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Flash continues to sink away into the shadows:
Adobe is finally ready to say goodbye to Flash. In an announcement last night, Adobe said that it will now "encourage content creators to build with new web standards," such as HTML5, rather than Flash. It's also beginning to deprecate the Flash name by renaming its animation app to Animate CC, away from Flash Professional CC.
[...] By acknowledging that Flash is dying, Adobe is able to better position its animation tools for the future. Flash Professional CC is already capable of creating HTML5 content — in fact, it already represents a third of all content created in the app, according to Adobe. By taking up the name Animate CC, Adobe is able to sell Flash Professional CC as a general animation tool, rather than a tool geared toward Flash. The name change will take effect early next year.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Insightful) by zugedneb on Thursday December 03 2015, @09:23AM
Still, I kind of wonder what went wrong...
Flash have been around for 20 years, they should have had ample of time to fix the various issues with it.
Same goes for their pdf reader. I do not know what they have done to it, but nowdays even a document viewer has security issues...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:38AM
Flash have been around for 20 years, they should have had ample of time to fix the various issues with it.
Having been around for (over) 20 years is part of the problem. Remember what kind of hardware ran Flash back in 1995? A 486, if you're lucky. Probably an FPU, but maybe software floating point. A graphics card that was basically a dumb frame buffer. It ran on Mac (Classic MacOS) and Windows (including 16-bit Windows 3.11) and a few other platforms. It's been ported to tiny phones and to a load of different operating systems.
It was quite informative to see the APIs that Adobe insisted Apple add to OS X to make Flash performance not suck (Apple did, and then removed them a couple of minor releases later). They wanted to be able to use hardware-accelerated video decoding, then pull the rendered image back to the CPU and do drawing / compositing over it on the CPU. That is absolutely the wrong way to achieve their goals: you want to keep the decoded frame in a texture and have the GPU composite it and other textures (because that's what GPUs are really good at). On the AGP machines that were still common at the time, the Adobe approach was even more insane, because AGP is very fast to send data to the card, but very slow to bring it back.
They needed to do this, because they had their own rendering pipeline that predated being able to expect the OS having something like OpenGL support.
Same goes for their pdf reader. I do not know what they have done to it, but nowdays even a document viewer has security issues...
That's far less surprising. The PDF format uses offsets into the file all over the place, so it's easy to get bounds checking wrong. It also has the ability to make network connections (to post PDF forms) and to run arbitrary JavaScript code (for form validation). On top of that, it includes a load of other formats (PNG, JPEG, and so on) with decoders that have pretty poor security track record by themselves.
sudo mod me up