HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1344404336252768257

by tosh • 6 years ago

375 363 6 years ago

mtmail• 6 years ago

Why didn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR take off as successor to Flash? It is available for all platforms, runs ActionScript.

shiburizu• 6 years ago

Lots of applications used it. I recall Wacom having some art applications made with it, I remember League of Legends used it in the early days. The link you sent also specified quite a few uses.

But most notably there is a focus on desktop/mobile applications when the real dichotomy ended up being web/mobile applications and a ton of internet companies were dumping money into their own frameworks at the time because who wants to pay rent to Adobe? If artists don't want to pay for their proprietary crapware, imagine tech companies.

AIR was yet another closed platform to throw on the pile of failed closed platforms.

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

A shocking number of "native" applications are actually Adobe AIR. Brawlhalla on Steam (one of the top F2P games) used AIR as of a few years ago and still might! (They use a HAXE-based client on consoles)

niftich• 6 years ago

AIR was wildly popular for making games and cross-platform applications around 2010. These could even be submitted to mobile apps stores, even for iOS.

But AIR produces packaged applications you need to install, and not the embedded-in-a-webpage experience that Flash was.

tomc19852• 6 years ago

AIR apps were the Electron of its day -- slow, poorly-written HTML/CSS/JS (well technically AS but linguistically similar enough) garbage, which reuse exactly zero of the affordances your OS grants you, on top of a runtime that was waaaay too fat for its own good.

Mercifully, I only had to interact with a few AIR apps, and by god it was a terrible experience. The platform itself may have been fine but it was definitely the target platform for people who think of dev teams as cost centers and not value creators.

thrower1232• 6 years ago

I have an old version of the Pandora AIR-based app that I'm holding onto for dear life. It still works wildly better than any of the subsequent UWP or Windows Store apps.

seanalltogether• 6 years ago

I wrote a good number of AIR apps back in the day, the reason it didn't succeed (and why electron has succeeded) is because Adobe didn't want to allow devs to bundle standalone .exe/.app releases. You had to install the air runtime permanently alongside the application you wanted. Nobody likes 3rd party dependencies that worm their way into your system, just cause you want to run a simple app.

bmcahren2• 6 years ago

Is he ranting that Adobe Animate doesn't exist? Because it does and seamlessly exports HTML.

I'm pretty sure if they aren't already you could get a bundler configuration for webpack that would build a single file data uris and all.

jan_Inkepa2• 6 years ago

Lars is a game developer, so is presumably talking about interactive/multimedia content rather than pure animation. I fully agree with him that JS doesn't hold a candle to Flash even now (for rich media apps in the browser).

But I don't think Flash could exist nowadays online anyway in the same way - the hardware ecosystem is much more diverse, you can't make a keyboard/mouse game and call it quits so easily, because people with tiny-touchscreen phones might also end up on your site. Trying to treat the web as a single platform is...it's a lot of ground to cover.

gfxgirl2• 6 years ago

People still do this even without flash. Lots of people post tiny online games that require dragging the mouse with the left mouse button pressed and it's clear they forgot/ignored that the majority of people are on laptops

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

I'm well aware the Adobe Animate still exists, a fact I'm glad for. I'm well aware that it can export to HTML5, and even Haxe/OpenFL, an open source project I've personally invested a ton of time and money into.

It's great those initiatives exist, I've spent years of my career supporting them, but at replicating what Flash did in its prime, it's still not quite the same. The abstraction leaks around the edges and the community and singular simplicity and straightforwardness of what Flash had is long gone and a tiny open source community always heroically struggling for funding and contributions can't be expected to replicate it.

Also, RE: Animate, updates randomly break things with previous versions, and being proprietary I have no idea how long Adobe is going to let it continue existing and keep it compatible with anything I might want to use it for.

Anyways, the main point of the thread was just that the claims that HTML/JS was this perfect go to replacement for what we really valued about Flash just rings hollow to me 10 years later.

CyberDildonics3• 6 years ago

That's just restating your claim, you still didn't explain what specifically you think is missing or impossible.

bmcahren2• 6 years ago

I was really into action script and flash development back in the early 2000s. I can't think of anything I couldn't do today better using an animation framework.

Killing flash had to be done. Your complaint is misplaced because you're complaining about the quality of the alternatives. If there was a market for a seamless alternative it would exist. I think that market is gone. I think that market has been replaced by Unity and UE4.

imbnwa2• 6 years ago

I worked on porting a company's Flash library to Canvas, Animate is not that helpful here, it spits out an IIFE that calls into their CreateJs library but you just can't fire and forget because Canvas demands a lot of hand-tuning if you're doing anything other than banner ads to get the same performance profile and Animate won't help you do that work. This is particularly a problem with static images, text, opacity IIRC. Literally every tip you see on MDN for Canvas performance you will not get in that Animate Canvas output.

Jus as an example, Flash is able to redraw only whats needed on the screen whereas Canvas doesn't do this and works like a game where it blows away the whole screen every frame (assuming you're calling clearRect), hence why its best practice to use multiple Canvas elements, off-screen Canvas elements, etc but again, Animate doesn't do that work for you.

And up until the EOL of IE11 next summer you have to manually alter the output to make use of blend modes, which people use a lot of in Flash, if you want full browser support, which is pertinent in domains like healthcare.

daveoc64• 6 years ago

There is no end of life date for IE11 next year.

Internet Explorer is supported for as long as the OS is, and as such, will see support until at least 2029 on Windows Server 2019. It wouldn't surprise me if the next version of Windows (desktop or server) also includes IE, fully supported for its 10 year lifecycle.

There were a lot of clickbait articles in the past year about various Microsoft services dropping support for IE, but it will still be part of Windows, and still get security updates.

hactually2• 6 years ago

In my opinion, focusing on replacing the technology with languages rather than tools was the issue.

I wonder if something like figma/webflow, that allowed the WYSIWYG nature of flash, combined with an <embed> or web assembly output would be a solution?

hactually2• 6 years ago

The other thing missing from all this is that, most people who started with Flash, in my experience, all started with a cracked/pirate version ... the SaaS model killed that.

redisman3• 6 years ago

It was long dead before the SaaS model really. After iphone dropped support the writing was on the wall

amelius4• 6 years ago

For 95% of applications you can just distribute a single SWF file

You can do the same with HTML5+CSS+JavaScript, all in a single file. You can even include images, audio and video e.g. with data urls.

paulryanrogers2• 6 years ago

As what, MHTML?

hackmiester2• 6 years ago

No, just, like, an HTML file.

Put the JS in <script> elements, and the CSS in <style> elements, all within the HTML (in the <head>, or at the end, as appropriate).

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

You certainly CAN.

My point is this is not standard or even typical behavior and so you rarely see it.

Likewise, you could split up a Flash file into as much spaghetti as you wanted. But most of them were single SWF files.

Honestly, I think efforts like FlashPoint will have a better time archiving flash content for this reason than trying to preserve HTML5 content of today.

amelius4• 6 years ago

My point is this is not standard or even typical behavior and so you rarely see it.

It could easily become a standard if someone writes a convenient JavaScript library or composer tool to do exactly that. My point is that the underlying platform is not the limitation.

est31• 6 years ago

data urls encode things in base64 format so bloat up the file. Also the user agent can't just seek over them, requiring it to parse the entire included base64 content. There are better ways, but sadly nothing cross platform:

* https://github.com/WICG/webpackage

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webarchive

amelius4• 6 years ago

I suppose you could write a small JavaScript library that handles seeking through series of binary blobs.

kennu• 6 years ago

But when you share some HTML in practice, e.g. send a HTML game exported from Godot to a friend, they will need to unzip it and install a local web server to actually play it with appropriate permissions.

Whereas .swf files could be opened directly in the browser without any preparation steps.

It was also possible to read metadata from .swf files (background color, canvas size, etc), which made it very simple to automatically embed Flash games on web pages with the correct layout.

So there are a lot of small practical details that made .swf a very convenient format for sharing games and multimedia content.

gfxgirl2• 6 years ago

Even if you did that it wouldn't repo flash. Flash streamed the file, executing it and making it interactive to the user long before the entire file was downloaded.

olyjohn• 6 years ago

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash player.

Flash on the web only worked if you had Flash player plugin installed. Both browser and Flash updates themselves would break the Flash plugin constantly. That was across all browsers and platforms. Keeping plugins updated and reliable was a mess, for a long time there weren't even auto updates.

Flash was a mess the whole time. Let's not pretend that it ever really "just worked" because it didn't.

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

My experience was to upload to Newgrounds and Kongregate and send it to my mom on an ancient computer and she'd run it just fine. I am sorry for oversimplifying but I do think many people had the same experience as I did.

danShumway11• 6 years ago

But your mom was on Windows, right? And probably running a pretty mainstream browser that was updated regularly.

If your only requirement is that you should be able to put your code on a website and your mom should be able to visit a link and run it, then the web is already significantly ahead of where Flash was.

Of course, the accessibility of creation is a problem, but if you send someone a link to a canvas-based animation, they are more likely to be able to play it today than they ever were in the days of Flash. They can even play it on mobile. Unless you're doing something very experimental, they'll likely be able to play it even if their computer/browser is out of date.

I mean, if we're simplifying this down to the common experience, the way people consume HTML games and Flash games is literally the same -- they visit a link. I have self-hosted remote playtests of the current game I'm working on by putting the game on a static page, and that is just as accessible to playtesters as anything that I was ever doing when I was building Flash games. More accessible, because now I don't have to send people to a wiki to get the game playing on Linux.

QuantumYeti• 6 years ago

I definitely remember downloading SWFs and running them from my desktop. I don't recall having problems getting them to run. Just wanted to add that my experiences match up with what you're describing.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

Came to say this. Versioning was a nightmare and still is if you want to run any legacy SWFs. I guess that you could levy the same criticism against HTML with infinite NPM libraries though.

danShumway11• 6 years ago

Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked.

Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.

Flash was really important for its time, and I agree there are things I still miss about it that the web hasn't been able to replicate. But my goodness, as someone who uses Linux today, I can't express how glad I am that the websites that never worked on my Linux machines now do work on my Linux machines. Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored because Flash was a proprietary blob of insecure DRM-riddled code and Adobe couldn't be bothered to give anyone any attention unless they were big enough that they were impossible to ignore. Yes, I'm incredibly disappointed that the web hasn't captured everything Flash did, but it is good that we have gotten rid of Flash because mobile and Linux users deserve to have a version of the web that works on their machines.

These people who are lauding Flash as a universal environment either just have rose-tinted glasses or they lived in an even smaller programming bubble than the one they accuse HTML advocates of inhabiting.

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked.

C'mon I never emailed people SWF's, seriously. We uploaded them to flash portals and sent links to our friends. The single-file aspect was important because it made it easy to share (for both you and the flash portal). Also crucially it made it easy for competing flash portals to "steal" your game and spread it even further.

as someone who uses Linux today

I get what you're saying and I love Linux and go out of my way to support it, but I don't think the Linux audience in 1999-2008 was exactly who most of us were targeting, nor did it have particularly much market share among desktop computers then or now.

mgkimsal2• 6 years ago

Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows

"Cross platform" to many meant Windows 98, XP, 2000 and NT5. You could work across that, you had the 'enterprise' market apps people using 2000 and NT which could then also be used by employees at home using Win XP. What more could you want?

I'm guess I'm being only half-sarcastic here.

naikrovek4• 6 years ago

Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed

What? Literally everyone who downloaded the flash plugin and ran the installer got a standalone player installed as well. It was right there in the start menu for anyone to find.

bitwize5• 6 years ago

Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac.

Flash only ever worked properly if you were running it in Internet Explorer for Mac OS 9. Any other browser/OS combination and you were looking at low framerates, audio/video desync, or both. Linux was worst of all.

arbitrage• 6 years ago

there wasn't really a mobile market to speak of during the hey-day of flash.

it was an awful and wonderful time to experience the constant breakage and delight that was the www.

selfhoster112• 6 years ago

Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored

This is my view as well. Windows on x86 was the golden child. Linux was the hated bastard at best (anyone remember switching between OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio to eke any sound out of the plugin?).

And even that only on x86. ARM? What, you mean that's a processor architecture? That's not even going into the utter dead silence when it came to supporting other Adobe plugins outside of Windows. Adobe Air? Shockwave? I can still easily feel my blood boiling at the absence of these plugins, after so so many years.

Aardwolf• 6 years ago

Sending an email with SWF was not the intention, but you could easily host your SWF anywhere and give a URL and they could play your game, most of the time cross platform except those few years where they weren't updating the linux SWF player to the latest version (which got fixed again later). If you can't host it yourself, you could put it on websites like newgrounds.

_the_inflator• 6 years ago

I only want to add security to the list.

This lead to my boycott of flash. Sorry flash websites!

Flash was an interesting experiment, as you said, important at the time, however I started distrusting websites, that used it, heavily and avoided them.

HeckFeck• 6 years ago

As an avid Linux user, I can't help but agree with the core of your argument. Open is always better, especially for posterity.

But the aspect of Flash that hasn't been fully replicated by HTML5/JS/whatever is the fully integrated workflow. That took away much of the underlying woes with environments and configurations. All you did was install Flash, make your game or animation, and a SWF was produced. This ease of beginning surely was a springboard for so many creators and animators, like the Newgrounds community.

I'm also partial to the idea of not everything being done by the browser, and instead plugins specialising in their respective area. The effect of moving everything into the browser only contributes to the Google-led near monopolisation of rendering engines.

roenxi• 6 years ago

Flash was really important for its time

It'll be a shame to see Flash go, it really was quite a technology. Couldn't click a link without some cutesy little flash something-or-other popping up.

My memories may be tainted by time, but I'm hesitant to say that modern web apps have surpassed flash yet. A web browser simply isn't up to the challenge of creating a nice interface for an app and I got the impression Flash's tooling was a long way ahead of the game. But Flash stands as a soon-forgotten internet monument of closed source winning battles and open source winning wars.

sleepy_keita• 6 years ago

Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows

This honestly got a laugh out of me.

the8472• 6 years ago

but that's not how people really used Flash

4chan's /f/ would disagree, they're posting stand-alone flash games and animations just fine and those also worked locally.

naikrovek4• 6 years ago

Yeah I remember clicking on .swf files in directory listings over FTP almost 20 years ago and seeing the animation or game load up in the browser like no big deal. It was a great way to share and discover weird as hell flash animations.

hackmiester2• 6 years ago

I don't really have any way to refute what you are saying, but I don't recall the difficulties you are describing. I supported Windows desktops for many years during the heyday of the Flash Player.

recursive5• 6 years ago

That point is very curious, since you actually can email someone an .html file, and it will "just work".

AnIdiotOnTheNet• 6 years ago

When was the last time you saw a web app that was a single html file and nothing else?

dsego3• 6 years ago

Not if it has local dependencies, like js or css, then you would need to bundle those as well, in an archive perhaps.

josefx• 6 years ago

With resources embedded in the highly "compressed" base64 encoding. Quite a few email services will probably block those html files just because they end up stupidly large unless your content is text only and doesn't include half a dozen java script frameworks to manage basic animations.

8organicbits• 6 years ago

In terms of sending a single SWF file to someone: The HTML equivalent would be to inline your CSS and Javascript, and use data URLs to inline images/assets. Now you have a single, self contained HTML file you can send around and it will "play" when you double click it.

I suppose the point may be that no one has written a tool to package a HTML5 app up like that? Seems possible to build under certain constraints.

stupidcar2• 6 years ago

They have. It’s called Webpack. There are also various similar tools.

EDIT: I got downvoted for telling the truth? The website is here if you don't believe me: https://webpack.js.org/ It literally does what the post I replied to asked for.

mook• 6 years ago

The older HTML equivalent would be to package it in a *.mhtml where the various parts are mime-encoded, like a multipart email would. It's only been around for decades. Creating it was saving a webpage in IE. Mozilla/Firefox never supported it, though, even though they already had the necessary code for doing email… possibly because they had inherited the Netscape mail codebase which was a bit difficult to reuse.

ineedasername• 6 years ago

In practice it wasn't too uncommon for a single web page to also be a constellation different interdependent swf files. One for each menu, button, forms, etc.

The author's points hold true at least somewhat if you're talking about a single cohesive Flash application, but much less so if you're talking about a website built with flash.

taf2• 6 years ago

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

Yes, flash websites were a bit of an anti-pattern even then (brilliant jewels like Homestarrunner.com aside)

Point I didn't mention clearly enough was that single-file-as-default was REALLY good for flash portal distribution. Made it easy for creators to share and easy for portals to ingest files, AND to "steal" them from eachother, which was something us developers actively encouraged, it's how you got your game or cartoon played/watched by millions of people.

shams93• 6 years ago

It was always hell to get hired to edit a swf file where the client didn't know you need the original fla to edit the thing the swf was not enough.

artificial2• 6 years ago

This brings back memories of flash decompiling and trying to sift through the output to do the deed.

nanodeath• 6 years ago

IIRC one of Chrome's various selling points when it launched was that Flash was bundled in, so 1. you always had Flash and 2. the plugin was more likely to be properly compatible with the browser, and 3. because Chrome updated constantly, that means you got updated Flash, too. So they definitely were trying to address that glaring pain point you brought up.

nl• 6 years ago

This is very true, and often forgotten.

Initially it was a strategy to reduce security incidents caused by out-of-date Flash plugins.

mkl2• 6 years ago

Plus Chrome's multiprocess model and sandboxing meant when Flash crashed you'd lose a tab or two instead of the whole browser. Before that I used to have browser profiles (and sometimes a whole browser) just dedicated to the fragile buggy Flash plugin, which wasn't installed on my primary browser.

its_simple• 6 years ago

You're missing his point. If you wanted to share what you made, all you needed to do was export the .swf file. If I want to share my html5 game with you, there's a shit ton of files I have to upload somewhere.

dimmke3• 6 years ago

The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on.

Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had its own proprietary scripting language called ActionScript and you definitely needed to have some coding skill to do most things in Flash beyond basic animations.

SimianLogic2• 6 years ago

Actually Flash was fantastic (for games). AS3 is one of my favorite programming languages I've ever worked with, but Flash wasn't just a programming language. The display tree (put simply: game engine) was baked into the runtime, which made it very very easy to make games. The tight coupling between art (movieclips created in Flash the program) and code (AS3 written in FlashDevelop or notepad) made for very fast iteration compared to today's highly siloed environments (make art in W. animate in X. export with Y. hand off to developers working in Z).

The amount of hoops you have to jump through to run something interactive in Unity is mind-boggling by comparison (without even talking about sharing that thing with another human on another computer). Processing was also pretty good at the first bit, but it wasn't as tuned to games and sharing your stuff was pretty awful (java applets).

Just because I <3 Flash doesn't mean it didn't have security problems, though. I wish someone had bought the tech off of Adobe and turned it into a gaming platform a-la Steam with proper input support.

jakelazaroff• 6 years ago

Where are all the new games and animations, then? They used to be everywhere. People stopped making them because the tooling went away.

pwdisswordfish0• 6 years ago

That #1 on the list is SWF as a single file is really, really stupid. People can author standalone SVG or embed their scripts directly into HTML, they just choose not to. About half the problems of modern Web development practices are not that such-and-such makes something impossible, it's that people pass up what's possible (even what's sensible) in favor of the monkey-see-monkey-do style of development that involves dumping Dockerized Webpack Babel Rollup TypeScript Bazel React projects transpiled from Clojured Elixir onto GitHub with three quarters of a gigabyte of NPM dependencies.

