I just feel very melancholic today.

I've been around to see Flash rise from the times when it was covering 5% of the web and I was looking at it skeptically in the late '90, until today when it's being booted off mobile devices entirely.

It's been a fun ride and I wonder how many people are going to remember Flash and Actionscript 5 years from now.

How long do you guys thing it will take everybody will look at Flash as no more than a glorified video player?

All Flash Veterans welcomed to join this conversation. :-)

that which brings you success in the past... becomes your downfall for the future. Simply put, Adobe forgot about which girl they brought to the prom (designers). HOWEVER, there so many new things emerging that our defining "creative play" in our industry. Don't feel melancholy... think about all the... new, faster, better things we can do. NO I'm not talking about HTML5... but Processing, openFrameworks, Cinder, VVVV, nodebox, paperJS, WEBGL, the list goes on... where before we just had Flash and were limited by it's sandbox. Today... I move towards unknown progress... into things I couldn't imagine yesterday. INTERNET HIGH FIVE !

I actually think that the reason for it's downfall was that it never grew up to deliver on performance.

Flash has always been considered a toy by any serious developer because it was slow, sucky and made for designers.

Think about the original reason why Jobs rejected Flash: it was slow and it ate the phone battery. I wish Adobe would have delivered on this, but it never had.

true... but the shift was so massive that the designers and animators that made flash rise in the early days were abandoned. They no longer knew how to wire in the bells and whistles that they could in F4 and F5. On top of their not being enough re-write to make it everything that it needed to be for developers... then you have no users. I complained about this for years... and we should have all seen this coming. Which is why I stayed pretty removed when the Adobe Fires starting breaking out and the community reacted. New stuff was happening and I moved to processing... late to the party... but better late, then never.

> I actually think that the reason for it's downfall was that it never grew up to deliver on performance.

I agree with this. They made an effort with their switch to AS3, but 1) it didn't give enough of a performance boost and 2) by then CSS and Javascript had caught up so much that the need for Flash was largely diminished.

They then shifted to Video, which is still a very powerful and useful part of Flash, but as time goes on they'll have a hard time justifying the use of the plugin to anyone.

There's also the rise of the smart phone/tablet: With poor performance on these devices, and browsers that were capable of delivering the animations that we used to rely on Flash to provide, there was just no need for the plugin.

I think Apple's decision to exclude Flash from the iPhone was a great decision for them, and ultimately the mobile websites that followed the release of the iPhone. You don't need interactive baubles running around on your phone screen when you want to find that cool restaurant around the corner.

have you seen full blown HTML 5 on a iPad1 or iPad2 device? runs for crap... this was never about flash vs HTML5... it was about closing the gates and keeping it about Objective-C and the APP store. I think Apple iced this cake... but as you pointed out Geoff things were maturing where Flash wasn't.

I agree with @okvivi. It was performance that led to the decline of Flash. Specifically on underpowered mobile devices.

I was an early fan of Flash. Processors and bandwidth were getting faster, making animation/video finally possible online. It seemed the extra weight added by the Flash player got less and less relevant as machines got faster and faster.

Now, while processors and bandwidth are still improving, we experience the web through a broader set of devices, many of which are intentionally underpowered to save battery and decrease size. And things optimized to run on less resources run even faster/smoother on more resources. Flash just isn't lightweight enough to keep up with the expectations we have for our connected devices.

The important thing to realize is that the web is moving forward. HTML5 may not perform flawlessly but it is evolving - Flash, however, performs poorly and cannot evolve to reach a solution.

With users moving to mobile and progressive enhancement/graceful degradation becoming significantly more important, HTML5 gives us the ability to choose what to give to users on different devices & users with limited bandwidth. Flash does not give any such solution and it has been doomed since Apple cut it out of iOS.

It being removed from Android just further proves that - not that it really needed more support.

While working at a previously "flash heavy" agency, I watched first hand the move to html/css/js sites before mobile ever became an issue. A few problems we had with every project included:

- SEO, and building duplicate invisible markup in HTML
- Accessibility (keyboards, OS conventions, etc)
- Divergent skills with other front end developers
- Slow load times, performance on slower computers
- Re-building many interface components

Flash was really a "patch" for the browser's inability to perform in aspects of animation, fonts, graphics, and sound.

While the tooling for javascript/css still has a long way to go, browsers have advanced incredibly, while at the same time javascript and CSS frameworks have grown to to match those of flash

I agree with Jason that tooling has improved, but I find it sad how slow some of the HTML5 features are moving. If the devs/execs/whomever of Flash had stepped up and not allowed the platform to whither in the minds of FE devs, then I think the competition would be great for the space.

+ HTML5 audio is lacking – blog.chenalexander.com
+ Mobile performance is poor if you're developing a heavy app like a game – shauninman.com
+ <video> tag lol – apiblog.youtube.com

Flash was a patch in some cases, and a real solution in others. The question is whether the patch is still necessary. Web tech still has a lot of work to do to supplant it with something better.

While we can argue about why, what, and what is going on in the present, I think that we can without a doubt put a stick in it and declare Flash over, at least as anything else but a video player. Anybody disagrees?

Way ahead of you ;)

The real benefit of Flash is provides developers a way of supporting old browsers with new features. Now that Firefox, Chrome, and Safari are the majority and have a very good upgrade story we don't need to worry about backwards compatibility as much.

While Apple may have started the battle to kill Flash I think the more valuable lesson to take away is that marketing agencies can really make or break a technology. That to me is really scary. The reason we saw people leave flash overnight was because the 'business' of Flash - the thing legitimizing it as a platform more than anything else was the marketing industry. When they didn't think it was the shiny thing anymore and moved to app development with their marketing dollars, Flash really dried up.

I never heard the standards / open source people get any louder or quieter about Flash (they consistently hated it), but I did see the ability to ignore them eroded when the money fell out.

I think Geoff's article (bit.ly) brings up a good point about the accessibility of using Flash to get something up on the web. I also learned Flash in high school and not only did I get to throw experiments up on the web, but at that time forums and support didnt really exist. It forced me to figure things out... all kinds of things to get my multimedia experiences to work. I have found that there was this small generation of people that were spurred to do this because of Flash specifically, and I'm hoping there are other things that are as easy to share as quickly that will get the next generation of folks to play and learn.