As a designer, I come across Flash a lot. A significant portion of my career thus far has been spent working in Flash, and for a while, it was my bread and butter. Now, I avoid it when I can. I’ve talked to a number of other designers who feel the same way, but how did we get to this point? What changed from those early days of Flash love?

To answer that, let’s take a quick look back at the history of Flash. Originally released as FutureSplash, and acquired by Macromedia and re-released as Flash in 1996, it’s original goal was to help users build websites without having to learn to code. Between 1996 and 2010 Flash became an entire development environment. Basic scripting supported was included in the 1997 release of Flash 2, with Flash 5′s release in 2000 included ActionScript 1.0. ActionScript 2.0 was included with Flash 7 in 2003, this being the first truly modern and ‘complete’ version of ActionScript.

MacOS X

When Apple decided to make the switch to a UNIX based operating system in 2001, Adobe decided to focus their development efforts entirely on Windows, assuming that the UNIX effort would be a failure. When Mac OS X debuted and proved to be a startling success for Apple, Adobe was caught off guard. Their subsequent efforts on the platform have been criticized as "rushed" and inferior to their Windows counterparts. Since much of the creative industry responsible for Adobe’s success prefers the Mac platform, this became one of the ways that Adobe first began to alienate this creative base. To this day, Adobe Flash is cited as one of the number one problem applications for Mac OS X. It is known for bringing the entire system to a grinding halt when invoked on a website.

ActionScript 3.0

In 2006, Adobe released Flash 9 with support for ActionScript 3, which was a complete restructuring of the language. Although a vast improvement, AS3 was not backwards compatible, and so users had to learn an almost entirely new syntax to use the new features, abandoning six years of learned code, and further alienating the creative base that Adobe relied upon. By this time, new and more open techniques had been developed for accomplishing much of what Flash had been used for previously.

iPhone and iPad

With the release of the iPhone in 2007, Apple refused to allow Flash technology to run on it until Adobe could release a "stable" and "reliable" version. Since Adobe has not been able to do this on the Mac, it is not surprising that as of 2010, Adobe has been unable to meet Apple’s requirements on the iPhone. After selling over 100 Million iPhones, Apple released the iPad to great acclaim in 2010, again refusing to allow what it considered a poor implementation of Flash on the platform. At this point, most users have agreed that Flash is unnecessary on the device.

Android Phone Support

Google’s Android mobile OS was released in 2009 in an attempt to compete with Apple’s iPhone. One of the key promises in Android was Flash support. Unable to develop a stable version, Flash was delayed multiple times for Android, before finally being released in "beta" form on a number of shipping phones. It has since cleared the beta stage, though many phones still ship with the beta version installed. Results across different hardware have been mixed, from running seemingly fine on some systems, to unusably bad on others. This has alienated many early adopters as they have now come to expect that the experience with Flash will be less than ideal. In addition to the unstable and unreliable implementation have been problems with phones being pushed so hard by the software that they can become quite hot, as well as extremely shortened battery life.

Can Flash be saved?

Perhaps more appropriate is the question "Should Flash be saved?". Although popular, Flash has never been much more than a browser plugin. It became so ubiquitous with the web for a while that the plugin now comes pre-installed on many computers, but this doesn’t change the fact that it is unavailable on most mobile platforms, and performs quite poorly on all platforms outside of Windows.

As a designer I asked myself these four questions about whether Flash can be saved, or is indeed worth saving:

1. Can the advantages of Flash be recreated using open web standards?

   Between CSS3, JQuery, and HTML5, I can now avoid using Flash in 90% of the situations I used to rely on it. HTML5 definitely has a long way to go, but it is an open standards up-and-comer. Flash is 14 year old piece of closed technology with a poor-to-non-existent implementation on all non-Windows platforms.

2. Is it likely that Adobe will suddenly "get Flash right" on non-Windows platforms?

   Although strides have been made recently in improving the Mac-based Flash implementation, including hardware acceleration, it is still buggy and insecure. Additionally there are significant issues with 64-bit operating systems (even in Windows), and hardware acceleration is unsupported in Linux environments.

3. When will we see Flash on the 100,000,000+ iPhones and iPads?

   Arguably never. As time marches on, Flash support seems less and less necessary, and therefore less and less likely on the platform. Apple has gone from acting mildly upset about Adobe’s inability to produce a suitable Flash port, to downright publicly hostile towards the company’s efforts in recent months. Major content providers such as YouTube and Hulu already provided dedicate apps to support the iOS platform, and those few that don’t are surely hard at work on it.

4. What about competing phones? Adobe has promised that Flash will soon be available and working on most mobile platforms.

   Flash regularly stalls and crashes on modern hardware. Top-of-the-line desktop computers with multiple multi-core processors, dedicated graphics cards, and up to 32GB of RAM choke on Flash video. What hope then, do we have that Adobe can deliver a version of Flash that can run the same content on mobile hardware, which has only a fraction of the power?

   Not to mention the fact that different handsets run on completely different hardware, further complicating the implementation of hardware acceleration. Given the fact that the average handset only last six months on the market, it would be impossible for Adobe to optimize Flash for each different piece of hardware before they became obsolete.

Perhaps the simple fact then, is that Flash has run it’s course.

This is not to say that Flash is dead, but it is almost certainly dying. It will be a long, protracted death, and Adobe will do it’s best to keep this cash cow running for as long as it can, but in the end it’s unlikely that they will be able to keep it up.

As designers, we must continue to move forward in order to offer the best value and solutions to our clients. Increasingly, Flash is being replaced by newer, more stable, more reliable, and more open technologies. Our efforts are better spent learning these new technologies, than trying to teach an old dog like Flash new tricks.