It's nonsense to say that "HTML5/JS has [...] gotten worse". It's not a vendor SDK where platform version X doesn't support feature from version because the platform hired a new head of the design team who wants to shake things up by ditching the previous gen for the new shiny that you have to use instead. Web platform standardization is additive. If the new stuff sucks, don't use it, and keep doing things the "old" way. Don't do dumb stuff like trying to stay on the bleeding edge for no good reason and then complain when you get cut.

It's also a total contradiction to double back after all of this and try to claim that HTML5/JS is "programmer-centric". To go further and say that "Flash was content-first" is something all on its own. Standard web tech is content-first in a way that Flash never was, or more accurately, it's user-first. Flash on the other hand was always creator-first, prioritizing authors'/designers' pixel-perfect vision over users and accessibility, and the tacit endorsement of the worldview that the ends justify the means and that it's okay to favor blobs over, you know, content—which is ironically exactly what's wrong with the current world of SPAs driven by inscrutable minified bundles on the order of megabytes just to do something like put half a dozen form controls on a page that still doesn't manage state correctly.

thrower1232• 6 years ago

Flash was good.

The internet is a much less interesting place without it, and the amount of ceremony required to replicate in HTML5 what any Tom, Dick or Harry could slap together with Flash is insane.

We have regressed here.

watwut4• 6 years ago

I was around when flash was a thing and it was actually great for small hobby development. Waaay better then what is now.

cblconfederate4• 6 years ago

ActionScript was just like javascript, almost no additional skills needed

dmitriid2• 6 years ago

Try animating anything on the web, and you'll quickly wish Flash wasn't dead.

And then reflect on why there are zero tools for the great collection of technologies collectively called HTML5 that have Flash's timeline tools, independent keyframe animations etc. etc.

goto11• 6 years ago

Everytime a lost or abandoned technology is mentioned on HN, someone will claim it was amazing and much better than anything current. You have people claiming <font> was better than CSS, that Gopher was better than the Web, that FidoNet was better than the Internet.

easton• 6 years ago

there weren’t even auto updates

I remember a point where just about every time anyone logged into a XP machine, the Flash player would start begging to be updated. There seemed to be multiple updates a week sometimes to fix stuff. When Chrome started embedding Flash it was just about revolutionary since you didn’t have to keep as much of an eye on whatever CVE popped up that day.

emn13• 6 years ago

Also, the whole auto-update story is a bit of a tangent anyhow - nothing updated reliably back then. People were lazy, or didn't trust updates; but it was common for people to delay updates sometimes indefinitely, even if in the long-term that was unwise. That may have been one of chromes big selling points; that meant that you knew what you were targeting back when FF and especially, especially IE always required coding for 5 or so major versions - you'd have IE compat mode (~5.5), 6,7,8, and sometimes IE9 or mac-IE, which all had pretty significant feature and bug differences, and it took years to obsolete a version. And ironically, IE's fractured nature kept the web alive; because it meant that you needed to invest in the kinds of processes, habits, and webdesign that catered to multiple rendering engines. IE's dominance appears huge only if you add all those versions together; but from a webdevs perspective, you needed to do many of the things cross-browser support requires anyhow - unlike today, when you can get pretty far by simply testing on chrome only, and likely iOS (though even that is ignorable for some quite influential market segments, e.g. india, and it risks obsoletion in china and africa too).

heavyset_go2• 6 years ago

In the early days, people would share Flash projects as .EXE files, and those would "just work".

thewebcount• 6 years ago

... On Windows. They never worked for me on the Mac.

fny• 6 years ago

So Flash and HTML/JS are how I got into programming at the age of 8, and I completely disagree with your comment.

All I needed to do was export the flash document as an exe and boom: it worked. The portability was amazing. I would just cut a release, put it on floppies, and take them to school. I never had anyone complain once about having an issue. Oh, and no one gave a damn about Linux outside of server admins back then, so yes an .exe was "universally" portable across whatever windows version people had running. There was also a fairly easy process for creating versions for Macs then too, but I don't remember how I did it.

Also, Flash was very good about having backwards compatible exports, so for as long as you weren't using the latest features you could reliably export to older versions of Flash.

Flash was a blessing in the late 90s and early aughts too precisely because it was the only reliable runtime when the internet was a flaming trash heap of incompatibility during the browser wars. Nothing worked everywhere /except/ Flash. The only other app platform available at the time were Java applets, and those were a nightmare. There's a reason why you used to be able to buy entire websites that were Flash based: it just worked.

Yes, Flash only worked if you had Flash installed, but honestly, who didn't? Was this really any different than making sure you had whatever God forsaken Windows service pack installed on your computer? And yes, I know Flash didn't work on Linux, but almost /everyone/ ran Windows back in the day.

I loved every product Macromedia created and owe a lot to them for having made it so easy to make engaging dynamic content. It's how I got hooked on developing software as a kid in elementary school.

It's a shame that there's nothing as simple anymore. I died a little inside when Adobe bought them, and I feel like the next generation is missing out on what was a really fun, flexible, and simple tool...

Making a ball change shades and move in Flash was a few intuitive clicks on a timeline. Now we have a only have a canvas API with relatively low level primitives. If you want things to be simpler, you have to go find some other package, oh wait now you need node, npm, we pack and 20 other dependencies to build the damn package, did you download the proper CSS file too, oh wait you need to import the script at the bottom of the page not the head, blah, blah, blah.

I miss Flash. Yes, the internet is better without it, but I feel like kids of today don't know what they're missing.

chrisco2552• 6 years ago

Adobe moved right on to supporting HTML5 in their Adobe Animate tool: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht...

The support for using simple tools to make HTML5 animations and interactive content has been there for years (since at least 2013, when CreateJS was released: https://www.createjs.com/ ))

Adobe Animate: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

watwut4• 6 years ago

I miss flash games. The internet is not better without flash, because it lacks those tiny creative games people with little tech knowledge done fast.

That kind of scene is not present now.

ksec4• 6 years ago

All I needed to do was export the flash document as an exe and boom:

Yes there were huge Gaming communities around it. Flash at the time was like Unity today. And may be even better than Unity from ease of use perspective. Lots of interesting Indie games.

Sometimes I just wish Adobe had open sourced Flash.

gorgoiler3• 6 years ago

In the context of the tweet thread’s list the author meant that (1) Flash web deploys were a single file and (3) distribution was with a single URL, which could be emailed.

reaktivo• 6 years ago

For what it's worth, distributing SWFs bundled with the player as an executable was something that was popular and trivial to do. It used to be called a Projector

jonplackett3• 6 years ago

I think what they mean is that it when it worked, it worked the same everywhere. Barely any testing was required because flash always played the same in every browser on every computer. Which was nice.

velcro• 6 years ago

My experience with Flash is completely opposite to yours - I'd say we're for the most part pretending that by letting Flash die we're better off today.

My fans spinning up every time I open a random website definitely disagree with you. Wasn't that the #1 argument for getting rid of Flash?

I started developing Flash websites in Flash 3 in school, transitioned into Actionscript 2/3 and did some complex projects over the years. Can't vouch for Linux but on my Mac and on Windows it was definitely great, it DID just work and it was cross-platform. People have short memories - but cross-platform back then was also mostly referring to huge JS/website inconsistencies between different browsers. I mean - when you say cross-platform, what are you even comparing it to?

I had a huge offline collection of different SWF files/websites for inspiration and that I could just start up from the filesystem and they also just worked (if it was a single-file project of course). I'd wager that 95+% of the people also had the full Flash Player installed.

Today I do some complex JS/React/webGL stuff - and let me tell you it takes like 10x as much (money, time, knowledge, effort) to develop stuff that's comparable to what I did 10 years ago in Flash. And this comes with more or just as many cross-browser and performance problems.

Blaming Flash for "fixing your computer" or saying it somehow had "hosting issues" I can't really understand at all.

The "mobile era" just started when Flash started transitioning into smartphones/apps - first results were not ideal but promising. Were Adobe allowed to have 10 years of iterations on those - I do firmly believe it would have been a #1 app development environment today. There would have been no need for Unity or even cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, etc...

But it is what it is - sorry, but anyone who thinks Flash dying was not primarily about Apple or even Google not wanting to keep their walled gardens for themselves is delusional. Adobe definitely has a good part of the blame for not recognising the potential and fighting for it some more.

koonsolo• 6 years ago

I can't upvote this enough. Anyone who developed in that ecosystem loved it, including myself.

When you read negative comments, it's always someone who didn't really use it.

It worked for developers, it worked for gamers. My guess is that the haters are just very loud in their hate.

cblconfederate4• 6 years ago

they say "distribute", not send. The truth is, you just put it on a web server with some rudimentary js, if required, and it works

AshleysBrain2• 6 years ago

Honest question: why does it matter if it's one file or not? For example if you're deploying to a web server, it doesn't seem a big deal if you're uploading one file or several... so why the issue?

j4510• 6 years ago

One file allows it to work offline, from anywhere which was more common.

DharmaPolice• 6 years ago

It depends on how you're deploying. If you're uploading (or downloading) via a web front end (like someone else has mentioned) then obviously one file is easier. I don't recall emailing too many swf files like the twitter poster said but if you were, emailing one file is clearly easier than emailing a set of files.

Also as soon as you have more than one file you can run into path issues.

fmxexpress• 6 years ago

I ran one of the large flash game portals. We had 100,000 Flash games. It matters because of distribution. One distribution mechanism was through MochiMedia and MochiAds. You'd upload an SWF to MochiMedia's site and they would aggregate it out to thousands of other sites. Without a playable package format you would have had millions and millions of files. Game creators liked the "copy protection" that the SWF package provided and game sites liked the "sandboxed" game files. If a browser could host a ZIP file and load all the assets out of it as if it was a sandboxed local directory that would be the equivalent.

