I owe my technology career to Flash.

Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together.

This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate.

Nothing has come close since.

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jb1991 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

The product itself still exists as Adobe Animate, I think (or one of the Adobe CC tools). It's just as good or better than it ever was, with the same workflow. But instead of exporting to SWF now people just export to video and share it on video platforms. Lots of great stuff still being done with it on Youtube.

	▲	riffraff 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		But flash was interactive, videos are not. I miss the days kongregate had a bunch of new fun games regularly. I suppose itch.io fills that niche now.

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hangonhn 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Flash was a poorly written piece of software. It had numerous bad memory leaks and a CPU hog. It was never allowed on the iPhone probably because it would have drained the batteries really quickly. On top of that HTML5 was starting to catch on and could eventually do everything Flash could and do it better without the memory leaks and poor CPU usage. I have the very unfortunate claim to the title of being an engineer on the world's biggest Flash/Flex app. The memory leaks were so bad that Adobe advised us to just restart the app periodically -- despite Adobe marketing Flex as enterprise ready. We found compiler bugs for Adobe. Adobe and Jobs didn't set out to destroy it. Macromedia wrote bad code that performed poorly and it wasn't worth the effort for Adobe fix it once HTML5 won.

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anymouse123456 a day ago | parent | next [-]

The core ideas of Flash remain unparalleled even now.

- Vector drawing and rendering for extremely fast performance and file size

- Visual authoring tool that invited creative, non-technical people to the party

- Deep support for managing state changes over time

- Gradual ramp of complexity that balanced ease of entry without overly constraining expertise

Were most Flash apps slow and buggy? Yes

Did Flex have tons of bloat and memory leaks? Yes

Did Flash create a cambrian explosion of creative and fun projects that inspired a generation of young people? Yes

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cess11 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind.

Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do something cool without ever learning about things like memory leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying platform.

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wolrah 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind.

Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were not just excessive resource usage and instability, they were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plugin was simultaneously one of the greatest strengths of Flash as a creative platform and one of the greatest risks to the average person browsing the web in the 2000s.

The plugin needed to die. Unfortunately the Flash community was so firmly built around the web plugin as their distribution method of choice (presumably because many of us were browsing animations and playing games at work/school where we couldn't necessarily download and run arbitrary .exes) that the plugin was more or less a diseased conjoined twin, and when it died the community didn't have long left.

Compare this to Java where the death of the browser plugin caused a number of badly designed banking sites to have to be redesigned in a less stupid (but quite often still very stupid) way but the community as a whole continued on without huge disruption. The browser plugin was just one of many places Java existed, it wasn't the dominant focus of the community.

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Wojtkie 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, it's kinda crazy people are brushing over the security issues. The nostalgia is huge, I get it, but Flash was terrible for browsing the internet at the time.

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cess11 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you name some renowned such creative works that were "weaponized against a huge swath of internet users"?

	▲	tonyarkles 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think they’re referring to the flash plugin itself. It enabled a vast amount of creative work and it enabled vast exploitation of users’ browsers. I worked as a tech at a consumer-focused computer store from about 1999-2005. It was a wild wild world back then. The vast majority of our time was spent removing viruses, browser toolbars, Bonzi Buddy and friends, and helping people understand how their online banking passwords got stolen by the shady porn site they like so much.

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2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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Marazan 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It was not a CPU hog - this is a myth that needs to die The flash runtime was pretty modest.

Now, the code people wrote was CPU hogs, because lots of non coders were writing code and they would do anything to make it work. The Flash runtime was not causing the Punch the Monkey and to peg your CPU, it was because the punch the monkey ad was fucking awful code.

All those Flash programmer went on to write the first wave of HTML5 stuff which, shock horror, where vastly CPU inefficient.

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nntwozz 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I remember the white MacBook Core 2 Duo with 100% CPU, fans maxed out while watching YouTube 720p.

This was months before the iPhone announcement.

I can see why they killed it.

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croes 2 days ago | parent [-]

Because it was a security nightmare

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IshKebab 2 days ago | parent [-]

No it was a usability nightmare. Watching Flash Youtube on Android technically worked but it was a horrible experience.

Google were ok with "works but janky af", but Apple weren't.

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kakacik 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

We could have kept that creative environment (that seem to just disappear without any alternative to this day) while leaving videos to evolve as they did.

People here complain like they have issues with long term memory, but reality was - there was no real web video before. That apple had more issues than others was problem that should have been contained to apple walled garden alone. World was, is and will be much larger than that.

	▲	empath75 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That 'creative environment' was mostly used for obnoxious advertising by the time flash died.
	▲	SchemaLoad 2 days ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The creative environment could have been built with HTML/JS as well. I feel what killed it more so was mobile gaming took over casual games, and modern game engines enabled a single person who would have been making dinky little flash games to now make what used to take an entire studio.
	▲	IshKebab 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Maybe, but playing videos was 99% of the use case for Flash by the time it was killed by Apple. Adobe could have kept maintaining it for the 1% Flash games, ads and terrible websites, but you can see why they gave up...

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croes 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It can be both but it definitely had a security problem

> Mitre lists more than 1,000 Adobe Flash vulnerabilities.

>Flash ranks 14th on the list of products ranked by the number of vulnerabilities – one of only two applications in the top 25 that aren’t operating systems or browsers.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security-and-risk-manage...

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as1mov 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same here, I somehow acquired a pirated copy of Flash when I was 10 or 11. Went through the included offline manual and within a few days somehow knew I'll probably end up doing this programming thing for the rest of my life :D

It's sad what happened to Flash, sure we have plugin free interactive content using JS but I'm not sure if anything has replicated the IDE. Though I guess the decline can also be attributed to the users moving onto other platforms. The kids making games moved on to making Android/iOS games and the animators moved to Youtube.

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Night_Thastus 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The vast majority of games I played, for years, were flash games. I have a lot of fond memories of that time.

However, Flash sucked. It ran terribly, it was insecure, and a mess to maintain. It needed to go.

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empath75 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The problem with flash is that it was a security, performance and usability nightmare for web browsers.

Yes the games and videos were cool, but 99% of the usage of Flash was awful ads and UI/UX elements.

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jonbiggums22 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I just used an click to load flash extension in firefox back then and everything was fine.

	▲	DANmode 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		True. That’s basically how h.264 and DRM is being done in the browser for stuff like Netflix, today, right?

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hollerith 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

For most of Flash's existence on the web, I had my computers configured to block flash. (The block was achieved by removing files IIRC).

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DANmode 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Unity.