I guess crashing isn't a feature. I'm not trying to be a troll, but let's be honest -- There has never been a version of Flash that hasn't piece a complete piece of garbage when it comes to stability and performance.
If Adobe "got it" this list of "What's new" would include words like "removed" and "deprecated" and "eliminated." Those words don't appear once. They've just thrown more stuff into the kitchen sink that was already overflowing.
They have amazing developers, but there is a reason Flash is the beast it is, and this isn't moving it in the right direction in terms of delivering a stable, secure and fast experience.
I'd disagree. I've come to realize that crashing is usually either the developer's fault (e.g. trying to do something that doesn't make sense) or the browser's (with Firefox I'd get crashes constantly, since their sandboxing actually breaks the plugin more often than it protects from it; with Chrome, using the same version of the plugin, I get none).
Still, if you look at what they've done in the past couple of years you'd see a lot in trying to revert that situation. Forcing a maximum tick rate of 60hz (was 120), dropping memory use and performance (tick rate goes to 2hz when hidden on a separate tab, or out of the screen); coming up with new browser APIs so the browse can control the plugin performance; and on and on.
They do deprecate a lot over the years. However, is "eliminated" something people really want? The platform prides itself in the fact that SWFs that worked for Flash 2 still work today, despite the changes in the language and virtual machine. So unless it's a change of security policy, nothing breaks or is "eliminated"; as a developer, I find this to be a good thing as I don't have to have a client coming to me after 6 months complaining about something not working anymore.
Flash is a platform that allows people to do a lot. Including shitty binaries. And there's not much defense against it.
And personally I still have my browsers crash more because of shitty HTML/JS than Flash. YMMV.
Crashing in a managed environment like Flash is never the developer's fault. These issues are either introduced by the browser vendor or Adobe.
It's worth noting that Adobe is very reluctant to deprecate API's. They've historically preferred (with AVM1/AVM2) bundling new VM's into the player over deprecating features. And any deprecation must be version-specific, and tends to be more for API consistency than anything else.
What really disappoints me is Adobe's reluctance to support really neat Labs projects like Alchemy. Want to run C (or any language which compiles to C, like haskell!) in the browser? It's been possible since Flash 9, way before NaCl. Official support is coming soon but it's a bit too bad it took so long.
Haskell doesn't really compile to C, unfortunately.
The (deprecated) via-c backend of GHC compiled to something that looked like C, but depended on a horrible Perl script to post-process the object output.
It does have an LLVM backend these days, though, maybe that can work?
Agreed. But most of the crashes I see are of the former type (I.e developers fault).
I honestly can't remember ever seeing a Flash crash actually bring down the the browser. Maybe I've been very lucky.
I see that I'm getting down voted for calling 'ED' out on his sweeping statement where he did not define what he meant by a "crash". Note that for many users a "crash" is when what ever App/game/web-page they are running stops with some error and they can't continue. My basic point is that many (most??) of these, in my experience, are down to developer error.
Many developers seem to have an irrational "hate-fest" going against Flash. For sure there's a lot wrong with it but, for me, all to often "its not the tool but the craftsman at fault".
People are definitely referring to Flash taking down the browser (or crashing the plugin in Chrome and Safari, which have plugin sandboxes). Personally, I've seen "Plug-in Failure" several times even though I rarely visit sites that feature Flash. Steve Jobs wrote that "we know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash."
It isn't irrational. It's quite simply that my laptop fans run loudly when I'm using flash, draining the battery while not using flash doesn't run my fans or drain my battery. It's a pretty simply complaint. Flash is a power and resource hog for very little upside.
For me there are many real world cases which can't be handled without showing the user a fatal error.
E.g. - the developer asks for an runtime created asset that doesn't exist anymore or there's a condition under which a block of code runs forever (actually in this case the flash runtime stops after 15 seconds of activity and allows the user to kill it but it's still a "crash" insofar as the user is concerned.
But Flash often crashes way worse than that; it segfaults, or raises a structured exception. It used to take browser processes with it, before Chrome made it popular to have plugins in their own process.
I suspect Flash's (lack of) stability was one of the reasons for considering this design decision in Chrome.
No doubt this is going to be the most fucked up flash version ever... I can not wait to read about the sploits because the one thing you did not read about is the new 'executable stack protection' mechanisms.
I am just saying the 1980's called and they want their software back...
My experience doesn't match your statements at all. I run a Flash website (it's a game), and Flash is pretty much rock solid for me. My site has been up over 3 years, has over 80k lines of Actionscript, and I can count the number of times I've seen Flash crash on one hand. Even if you include reports from my users who have Flash crash on them, the number is less than 20. That's probably not too far from any software - including browsers themselves.
I'm not a huge Flash fan or anything; I don't care much for Actionscript as a language and I'm constantly looking at switching to HTML5, which I'm sure I'll have to do eventually. But Flash crashes aren't really an issue for me at all. I wonder if your poor experiences in Flash are created by the developer of those specific Flash applications that are crashing.