Olreich3• 6 years ago

Another reason for single-file distribution is the ease of installation and running. If you can run from a single executable with all resources embedded in it, then users have a very easy time of things, they just download the program, then run it.

Apple's ".app" distribution format works just like that, while allowing the developer to have a directory structure for their convenience. App stores solve the problem in other ways, but there is no good app store for the web.

deno• 6 years ago

Macromedia Flash allowed you to export to an .exe and it just worked (on Windows). The executables weren’t big either, I remember taking my Flash presentations to school on floppy disks.

tpoacher2• 6 years ago

As a user, I remember it exactly as the author of this article does. "Standalone player" (let alone on 'linux') is a bit of a strawman. For me it was always as easy as just opening it in my browser and it worked out of the box.

And even if this had problems as you rightly suggest, for its time the alternatives were worse. Comparing via the benefit of hindsight in 2020 isn't really relevant to the point of the article.

ogre_codes5• 6 years ago

The author is right.

But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed.

Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

100% agreed.

The one ultimately responsible for Flash's death was Adobe, who neither felt it was worth investing in to overcome these issues, nor worth open sourcing to let the community give it a try.

What a loss.

epistasis• 6 years ago

Remember when Adobe added Flash content to PDF? That's just how little they understood the technology they owned.

jcfields• 6 years ago

My experience was that Flash ran like garbage on anything but Windows/Intel. Linux/Intel? Trash. Mac/PPC? Trash. The web at the time was unusable on my PowerBook G4 without FlashBlock. Maybe Flash would still be around if Adobe bothered to make it run well on anything but one platform.

ogre_codes5• 6 years ago

I had similar experiences.

Adobe had zero F*s to give about anything not mainstream.

pfranz• 6 years ago

I worked at a creative studio that used Linux during that time. For many periods of time there literally was no solution for doing something as trivial as watching YouTube videos (a huge need for reference) because of trying to pin down the right combination of 32/64 bit OS, browser, and Flash plugin.

duxup2• 6 years ago

Even in windows I remember flash was often a resource hog and crashed the browser regularly or would freak out and I'd have to restart it.

naikrovek4• 6 years ago

Well the SWF file format was (is maybe still) available and Adobe publish(ed) the spec with no strings attached.

No one wanted to do it.

asddubs• 6 years ago

i remember cheering apple on as they were killing flash because of how abysmal it was on linux. I do miss flash in a way, but also good fucking riddance

ramraj07• 6 years ago

I call a bit of BS about this. In the end, the code that creates js or HTML5 equivalent (poorer versions in fact) end up being far more resource intensive and buggy than flash was. Importantly, this is after millions of man hours were put into optimising the hell out of the js engines. Further, apple itself ended up optimising it's processor architecture to allow faster JS execution.

What would have happened if Steve Jobs hadn't made an ultimatum on Flash? The iPhone might have taken a few more iterations, but eventually they would have figured out how to support flash well in their phones. We might even be in a place where processors are designed to efficiently execute flash (the new M1 has so many specialization this is not even reaching out).

Instead what we have today is a mess of things that still don't add up to technology we had a decade back, and we have really bad, inefficient code running everywhere trying their best to emulate what flash did.

In the end, the reality is that Jobs made a tech forecasting mistake assuming HTML5 (not js) will eventually catch up with flash. It never did. As poor forecasting decisions go this is fairly reasonable, but we cannot move forward if we continue insisting that this was the best decision even in retrospect.

ogre_codes5• 6 years ago

In the end, the code that creates js or HTML5 equivalent (poorer versions in fact) end up being far more resource intensive and buggy than flash was.

I doubt it. Adobe tried to make a go with Flash on Android to spite Jobs and it was a train-wreck. While Android makers were willing to put giant batteries in to support sloppy code, Apple wasn't.

The iPhone might have taken a few more iterations, but eventually they would have figured out how to support flash well in their phones.

Apple shipped a phone with barely a day's battery life and it remained that way for years as features and performance caught up. If they'd shipped Flash, it would have cooked the CPU on every site it visited ruining the limited battery life the phone had. This is one of those cases where shipping less made a better product.

In the end, the reality is that Jobs made a tech forecasting mistake assuming HTML5 (not js) will eventually catch up with flash.

You are splitting hairs. Nobody has made a perfect technology prediction 10 years out.

worik• 6 years ago

Do you not recall that flash was a the worst of the closed source rubbish.

It never played well on any system I cared to use. The tools to generate it were unavailable to the likes of me and a lot of people here, who back in the day were second class citizens.

Also it tried to make the the Web TV before there was anywhere enough processing power at the ends nor bandwidth in the middle.

Designers on their expensive powerful machines built magnificent content that nobody who respected the technology in their personal stack, and paid a reasonable price for their infrastructure could use.

Well, back in the day we may have been second class citizens. How the world has changed. Good riddance to bad rubbish!

tomc19852• 6 years ago

I had a Samsung Blackjack running Windows Mobile and it supported Flash, and anything Flash ran like absolute ass, even in LQ mode

leowoo91• 6 years ago

What he means by beginner friendly? Using the editor? If so, openfl can still import swf files to the project afaik.

tyingq• 6 years ago

Jobs didn't like Flash because it was a potential escape from the walled garden. I have my issues with Flash, but Jobs' reasoning was purely business model.

rendall2• 6 years ago

I see you're getting downvoted, but you speak truth, here

ogre_codes5• 6 years ago

but Jobs' reasoning was purely business model.

It is always difficult to try and second guess decisions which were made by other people behind closed doors. Particularly when you know the end outcome where the people who made the choices wouldn't have.

When Jobs wrote that memo, the iPhone wasn't remotely dominant. It had tiny market share on and Windows Mobile and Android were both very big threats to the iPhone. There could easily be an alternative history where Adobe wrote a really effective version of Flash and Apple was left out in the cold.

Fast forward 10 years and it all looks obvious, but I don't think it was a slam dunk back then.

duxup2• 6 years ago

Yeah it is sad to see that ecosystem lost....but Adobe didn't seem to care to fix its warts either.

wvenable2• 6 years ago

Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is.

Flash run on PC's hundreds of times less powerful than your smartphone is right now. For the original iPhone, sure, but this resource argument is decades out of date now.

In the years after, all we've done is made HTML/JS/SWF as powerful as Flash and even more resource intensive.

devwastaken• 6 years ago

The proof is in the pudding. Nobody makes webgl+javascript 2d animations hostable anywhere. There's little to no websites that will host arbitrary content like they could with swfs.

Luckily browsers don't matter, and newgrounds has their own flash player you can launch content with.

stefan_• 6 years ago

Well the state of art seems to be scroll wheel operated slideshows. I'm still not sure if that is just one gigantic troll because HTML5 is such a trash platform or if people truly believe that's how you should present content. It probably started as the former and morphed into the latter.

saurik• 6 years ago

Yeah: the "real winner" here is simply the closed garden of native applications, all purchased from a two-party oligopoly (which is where all of those use cases now exist, de facto); it isn't a coincidence that Apple not only spearheaded both results, but also holds back a lot of standards for the open web on their mobile devices :/.

rendall2• 6 years ago

This. I don't understand why more people don't see this connection. It was obvious to me even at the time that Thoughts on Flash was more about driving traffic to iPhone and the App Store than about actual issues with Flash itself

mirthflat83• 6 years ago

Sorry, no. HTML5 exists. Web “standards”? Lmao. Is whatever the Chrome team develops the web standard now?

Latty• 6 years ago

Is it "web platform animation is that bad", or is it "web platform video is that good"?

I think a large part of the flash animation scene being as big as it was was simply that it was the only real way to do video at the time, and so it was popular because video is engaging, and animation was the way to do it when video was big, bandwidth was limited, and browser support was bad.

Now that YouTube exists and video hosting is free, bandwidth is plentiful, and when everyone has a smartphone camera and can shoot some video super easily, the cost of animation is much higher than the alternative. If you do want to put in the effort, you go where the eyes are and render the animation to video and upload to YouTube.

Web platform games very much did replace flash games over time. I'm not saying that it being bad isn't a part of it, of course, but I don't think it is the lone factor.

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

"Web platform animation is that bad" and "Web platform video is that consolidated" would be my vote, personally.

Tech affects community affects affordances affects distribution pipelines.

gruez• 6 years ago

Nobody makes webgl+javascript 2d animations hostable anywhere. There's little to no websites that will host arbitrary content like they could with swfs.

codepen?

github pages?

chrisweekly• 6 years ago

Nobody makes webgl+javascript 2d animations hostable anywhere.... no websites that will host arbitrary content.... browsers don't matter....

Huh? Sorry, I can't make head or tail of your comment. Is it intended as sarcasm?

dleslie2• 6 years ago

There is no "Newgrounds as it was at Flash's peak" for HTML5.

jayd16• 6 years ago

I feel like part of the equation that gets ignore is the fact that the amount of screens and UX that need to be supported these days just doesn't make sense for Flash/canvas based apps.

We all invested in responsive layouts and dropped the rich, absolute and hand made layouts of yesteryear.

swebs• 6 years ago

Well why would you when you can just export it to a video and have it accessible to mobile users as well? Most devices even have hardware acceleration for h264 video, so its a nicer experience too.

rangoon626• 6 years ago

Everyone knew to clear their browsing history, but most did not know to clear their Flash caches. Mhahahaaaa.

rickyc091• 6 years ago

The closest thing I ever found to Flash was https://scratch.mit.edu. You can draw vector graphics and attach code onto the individual sprites. It has the concepts of scenes as well, but no where near the power of what Flash had to offer.

dpcan• 6 years ago

Scratch is still programming first, where Flash was animation first with the ability to add programming.

