Before the iPhone it seemed like everyone agreed that Flash sucked, but after iOS that was taken to be some kind of Apple fanboy position. Which is to say, plenty of people with no particular allegiance to Apple have been unhappy with Flash for a long time, so there is no need to paint this as some kind of unilateral war on Apple's part. Flash is crappy and it's finally, slowly dying, that's all.
Mac users and Linux users agreed that Flash sucked. Windows users just saw it as the thing that let them play games and videos in the browser without downloading some stupid plugin for every different site.
And even though it sucked on Linux, and held back the platform (by e.g. making ARM a 2nd class web platform and not working with pulseaudio or 64-bit) it also gave Linux access to consumer-focussed software that might easily have been delivered with Microsoft-centric technologies that wouldn't have worked at all on Linux.
Google's support of Flash on Android and Chrome OS has helped it to become slightly less crappy. Meanwhile Apple's anti-Flash stance has encouraged people to push web-standards harder so Linux has done okay out of the battle.
I actually think Flash is not entirely bad, it just does not really belong in browsers. As self-contained apps, Flash applications are pretty cool - they are fun and easy to program (at least AS3 - AS2 sucks), and I often use it as tool for rapid-prototyping little algorithms. Trying to put Flash into browsers though is like putting a sandbox inside another sandbox - it just gets in the way and impossible to effectively interface the two.
Unlike most people who grumbled about Flash, Apple actually made the strategic decision not to support it any more on its mobile OS. I'm not a huge fan of Apple, but I admire and respect them for taking this calculated risk.
> Flash is crappy and it's finally, slowly dying, that's all.
Is it, though?
Google bundles Flash on Android. Android device makers use the existence of Flash as a differentiating factor from iOS devices. And this is not just something disconnected from what users want, if you look at Firefox Mobile's input system,
then one of the top complaints is that Firefox Mobile doesn't support Flash.
I wish this wasn't the case, but it isn't clear at all that Flash is dying. Google bundling it in Android (and Chrome) is helping it quite a bit. If Google had taken a hard stance against it on Android, like Apple did, that would have been great. A lost opportunity.
Google aided in de-emphasizing Flash when it began converting video to H.264 to support the iPhone in 2007. Apple and Google were partners then--people forget Eric Schmidt spoke in glowing terms about the iPhone and Apple on stage at the iPhone’s rollout: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3206653149996743169
I disagree, it is dying, though slowly as I say. Regardless of what Google is doing, the two top-selling smartphones and the best-selling tablet by far do not have Flash. These devices now have a huge install base, and that undermines what used to be one of Flash's biggest selling points, which was that everyone had it. At the very least, there needs to be an argument for doing something in Flash where in the past it would have been a no-brainer.
Android device OEMs do try to use Flash as a differentiating factor, but I seriously doubt that argument has much traction at all. They're using it because they're desperate for selling points, not because it's such a good one.
I've been racking my brain to try and make sense of why som many people seem to have forgotten just what Flash did to the web, and that's it. Pro-Flash is the polite face of Anti-Apple.
The biggest fans of Flash are not users, but designers and game makers who have invested years of effort in mastering the creative tools. And I truly feel for them, both in terms of sunk time/costs, and the dearth of alternative tools that don't require a buggy and closed runtime environment.
I don't know what you mean about what Flash did to the web. A lot of restaurants and small businesses had bad flash web sites built. Before flash a lot of people made websites with tons of animated gifs, but that didn't cause me to hate animated gifs.
There's no doubt Flash transformed the web but not all of it was good. Flash was (and still is) buggy - how many browsers have crashed and how many vulnerabilities has the Flash plugin introduced?
Could not agree more. Even folks who claim to be for open standards (including Google) defend Flash as if it was an open standard.
But it's not--it's proprietary to Adobe and was designed for the desktop and not mobile. And while performance on Windows was always pretty good, it was horrible on Mac OS X. Flash is the single biggest cause of browser crashes on the Mac.
Ironically, Apple choosing to support HTML5 video and encouraging their developers to do them same got them lots of criticism.
And even if your browser didn't crash, your machine would slow to a crawl because almost all of your CPU cycles got hijacked by Flash, even on new hardware. Apps like ClickToFlash (http://clicktoflash.com/) were required to make surfing the web tolerable on the Mac.
Eventually Apple stopped including Flash preinstalled on Macs; many Mac users removed Flash so their machines would run cooler and faster and with more stability. And existing users realized (thanks for articles like Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It (http://daringfireball.net/2010/11/flash_free_and_cheating_wi... they could uninstall Flash and the world wouldn't end.
Even when pundits were producing FUD constantly about the lack of Flash on iOS, even predicting that Apple would eventually relent, I knew it would never happen.
Apple would never allow something they didn't control to become the video or animation standard on their platform. And certainly not something that would have a detrimental impact on battery life and wasn't designed with touch in mind.
Apple didn't just win today; they won when they said publicly what many of us already knew: Flash is legacy technology that's not necessary going forward. Which they've proven repeatedly.
This "everyone" that criticized Flash pre-iPhone were web developers on message boards. Now lay people who are just Apple fanboys are partaking in this silly fight. I absolutely do not remember the level of hatred that exists today (again, as far as I can tell, mostly on Apple-leaning websites) pre-iPhone. But maybe we just have different viewpoints on the history.
