players. What now?

[watty]

Is it that you find "Flash" annoying or just rich content in general?

[ganley]

Similarly, since I've been running Chromium without a flash plugin, I've found that I seldom miss it ... except for the occasional video.

[glhaynes]

Yep. I know a lot of iPad users, and I haven't heard a single one complain about something being inaccessible due to lack of Flash. I'm an iPad owner myself and have been annoyed a small number of times by not being able to see something, but so rarely (and always on such uncritical stuff) that "support Flash" wouldn't even be in my top 20 of feature requests. There are of course some for whom this wouldn't be the case.

[thingie]

Oh, sure. H.264 is just a codec, and <video> is just an HTML tag, but somehow, that's exactly what I want. I can (very easily) make a H.264 or Ogg Theora video and wrap it inside <video> tag and it is going to work, I don't even know how I would do that with your "complete solution for advanced video distribution". Except "put it on youtube", of course.

[pan69]

I've never used the video tag. I'm sure there is more involved than adding <video></video> tags to my page. I'll probably have to do some research to get it working the way I want. "How do I make the play and pause button the way my visual guy designed them" would the first question that would come to mind. I guess the same goes for a Flash based solution.

[kristiandupont]

"For existing Flash content developed with mouse input in mind, Flash Player will automatically convert the touch events into mouse events. This allows Flash content designed for the desktop, to work seamlessly on touch-based devices."

I can't wait to try http://www.dontclick.it/ on a touch based device!

[pan69]

Will work just fine. On a touch device you use your finger to move the mouse, what would be the problem?

[braindead_in]

The article is more about present than the future.

Instead why not focus on filling the gaps? There are still so many things that HTML5 and browsers cant do. Wasn't that the reason Flash came into existence in the first place.

[jasonlotito]

The problem is, there is a lot of FUD suggesting that HTML5 is a complete replacement for Flash, and you can duplicate Flash in HTML5, when the truth is, you can't.

[ssharp]

Those stats are useless.

Microsoft had 95% of the browser market at some point.

I'd also like to know how 98% of enterprises "rely" on Flash. I think if Flash was completely obliterated, those enterprises would be largely unharmed.

[tomlin]

Rely is a fair word to use. It would be sensible to say that these enterprises also rely on IIS, Apache, Microsoft Word, Excel, Photoshop or a long list of other software that they likely rely on.

None of which would dismantle their interests if they disappeared.

But, I suppose you don't get any upvotes for mentioning any of those.

[kixxauth]

Adobe: Please stop defending flash and get on with your life. Build us the HTML tools you said you would and do it so fast that I will forget about all this flash stuff.

http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/05/adobe-cto-kevin-lynch-were-...

[CodeMage]

Okay, so you read the interview where Lynch says "It’s not about HTML 5 vs Flash. They’re mutually beneficial." and you're still expecting Adobe to replace "all this flash stuff"?

[andreyf]

youporn.com has implemented HTML5 video. Flash is dead.

[DeusExMachina]

There are a lot of opinions on the future of Flash. It would be interesting to see the statistics at the top of the article from now on, to see if flash will shrink fast, slowly or remain strong. Or even grow, but I would not bet on this last one.

[lukev]

No flash on the iPad is a reasonably big deal for me. I almost bought one, then realized that I couldn't use Hulu or Amazon Video on Demand with it.

I use those for ALL of my TV needs. Watching TV in bed with an iPad was actually the most attractive use case to me, until I realized it wouldn't work.

So I didn't buy one.

Edit: I don't particularly love Flash for its own sake. I just want to use the services that I've come to like. And apparently, right now, Flash is the only realistic way to get them. HTML5 is, apparently, not quite there yet.

[MikeCapone]

> No flash on the iPad is a reasonably big deal for me. I almost bought one, then realized that I couldn't use Hulu or Amazon Video on Demand with it.

If they don't already exist, I'm pretty sure that you'll soon be able to access these services via dedicated apps. They'll probably have a nicer interface (for touch) than the websites too.

[iongion]

From my view, the only real closed thing in Flash is that they do not allow SWF renderers others than the Flash Player itself. (If any mobile company can create their own renderer, then, why license players from Adobe)

Then another problem appears, if anyone can create their own players, then they might introduce differences(Java vs J++ long ago)

GNASH being mentioned on an official page, i can not believe my eyes!!!

[CodeMage]

I was surprised to see that only 70% of web games use flash. Anyone have any idea on what's in the remaining 30%?

[renewableGuy]

On my iPad, 100% of web games are non-playable. Flash wont work on Ipad, and Html5 games are painfully sluggish. (including that Asteroid HTML5 game featured on the front page right now). Anyway, im happy that Flash doesnt work on iPad. Its not very fun to hold a hot iPad, you know!

[sarvenna]

There's still a fair number of Java-based web games out there, and lots of older web games were made in Shockwave instead of Flash. Flash is certainly dominant amongst newer web games, but lots of old games stick around in various portals.

[muhfuhkuh]

Alot that I've seen (especially the more complex or 3-D ones) use Unity. Maybe it's not 30% of the market, but I've seen that little Unity cube load up more often lately.

[ido]

I don't think html5 covers even 0.1%

They're probably counting some non-dynamic games like most facebook games & there are still some java applets games out there as well.

[inerte]

Straight html and server side code (mmorpgs, strategy games and zombie infections). Javascript (sudoku, crosswords), and some java applets.

[zmmmmm]

You'd be surprised how much Java there is.

[jim-greer]

I bet it's higher than 70%...

[ryanwaggoner]

It's a good thing they didn't have any flash on this page or my browser would have crashed before I was able to finish reading all the reasons that flash is awesome and I can't live without it.

[latch]

98% of enterprises rely on flash player ?

[joubert]

Less talk more action