The Flash IDE was probably the best part of Flash.

rishav_sharan2• 6 years ago

For the player, https://www.openfl.org/download/ is the best replacement

viraptor• 6 years ago

Scratch is really for learning. There's no good way to create serious distributable results or version/manage/reuse scratch code. It provides a very basic Newgrounds alternative for young kids, but not much more.

acid__• 6 years ago

Anyone have a good explanation for why someone hasn’t built a true replacement? e.g. a good, widely used flash-like tool that compiled down to a HTML5 bundle of assets?

Vorh• 6 years ago

I haven't worked with Unity, but doesn't it compile to web?

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

Unity WebGL export is a big rusty bucket. It works but it's a) incredibly heavy, and b) the abstraction leaks and is buggy.

redisman3• 6 years ago

Unity is a fine game engine but where flash had a handful of abstractions you needed to make games, unity has hundreds. It’s never going to reach the same audience (as in the non technical devs)

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

There's been lots! I've funded and contributed to many of them!

The most famous is probably OpenFL, which uses the Haxe programming language. It does exactly that. You can even use Adobe Animate to author content for it.

The main missing pieces, however, are:

1) The abstraction inevitably leaks. HTML5 is just a fundamentally fiddly bundle of tech and there's always this or that little thing that can shake loose.

2) The tech burden is fundamentally higher with an open source project no matter how you try. With Flash you never needed to even touch a command line or download anything other than the Flash authoring tool.

3) The community is smaller. Fewer tutorials, fewer people able and willing to help you out. It's respectable, but back in the day Flash's community was MASSIVE. You'd post on the forum and get a detailed technical reply in MINUTES.

4) Resources are thinner. Without Macromedia or Adobe's pockets individual developers just have to bear the burden of dev/maintenance themselves.

5) Flash portals are dead. Now everything's about app stores for software and baked-out video for animation.

It's still a great project and I use it myself, but IMHO it's going to take someone to dump a bunch of money and time on top of these ongoing projects to recreate all the magic Flash had. There's only so much a small community of open source coders can be expected to pull off.

bawolff2• 6 years ago

The tech burden is fundamentally higher with an open source project no matter how you try. With Flash you never needed to even touch a command line or download anything other than the Flash authoring tool.

What does open source even remotely have to do with that?

rishav_sharan2• 6 years ago

Openfl. All flash APIs are supported and it compiles to js

shepardrtc• 6 years ago

You should check out https://www.ceros.com/

That's actually exactly what we do.

bawolff2• 6 years ago

Lack of good content authoring is probably true, but as far as single file - i disagree. If you want to make a single html file thingy go right ahead. Its not popular, but its still really easy to do.

henryscala• 6 years ago

The closest thing I found is wickeditor(https://www.wickeditor.com/).

Koiwai• 6 years ago

I suppose you can distribute HTML5 as standalone binary with Electron?

And I'd like to argue the fact that there is no such (integrated) tool existing indicates it's a niche market.

ourcat• 6 years ago

If Electron wasn't such a large minimal build, that's the way I think things could go.

I think something more like Web Components would be the direction I'd look in for a solution to this.

redisman3• 6 years ago

There are multiple tools now that have filled the Flash niche. YouTube, more advanced game engines, AppStore’s, modern JS... free to play games really killed the money side of it too. Flash games were the only free/ad driven games in town. Now you’ll be battling against billion dollar companies in that arena.

danShumway11• 6 years ago

I have some sympathy, but not a lot, because I don't feel like this is a problem with the web.

Honestly, just based on what I used Flash for, the big thing I miss has nothing to do with Actionscript or any of its code or distribution. Distributing SWF files was no easier than it is today to distribute an HTML directory in a zip file, in either case the only reliable way to share your stuff was to link it on a website. And obviously, the web works for that.

So what I miss is not the code or the platform, what I miss is the animation pipeline. I feel like Flash was a relatively unique animation tool and content creation tool and the web hasn't really tried to replicate that, in part because it really has nothing to do with the web's capabilities.

What we're missing is probably not some kind of giant API effort on the web that would make Flash animations possible, what we're missing is a standalone program that generates animations for the web in a format where they can be manipulated with code. As a pure prototyping tool for game development, I would already rather be working in a program like Construct instead of Flash. I just don't want to use a separate program to generate sprite sheets, I want them integrated really nicely into the timeline and the coding environment.

But I don't think that has anything to do with the web at all. The web definitely isn't perfect, but with WASM and WebGL we have more graphical/processing power than Flash ever offered, and aside from some problematic areas like web audio, controller input, and other game-focused APIs that browsers have been slacking on -- what we're really missing is a development environment. Flash's development environment wasn't self-hosted in an SWF. You don't need a development environment for the web that is self-hosted in a web page. You just need a thing that spits out WASM. It's not the web's fault that nobody has made that tool.

----

If all you're worried about is programming and Javascript, then Construct 2/3 already has more accessible programming environments than Flash ever had at any point in its lifecycle.

Construct isn't as powerful as Flash was. But setting up a quick prototype game in Construct is fast, and it has been fast for a long time, and that's the important part. The important part of Flash was not how powerful it was, it was purely about the accessibility. And Construct 2 is an extremely easy environment to learn to code in. Even as a seasoned programmer I liked Construct 2's drag-and-drop visual interface; it made it easy to visualize the overall shape of the code.

But again, Construct lacks that animation pipeline where you can draw, animate, program, and export all in one kind of unified environment that allowed you to jump around a lot to different tasks.

And of course, Construct also isn't Open Source so you don't know what the company is going to do in the future. That's a real problem, that's why I don't use Construct at all, even as I'm singing its praises. I will not use a proprietary development environment. But it at least outputs to an Open format, and the people who miss Flash are probably not going to be losing sleep over using another proprietary engine anyway.

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

This is a really good point.

It PAINS me that when somebody wants to upload a friggin' cartoon on the internet they have to render it out to 100X the native size and introduce compression artifacts. We were more sophisticated than this in 1999!

danShumway11• 6 years ago

I mean, it's kind of crazy to think about, but forget distribution and even games entirely for a sec. What is the current standard for making vector animations, just in general?

There isn't one. Why? Flash clearly showed that people like to make animations with vector art. It compresses well, you can do nice things with scaling. And independent of everything else, there just isn't a clear best tool for that today.

I honestly feel like some of this comes down to, somebody needs to look at Flash and say, "hey, having nested timelines inside of symbols that can be edited on the fly is a really good idea, and maybe some program somewhere should do that." I don't understand why that hasn't happened anywhere.

jchw2• 6 years ago

This is true but it is a common misunderstanding imo. Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime.

So why doesn’t that tool exist?

Well... as far as I know it does. I’m pretty sure this is exactly what Adobe Animate is meant to be:

https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

So why isn’t it causing a Flash-style revolution?

In my opinion... Because of YouTube. Twitter. Etc.

Before everyone had heaps of bandwidth, you needed to consume smaller files. A full 1080p video was unfathomable with the codecs, compute and network bandwidth available in the early 2000s. Swf files however were small and easy to distribute. The perfect storm occurred due to the structure of early internet, and communities like Newgrounds flourished.

I honestly think Flash just got a bit stale. It stopped being new and exciting, and for animations video sites were probably going to win out anyways. For games, a lot of indie devs now target PCs and game consoles. Unity and Construct export to HTML5. People wanted to do more advanced things to the point where Flash itself started doing things like 3D rendering, at which point the appealing aspects of Flash started to make less sense anyways.

Many seem to argue passionately, probably from an emotional place, that Flash was killed. Honestly, I just don’t agree. Flash was dying either way. Everyone just gradually decided to cut off the life support.

The era it ushered in will be missed, though.

tapirl2• 6 years ago

Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime.

The author doesn't argue a tool like Flash should exist. He just states the fact that HTML has still not caught up to fill the blank caused by Flash exiting yet, which is true IMO.

jchw2• 6 years ago

If that’s their argument, it’s missing insight in my opinion. The Flash runtime itself is not particularly interesting, and in fact it’s full of undesirable problems. If you ignore the tooling of Flash, very little about it is appealing. If you even just ignore Flash itself and include Flex, Haxe, and other authoring tools that can deal in flash runtime, it still isn’t that appealing.

These arguments get confusing because HTML, SVG and JavaScript are human readable and writeable. But that doesn’t mean the way someone should make animations in HTML5 is by typing coordinates into a text editor.

If there really is a gap in the web runtime that Flash fills, what is it?

Edit: also, I believe they are directly and indirectly arguing for the existence of such a tool:

1) For 95% of applications you can just distribute a single SWF file
2) You have a robust authoring tool that is animation/graphics-first and newbie friendly

The first one is 100% technically possible with tooling; though admittedly better embedding of assets would be nice. The second one is just literally directly asking for such a tool.

shawnz• 6 years ago

The author argues that a tool like Flash the authoring software should exist, but makes no argument about Flash the runtime.

An authoring software just like Flash could exist for the HTML runtime -- it isn't the nature of HTML which is the problem. Thus it's not HTML which has to "catch up", but vendors of authoring software.

hypertele-Xii2• 6 years ago

Adobe Animate costs 20$/month. I don't recall exactly how much Flash cost, but it sure wasn't that much. The barrier to entry is higher, thus popularity wanes.

kaslai• 6 years ago

If I recall correctly, it has always cost roughly as much as Photoshop during Adobe ownership. That is to say: prior to the Adobe CC pricing model, Flash cost many hundreds of dollars. I did a quick spot check on Archive.org and it looks like "Flash Professional 8" had a retail price of $700 in 2006. $20/mo is definitely a lower barrier to entry than a one-off $700 payment.

spyder• 6 years ago

Even for videos Flash was the best solution for a long time, almost every video sharing website used Flash video players until HTML5 video got developed.

dingaling• 6 years ago

All that 'HTML 5 video' did was move responsibility for the media player from an extension and into the browser, and wrap it in standard markup.