Personally, I think the Flash 11 features are amazing and, even if Flash may be losing relevance, I think Adobe's going in the right direction with it.
Thats somewhat anedotal for one website / flash game.
My own anecdotal experience from coming across flash sites while browsing for the last 11 years (that I remember) and spending two years developing flash sites, is that it has always been slow and crashes often. And most importantly the stability hasn't seemed to improve over time like everything else on the internet.
Any stats on how many people avoid your site because it's flash? Or perhaps people that avoid your site because flash eats up their power. While you might have a successful site, that doesn't mean it's a good technology. You also can't necessarily tell when someone using your site has a crash.
Flash is the de-facto standard for web-based gaming, so I don't think any significant number of players on a desktop computer avoids it due to it being Flash.
"There has never been a version of Flash that hasn't piece a complete piece of garbage when it comes to stability and performance."
YMMZ. I'm using Chrome right now and I'd say despite playing lots of Flash games and watching players that use Flash, most of the crashes that happen are due to the browser.
Cross compiling would be a horrible idea in my opinion. The end result would be horrific code that ran slowly. The platforms are too different to be ported automatically. There've been attempts in the past, but the cross browser support and performance are usually not that grand.
Adobe is however working on a html5 builder called edge - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/
Looks pretty good from the face of things, and to be honest I think this is the right direction for them to take.
I'm wondering how would HTML5 video support audio, webcam feeds, and a plethora of other features that Flash has had for years but that are barely on the HTML's radar.
Having a time machine is not the same as "getting it".
That’s a minority of use cases. Flash can stick around as a bridge technology for a few years to cover those. The majority of stuff that’s today done in Flash can easily be done with plain HTML, CSS and Javascript, often not even the newest variety.
Adobe has been working on a variety of HTML5 tools, so we can presume they "get it".
It must cost them a fortune to support Flashplayer (which they give away for nothing). I'm sure they'll drop it the moment there's enough HTML5 penetration on par with Flashplayer's capabilities.
It must cost them a fortune to support Flashplayer (which they give away for nothing)
The cost of supporting the free Flashplayer is paid for by the lock-in that this enables. Afterall, Dreamweaver doesn't have the kind of market dominance that Flash Professional has.
Yes, however, the desired "lock-in" is to the tool, which sells, not the Flashplayer. People are used to developing with Flash Professional and have AS3 codebases, etc. If Adobe successfully targets HTML5 instead of Flashplayer, these people can (and in all likelihood will choose to) continue to use FlashWhatever Professional and even their AS3 codebases.
The player is merely a medium, though by authoring it, Adobe can advance the state of the art more quickly than the browser makers can agree on anything. This does make Flash Professional a more compelling environment.
But let's pretend for a moment that 95% of browsers got feature-coherent on the level of Flash. Why would Adobe care if the player were "all browsers", instead of Flashplayer?
Would they care because if they were targeting all browsers, they'd be effectively targeting a level playing field in terms of the base technology? Would it end up like Dreamweaver, which also targets a common base technology?
I'm going to argue "not necessarily, and in this case, no". And the reason is that anyone today can target Flashplayer. The playing field is already effectively level on Flash. Tons of software outputs SWFs. There are even Flash Professional wannabes, but they're not as good as GIMP is compared to Photoshop, and we know where that thread leads.
Speaking of that, consider Photoshop. It is hugely popular in spite of the fact there is zero infrastructure lock-in. Literally bazillions of programs can view and edit Photoshop-produced files. It's thriving while Dreamweaver, relatively, stagnates.
Dreamweaver's lack of dominance, IMO, is likely related to other factors. (I'm not sure why, but I don't know any professional web developers that use it.)
Iff Adobe could get Flash-quality and quantity on 95% of browsers using HTML/CSS/JS, I'll still bet you a pint they stop work on the player. Chrome 14 just added audio synthesis, so we're getting there!
Adobe's not going to stop working on the Flash Professional-style tools, though, even if it is outputting HTML. People buy Flash Professional for the features it provides both to the designer and for the end result. No one actually cares if there is a plugin in the middle or not.
IMO the big differences between flash/photoshop and dreamweaver is that people look at the output.
Few people stand up and complain about the poor bytecode in SWF or the poor encoding inside PSD files, while _everybody_ used to complain about the code produced by dreamweaver and how much better it was to write HTML/CSS/JS by hand.
Probably once web devs stop looking at the "generated assembly" tools for programming at a higher level will be more successful.
If Adobe "got it" this list of "What's new" would include words like "removed" and "deprecated" and "eliminated." Those words don't appear once. They've just thrown more stuff into the kitchen sink that was already overflowing.
They have amazing developers, but there is a reason Flash is the beast it is, and this isn't moving it in the right direction in terms of delivering a stable, secure and fast experience.