So ironically the designer no longer just asks 'is Flash available on this platform?' but instead 'which codecs are available on this browser and platform?'.

ksec4• 6 years ago

And apart from Video Codec improvement, many HTML5 video are still not as good as Flash Video Streaming. Mostly an implementation issues and not technical. But no one has the interest of improving it.

anonymousab• 6 years ago

So why isn’t it causing a Flash-style revolution?

From the animators I've listened to, the answer is that Animate sucks to work with and is a royal pain in the butt, so they either use different tools or stick to older versions of Adobe or even Macromedia Flash/MX.

emptyparadise• 6 years ago

There's no HTML5 Newgrounds. It's a true shame.

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

There is actually, it's called Newgrounds :)

Not everything is converted over, but they're actively supporting the Ruffle.js project and using it on site: https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

29athrowaway• 6 years ago

"Anything you can do with a paintbrush you can also do with a toothpick and an infinite amount of time."

hahaha... best quote in thread.

aazaa• 6 years ago

The points don't make a compelling argument to me.

1) For 95% of applications you can just distribute a single SWF file

A single HTML file can hold HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

2) You have a robust authoring tool that is animation/graphics-first and newbie friendly

Hard to believe that there are literally no options that fit into that category for HTML5. An example of the next-best-thing would be helpful.

3) You can send a link to your mom and she can just play it w/ no issues

Same with HTML5. Send a link and no problems, unless she's one of the vanishing few still running IE6.

anonymousiam• 6 years ago

I have a 3-year old Dell/Nutanix cluster with VMWare 5 on it. It's never been updated, and all of the web tools require flash. Fortunately there are some dedicated desktop apps that can still be used (even though they are no longer available for download from VmWare).

perryizgr8• 6 years ago

Ultimately this is all Adobe's fault.

Lol I guess this guy is hopelessly stuck in the RDF[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field

racecar7892• 6 years ago

This doesn't get much attention on HN, but Apache Royale is the legitimate blood-line successor to Flex Framework.

Adobe provided the initial resources (developers and hosting) to get the project into a stable state. The project is now managed by Apache.

The team solved a couple monumental challenges (converting AS3 to JavaScript, and putting a GUI framework on top of it).

https://royale.apache.org/

omnibrain• 6 years ago

Havin worked with Flex 10 years ago it is nice seeing it living on. But Flex was not only about the Framework but a huge part of flex was the IDE (Flex Builder/Flash Builder) with visual form editor so you could build your programs Delphi/VB-style. Is there a comparable tool?

racecar7892• 6 years ago

An open source app called FlashDevelop was fairly hot for a few years after Adobe open sourced the Flex framework. FlashDevelop lacked a visual editor, but it was quite capable. FlashDevelop's last release was in 2018.

stupidcar2• 6 years ago

I've come across a lot of similar sentiment from ex-Flash devs, who romanticise its heyday as a period of fertile creativity (true) and say that HTML5/JS/CSS/SVG is an inadequate replacement (false).

In truth, the fundamental capabilities of the modern web platform matches and typically exceeds anything that was offered by Flash. What these people are really lamenting is the ease of authorship that Flash provided to non-technical users.

Macromedia/Adobe provided a suite of powerful tools for authoring Flash animations and applications. There is no free equivalent available targeting HTML/JS. This is not a problem of capability in the platform technologies. It is because there is no economic incentive to make and give away such tools. What equivalents do exist in this sector cost money.

When it comes to Flash, the old adage, "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product" holds true. The Flash authorship tools were free because 3rd party authors creating Flash content were assisting in the promulgation of a proprietary platform that was gradually replacing open web standards. Had they succeeded, Macromedia/Adobe would inevitably have looked to squeeze and monetise their domination of the web.

Programmers are often accused of not understanding what Flash offered to artists. Maybe that's true, but I've not encountered many artists who conversely understand the above.

nn3• 6 years ago

This raises the question - what paid HTML tools are available today which are as easy to use and have similar capabilities as the old Adobe tools?

chii3• 6 years ago

none - flash is still the only tool i know of that had the scene model which allowed you to have animations within objects in the scene. It was a very easy model to use, but is powerful.

Flash can export to html/canvas iirc. I dont think the lack of tools is the reason why html5 didn't replace flash in terms of output of new games/animations.

larsiusprime23• 6 years ago

What these people are really lamenting is the ease of authorship that Flash provided to non-technical users.

Yes, that's what we've been saying. And it was HTML5 boosters who said that when Flash died nothing of value would be lost, I'm pointing out their comparing a platform & authoring tools with a narrow tech stack.

And the Flash Authorship tools were absolutely NOT free. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the Flash IDE (not that it stopped people from pirating it).

FlashDevelop was free, but that was not an Adobe product.

danShumway11• 6 years ago

There is no free equivalent available targeting HTML/JS

I commented to the same effect elsewhere, but I would take this a step farther. There is no alternative, free or paid, Open Source or proprietary, targeting any platform (even just iOS or Windows) that is as good as Flash was at rapid prototyping and accessible game creation.

To me, the focus on the web is really frustrating. Unity is not as good as Flash was for rapid prototyping. Gamemaker is not as good as Flash was for animation. It's not the platform's problem that literally no one has found a way to merge animation, artwork, and programming in the same way as Flash did.

It's not that there's something awful about the web and that it ruined the ability to make that tool. Literally no one for any platform for any motivation has ever replicated Flash even just as a content creation tool.

So why are we talking about the web at this point? WebGL, Canvas, and WASM are powerful enough to replace Flash. That is not the issue anymore. I think when people touted the web as a replacement for Flash, there was an expectation that some company or Open Source initiative somewhere was going to make effective tools and that never happened. And instead of talking about the fact that the entire games industry has been unable to replicate Flash, we're attacking the Open web instead.

I agree that Flash was prematurely killed online, I agree that HTML advocates were too dismissive about the problems. But we are far past that point. The web kept its end of the bargain, the APIs exist, but nobody else built the necessary tools. We should be talking game engines right now, not the web.

chii3• 6 years ago

the flash/macromedia creative suite is so good, and even tho it wasn't free, it was popular (with plenty of pirated copies obviously).

If your thesis is true that the web/html api could've been just as good as flash had there just been a suite of tools to create the content, then why doesn't one already exist? I think the true underlying issue is that the expectations of the users have grown - "simple" animations that can be created in the flash suite and replicated using a html suite cannot satisfy users any more.

SimianLogic22• 6 years ago

I think the point you're missing is that Flash supported an entire ecosystem. Because it was easy to distribute the files (and steal them from other portals), there were tons of game portals out there competing for traffic. This competition created incentives to do special deals (add my logo and a link for $2k before you launch). I released several games sponsored by Kongregate which went viral and got distributed to thousands of portals. Higher-tier portals would reach out and purchase a site-locked version without their competitor's branding for an additional $300-$1k depending on if they had their own API for high scores and such. Because there were SO many portals, it wasn't as winner-take-all as the modern mobile marketplaces.

I could easily recreate my games in javascript today (or swift. or C#/unity. or whatever) from an "is this possible" point of view, but I think it's much harder to make money today. You could argue that's more due to the competition level and number of creators than Flash, but I think the siloed app stores are awful for the long tail and smaller developers.

That ramp-up of competition kind of happened even before Flash was dead-dead, though--the big portals existed in a time before Facebook games (which suck now but were amazing for awhile) and mobile games. It's wild now to see my kids (5 & 8) play a lot of online games on modern much-shittier-than-Kongregate-and-Newgrounds portals, but there's basically a short time period between "old enough to play games" and "old enough for their own phone or steam account" that they're in right now, and I suspect that audience isn't big enough to support the kind of innovation we saw before Facebook games (which were also made with Flash, for the most part!).

trianglem• 6 years ago

tldr there is no replacement

nemothekid• 6 years ago

The Flash authorship tools were free because 3rd party authors creating Flash content were assisting in the promulgation of a proprietary platform that was gradually replacing open web standards.

What? The Flash authorship tools were definitely not free. I remember Macromedia Studio used to cost nearly a grand. They were widely spread because, like Photoshop, Macromedia/Adobe didn't bother cracking down on piracy.

AshleysBrain2• 6 years ago

There are actually a number of tools that allow easy HTML5 authorship for non-technical users. We make one too - Construct 3 [1].

I think one reason Flash had such prominence was their effective monopoly. Remember when you had to install a browser plugin to get Flash? They reached ubiquity, but it was basically an impossible job for anyone else to achieve. So if you wanted Flash-like content, Flash was your only real option.

Since HTML5 is based on open technologies, there are lots of competing tools on the market doing exactly what some people apparently lament are no longer available. They're out there if you look, and arguably it's a healthier marketplace since there's real competition - although the choice is more complicated now, since there isn't that one option everyone uses.

[1] https://www.construct.net

hartator2• 6 years ago

The Flash authorship tools were free

Flash MX was a paid tool.

cblconfederate4• 6 years ago

that was gradually replacing open web standards.

Flash was offering things that the normal web couldn't do (like video). It took a long time for the web to catch up nominally, and it's still lacking

Macromedia would still be selling Flash if there was an open standard that replaced swf and was equally performant

After all the web is now full of SPAs which are a very bloated version of flash pages with much less functionality

wejick• 6 years ago

I missed the early 2000 when flash based websites was so exciting. I found some crazy design with psychedelic color, futuristic robotic head, many part moving around with sound effects and music. On the eyes of teenager that's really cool.

Now I see the scene is different, may be someone can tell me where to find that kind of crazy, prototypey, futuristic website design?

Honestly it's kinda similar with the scene of winamp skin.

numpad0• 6 years ago

So this is one of industries/ecosystem/environment that Apple destructed/revolutionized/liberated, but unlike others, without an intent to capture.

Interesting that when you destroy something with force but not rebuild, it stays destroyed.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 6 years ago

What prompted Adobe to try to rename .swf as "Small Web File".

wombatpm• 6 years ago

There are STILL sites that have flash elements today. I’m looking at you HomeDepot and your Citi bank partner card.

NiceWayToDoIT• 6 years ago

Adobe screwed with the ActionScript (that one was catastrophe of a language), security and the tools, as each version of Adobe package until Cloud had increasing number of bugs.

But in defense to Flash, as I was using it long time ago, it was super easy to make animations, and drawing 2D animated characters, lines were smooth and even at the time without digital pen it look so natural. Adobe Illustrator was always more serious, and you needed to spend time fine grain adjusting Bézier curves, but in Flash that was one stroke of the hand I loved it. Also timeline and animation, was super user friendly, 15 years after there are few tools I have tried but none has that same easiness for artists.

Tool is the issue, and I can understand artists, HTML5 does not have any similar tools. And writing "HTML & CSS" and aiming at pixel coordinates is just not the way to do 15 minute (27000 frame) animation.

oldgradstudent• 6 years ago

Flash's greatest feature for me was that you could disable it and get rid of the most annoying ads and the worst content on the web.

Then selectively enable it for YouTube, etc.

slmjkdbtl• 6 years ago

HTML5 itself actually didn't fail on all these things, it's just the way people use it gave up some of these features to achieve different goals.

1) I've been practicing a rule that all the web content I make can all be downloaded fully by a single cmd+s save command and fully runnable locally. It's extremely easy to do, just unpopular.

2) HTML5 does not contain any spec for tools. If you think HTML5 doesn't have great tools then it's the community you should blame. Personally I just use a text editors and some helper functions for all my needs. But I agree there's no popular + good non-code tools.

The only thing is that browser is much more bloated than flash runners, but at the same time you can say it's lighter than a 3kb binary cuz everyone has a browser installed on their device, but all flash download prompts legitimate or not all look like malware (speaking of which I'm curious how flash download prompts became such a phenomenon in phishing would appreciate some quick links).

pjmlp6• 6 years ago

Fully agree and look forward for Flash's revenge via WebGL/GPU and WebAssembly.

Thanks Unity, Uno, Blazor, Qt,... we are getting there.

orthonormal• 6 years ago

This is, in some sense, like comparing a factory to a product. HTML5 is the barebones of technological tools necessary to build something that does what flash can do, not the flash itself. Being content-first is up to YOUR SDK, not HTML5. Regarding single-file apps, when did the ability to use inline scripts and style vanish? Nothing prevents a tool to generate genuinely cross-platform "single-file" htmls.

Don't blame HTML5 for the fact that no one bothered to make a content-first studio out of it.

NineStarPoint• 6 years ago

I think people aren’t blaming HTML5, but the people who said that HTML5 would do everything flash can do.

Like you said, that’s a bad comparison since they’re fundamentally different things. And killing flash without a replacement for the studio existing leaves a hole where it used to be. And it may be possible that Flash was a product of its time, and such a well integrated studio isn’t going to be made again for decades.

Which isn’t to say that Flash didn’t need to die. The security issues existed and I suspect that Adobe would have slowly killed it from neglect regardless. But HTML5 is not a replacement for what Flash was.

axegon_• 6 years ago

I played a lot with flash back in the day when it was still macromedia flash and flash 4 and 5 to be specific. Mind you, I was 10-12 years old at the time so my current opinion would be somewhat skewed for obvious reasons. That said, I think flash had a few very good things about it. First off the fact that it could spit out windows executables natively was brilliant. Second it was perfect for 2d games and in-browser games. Nothing comes even close to it even today. But from a developer prospective, I think it had one fundamental flaw(from my point of view today): it never made a clear distinction between developers and designers. And even though ActionScript was based on the abomination that is js, from what I remember of it, it was a significantly better thought out language.

gorgoiler3• 6 years ago

YouTube (specifically hobbyist YouTube) replaced Flash.

As a nascent carpenter, baker, cosmologist and cycle repair guy I couldn’t be happier with the amount of freely available creative output people are sharing. Videos are this generation’s single-file-upload one-click-share platform.

I sure hope — for cultures sake — this generation also has an indie animation scene.

EamonnMR4• 6 years ago

I find video of someone else playing an existing game to be a poor replacement for someone going and making a new game.

gorgoiler3• 6 years ago

Sure. Every hobby I’ve learned in the past few years has been through YouTube.

forgotmypw172• 6 years ago

I love me some Flash games, and sad to see Flash go.

I must disagree on one point here: accessibility.

In HTML, accessibility is built in, and you have to do some stupid shit to break it, e.g. using divs and spans combined with CSS for fake "links". Many succeed, even Google has some on their search results pages, but it's not the default state.

In Flash, accessibility is barely an afterthought by default, and if you care about it, you have to work your ass off basically re-implementing the whole thing by yourself.

pjmlp6• 6 years ago

WebGL/GPU + WebAssembly

forgotmypw172• 6 years ago

:cries:

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

So now you send a link instead of the whole thing. Who cares?

larusso• 6 years ago

Every few years this argument pops again that flash is still not yet fully replaced. And then the same arguments from both sides start up that the one side either has a rose colored view on flash and the other side sees stuff to Linux centric at a time where windows was king. I programmed in flash for over 10 years. I started flash in school after building a few HTML pages with Java script. My plan was to become a web designer and I hated the fact that my pages looked utterly different on the same is with different browsers. So I testet flash and it was awesome for what I wanted. I started out with Actionscript 1 but never found the footing. A few years later I started with AS2 and thought myself OOP from books (I was ongoing media designer at the time). I had to make a decision at around 2008 if I want to go into the flash programming field as the company who hired me had a strict split between design and programming. So I went to become a programmer and learned AS3. I adopted Adobe Flex and this got my food in the door for the next 2 companies I worked for. It was 2013 when I started my last Flash based project and I switched over like a few other coworkers to iOS development (which I‘m also no longer doing). Flash for me was a Kickstarter for my carrier. That could be seen as a rose colored view. At the same time I remember all the struggle I had with the technology. The Textfield implementation was a mess. The timeline which is a very great concept for animators becomes completely useless and is actually in the way when your program flash for real. The later steps Adobe did to bring gpu and mobile support was beyond my reach as we had to keep the minimum flash player support (for us player 9 and later 19). I was happy to move on and try something else. I was able to bring my flash experience to cocos2d for iPhone. My company is using Unity now for development and I hate it with a passion. I never wanted to use it because it brings all the worst sides of flash development back. You are constantly in fear that the next version will break or remove a feature your project needs. I looked into web development with react in 2018. I even went to a advance workshop to learn how to use it with all its new features (hooks at the time). I really think react is good but the rest around it is a mess. Webpacker, Bable and npm/yarn are so damn complicated. I wished a few of the traits flash had would come back. But I‘m also happy it is gone for good.

pjmlp6• 6 years ago

I am having big hopes with Blazor and Uno.

irrational3• 6 years ago

I work on a training website. Back in the day our website was Flash based. We had a team of animators, script writers, professional voice talent, etc. cranking out training content. People loved it and we won multiple awards. But then the ipad came out and the people who used our product adopted the iPad as their training device. Very quickly we switched from rich Flash animation to text and images with the occasional video we got from marketing. It is all the same information, but it is so incredibly boring. Usage dropped dramatically since people loved the animated content. Reading and looking at static images? Not so much. That was 10 years ago and things haven’t gotten better, at all. We really lost something special when Flash died. Somebody mentioned Adobe Animate. It really isn’t a replacement. Someday someone will create an animation tool that was as good as Flash. Maybe.

jonplackett3• 6 years ago

The difference in authoring tool is the big one here. Flash let artists and even kids (like myself aged 12) start making really fun interactive websites that could be hosted very very simply.

But I lay the blame for that with Adobe. Why didn’t they just adapt the Flash application to output html and JavaScript? If you can compile modern JS to old with babbel I don’t see why they couldn’t have an interpreter to turn action script into JS and render everything to a canvas. They had a massive community who would have loved it. Instead they just kinda gave up.

rogual• 6 years ago

They did, sort of. Flash (now rebranded Adobe Animate) can export to HTML5, it just isn't very good.

As I recall, it tries to naively export your Flash graphics as HTML5 Canvas drawing commands, but they come out all glitchy because Flash's renderer just uses a fundamentally different model (planar maps vs. stacked rendering).

This probably is fixable, but I sincerely wonder whether Adobe still has the engineering skills to solve new problems like this. They've subisted for so long now by just adding new layers of janky, slow, webview-powered cloud-enhanced e-commerce integration to their existing products, that I wouldn't be surprised if most of the serious engineering talent has left.

jonplackett3• 6 years ago

Yeah Flash animate is really not targeted at proper web development. It’s more of a tiny bonus to export to html and is generally terrible.

It needs to be feature parity including the ‘runs anywhere’ of an swf. I don’t even think it’s too late if they could really deliver this.

Just look at the community surrounding Instagram filter development because they made really easy-to-use software (Spark AR studio) that kids and artists can use.

fimdomeio• 6 years ago

There's a huge change in technology that made doing what flash did well very dificult and that's not html5 fault. We now live in a world of multiple screen sizes. one of the huge benefits of flash as a creative tool was the wysiwyg interface, but that worked well when you could optimize for 1024x768, when you start having multiple screen sizes that creates a dramatic shift on how things are designed. I know quite a few graphic designers that to this day cannot wrap their heads around the fact that you have to be designing to multiple screen sizes and proportions.

udioron• 6 years ago

(From the thread: https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1344530847685369856 ):

    > 1) Because YOU didn't value something doesn't mean you understand all the ways it was valuable to others
    > 2) It's possible for technology to regress in big ways even as it moves forward in others, esp. when 1) applies

+ Google Reader (RIP 2013)

+ Google Music (RIP 2020)

protomyth• 6 years ago

Like HyperCard, getting rid of flash removed a lot of people's ability to use that creativity to create a program. If I was cynical, I would say it was on purpose to protect 'actual' developer's turf.

habosa• 6 years ago

I do miss the flash aggregator websites (newgrounds, etc). There is no format today that lets you package up an interactive web experience and let someone else embed it for you. That was a huge deal because while Flash was easy to get your hands on (illegally, but still) most of the Flash creators did not have the ability to run their own web server.

I don't agree that sharing links to Flash content was a walk in the park though. I remember spending a lot of time updating Flash player and restarting my computer and then something going wrong and doing it again. Plus Flash was always trash on Mac and Linux, HTML5 works great on those platforms.

So I don't really miss Flash the technology but I miss the wacky internet that existed around Flash content.

boudin• 6 years ago

This forgets a lot of the pain of flash. It was almost a windows only thing. It required constant updates independantly of the browser, sometimes not working properly. It was also a common cause of browser crashes. There was low control over what it was doing (remember those horrible ads with blasting sound?) Having a plugin to block flash was almost mandatory. It was also taking over user input in a way that always seems to break website that were a mix of html and flash. Flash was a horrible user experience.

The flash editor was indeed a user friendly and nice tool to get into vector animations though, for anything else HTML/js already does a much better job than flash in my opinion.

One thing i'll never get is why adobe didn't open source flash player instead of killing it. The money was in the editor, not the player. Open sourcing it might have changed its fate.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 6 years ago

> To this day, I am super mad at all the people who put for the codswallop that HTML5 was this perfect replacement for Flash.

I'm curious about this turn of phrase that I hadn't heard before, "put for the codswallop". I can find "put in for" used or explained on the internets, but not "put for" (and "put in for" doesn't seems to be relevant).

Could someone explain? What does "put for" mean, where does it come from and how or where is it used?

jaspax• 6 years ago

It's a typo for "put forth the codswallop". In fact, I didn't even notice that it was a typo until you pointed it out, since my brain autocorrected it as I was reading.

To put forth means "to offer an opinion; to argue for something". Codswallop is a rare, somewhat archaic slang term meaning, basically, "bullshit". Thus "to put forth codswallop" means "to argue for bullshit".

YeGoblynQueenne2• 6 years ago

Oh, right you are. Thanks. I guess "put forth" was autocompleted as "put for the". Hah.

I use "codswallop" often myself. Beautiful word :)

dandare2• 6 years ago

The Flash "editor" software was a work of a genius. The combination of vector graphics editor, symbol library, layers, animation tools and code was super powerful yet super approachable at the same time. I have learned AS2 just by toying with the examples. Over time I learned AS3, then HTML and TypeScript, in this order.

One more shout out to the vector graphics editor - the way you did boolean operations with shapes based on their color has not been bested since by any other editor.

creata• 6 years ago

the way you did boolean operations with shapes based on their color has not been bested since by any other editor.

Can you expand on this? How did it use colors to help us work with boolean operations on shapes?

yoz-y• 6 years ago

If I recall correctly (I've only ran Flash, the program, once):

It has automatically merged shapes of same color into one. So to add or remove to a shape, you just had to paint in the same (or a different) color.

For what it's worth, I've found it super confusing.

dandare2• 6 years ago

Shapes of the same color are added to a single shape, shapes of different colors are extracted from each other. Lines (of any colors) can (but don't have to) split shapes. A simple rectangular selection with mouse can add a bezier point to a shape, simple aligning of the bezier point with its curve will erase it. If you know how to use the editor is is super efficient.

Fifer82• 6 years ago

I followed the same path, how amazing was TypeScript Beta when it looked like you had to go back to ES3/5 after AS3? I almost became a gardener.

unnouinceput• 6 years ago

Flash is dead and it's a good thing. Now, what I want next is for ActiveX to be just as dead. Not ignored, but pro-actively support for it on all browsers to be dead as well.

Why Flash is dead but ActiveX is still supported? It's a bigger risk than Flash from security point of view. I can, if I want, write a malware in ActiveX and feed it to visitors on my site if I see they have Windows as OS.

Now kill ActiveX just the same. My pet peeve!

cblconfederate4• 6 years ago

SWF was a threat to apple's and google's walled garden. Its death coincides with the high point of the new world order

HTML5/JS animations and video are a worldwide space heater in comparison. If HTML5 was any good, app stores would have ceased to exist

nop90• 6 years ago

You can send a link to your mom and she can just play it w/ no issues

Is this an argument against IE? If so then the pain of installing flash wouldn't be "no issues". If we're assuming mom used chrome here then what's the argument against HTML5? Packaged apps were (discontinued) also more accessible than an SWF file IMO. Rather than explain how to find/run an a file it was just there to click in the browser.

CyberRabbi• 6 years ago

Web video satisfies all the good things he lists about flash. Mp4/webm is the new swf, not html. Flash became irrelevant because web video subsumed its use cases as well as other use cases. YouTube killed flash.

lexx• 6 years ago

The best thing that happened to the business the last 20 years was the end of flash. I am not sure why is this even a discussion.

bernardv• 6 years ago

Totally agree! Flash and Actionscript were great and allowed both coders and non-coders to produce polished applications/animations/simulations quickly. I would choose Actionscript over Javascript any day of the week for that matter.

j4510• 6 years ago

I increasingly find positions about flash are not based in first hand experience, believing ones experiences summarizes all experiences, or anecdotal knowledge based in popular belief about what we heard about something but might not have used ourselves.

With all the progress in tooling, it's completely reasonable that more and more folks might not remember how broken browser compatibility was between multiple browsers on the same computer in the age of Flash. It was nothing like today with shared engines and even shared runtimes like Webassembly. Browsers were young, at war and didn't lean towards being compatible on their HTML interpretation.

I spent as much time focusing on HTML compatibility, if not more, as Flash pains.

Flash helped cover some and even smooth of those gaps between web browsers where the same features didn't exist in each browser, or they did not implement HTML tags, or even Javascript in the same way.

Flash based technologies like Flex and Air really shed some light on what rich internet applications could do, and it's one area where HTML5 and JS have been able to provide some alternatives and evolution.

From a mobile perspective, it seemed like flash couldn't do much there...the same until I discovered Flash Lite. It quietly powered the GUI on many more devices than I ever imagined in its time.

Nokia adopted it and it was quietly embedded in far more devices to provide custom functionality than I realized around the world. It makes me consider Steve Jobs letter against flash at a time when he was also against custom apps and app stores in a different light.

Flash lite even appeared to power the internet channel on the Nintendo Wii.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite

Much of my flash exposure was to integrating with educational content, and in that way I has a direct exposure to many of the things thst simply weren't possible in its time. It wasn't perfect by any means, but I think today's environment of tools takes for granted how few tools there were during Flash. I truly had to create identical experiences in multiple browsers, and where avaikable, operating systems.

I also worry that new closed digital experience tools are simply trying to replace Flash with another closed garden.

Flash in some small ways delivered on the write one deploy anywhere promise made by Java, but for the average user. This should not be diminished in its age of Java applets, and many security issues with alternatives as well.

Flash helped me get my start and imagine and help deliver interactive digital experiences in a time when everyone was anchored in compact disc based rich experiences. Flash, and broadband internet helped move mountains forward.

I still look forward to find the set of solutions that completely replace what flash could do. While a closed source tool, it was uniquely democratizing and accessible.

indymike2• 6 years ago

Flash and HTML5 never were the same thing. Flash always seemed to be an easier and more approachable way to do applets than Java. As it aged, it also became a kind of universal functionality plug-in that let people build experiences that you just couldn't do with HTML and JavaScript at the time. The spiritual successor to Flash (and Java applets) is probably more WebAssembly than HTML5 - although many parts of HTML5 do things that a Flash piece would have been used for 15-20 years ago.

azangru• 6 years ago

The spiritual successor to Flash <...> is probably more WebAssembly than HTML5

The author's point is that Flash had GUI authoring tools and was "content-first", whereas js and infinitely more so webassembly are programmer-first. It doesn't bother me a bit (am a programmer), but it does bother him.

indymike2• 6 years ago

I wonder how long it will be until there are content authoring tools that build to WebAssembly? For a long time, Flash was kind of the runtime for stuff you couldn't do in the browser with HTML + JS.

hartator2• 6 years ago

The ads industry killed Flash by using it everywhere with bad optimizations. Adobe buying Macromedia and giving up on it didn't help either.

samyem• 6 years ago

There are alternatives to Flash today that does fairly decent job of what Flash bought:

* https://atomisystems.com/saola-animate/

* https://webdesigner.withgoogle.com/

* https://tumult.com/hype/

jdmg94• 6 years ago

This thread is bullshit, I can’t believe we already forgot everyone hated working on flash sites (and using them), in the same spirit we should be romanticizing java applets cause they also compiled to a single file ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

marcusmarcus2• 6 years ago

As I write this we're now months into a children's book project using WordPress that would have taken _weeks_ with Flash. Our creatives now depend on CSS and HTML wonks who are hard to find and expensive. With Flash, this step was not needed—they could publish right to the web; every site we made was uniquely beautiful.

marcusmarcus2• 6 years ago

As I write this we're now months into a children's book project using WordPress that would have taken _weeks_ with Flash. Our studio depends on CSS and HTML wonks who are hard to find and expensive. With Flash, the extra engineering steps were not needed—we could publish right to the web; every site was uniquely beautiful. It's a big loss for us. The workflow we had with Flash twenty years ago was faster and less resource dependent than what we have now.

multiplegeorges• 6 years ago

The Wick Editor seems to be the closest thing to replicating what Flash did: https://www.wickeditor.com

tpoacher2• 6 years ago

This raises an interesting question. Now that we have things like ruffle, could flash content see a resurgence? Or are there no viable tools for flash/ruffle content creation anymore?

coder4life• 6 years ago

You could do everything that flash did with IE 5.5/6 tech as well. SMIL 2.0 and VML, in 1999, did all of what flash did

The waters will always be muddied

HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

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