| ▲ | echelon 10 hours ago |
| > the whole thing could be a PWA Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails. I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs. A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends. You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set. |
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| ▲ | tliltocatl 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier. |
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| ▲ | hyperhello 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The security issue could have been addressed by simply running it in a sandbox. | |
| ▲ | echelon 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Creativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5. During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it. Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable. The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now. Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back. The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible. Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation. | | |
| ▲ | comex 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The thing is, HTML5 is far more technically capable than Flash ever was. It was competitive even at the time: Flash's main thing was 2D vector graphics, but iOS Safari has supported both Canvas and SVG since at least 2010, possibly from day one. But the creation tools and the culture never really lined up the same way, and developers focused on creating apps instead. For non-games, HTML has always been technically superior. iOS Safari may have a long history of rendering bugs, but it beats Flash/AIR, which always looked very out-of-place even on desktop. I do wonder what would have happened in an alternate universe where either Flash or HTML5 took off on mobile instead of apps. We would have both the upsides of openness, and the downsides of worse performance and platform integration and the lack of an easy payment rail. Pretty much the same situation we still see on desktop today. We wouldn't have had the same "gold rush" from the early App Store, which happened in large part because of the ease of making money. There would probably be more focus on free stuff with ads, like Android but more so. | |
| ▲ | Bengalilol 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I second everything except the fact that Adobe was behind Flash, which IMO is what killed it in the first place (with ten years of hindsight, I can say this confidently). I still do creative, non-standard work, but in a free way using pure vanilla JS (using Haxe).
Adobe's mistake was keeping the system proprietary instead of letting it be free. Since then, I've left that ecosystem and what a relief! (I know I'm mixing different levels here, and my personal experience isn't really an argument). ps: HTML scope is way more advanced than whatever Flash could have been. | |
| ▲ | pdntspa 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware | | |
| ▲ | tliltocatl 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > It occupied the same space that Electron does today This. Except Electron crap at least runs on top of a well-designed and relatively reliable platform (HTML/Chromium) - and sometimes the crap even offer an actual PWA version with all the sandbox benefits a real browser has to offer. Flash didn't even had that. And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere). | | |
| ▲ | pdntspa 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | > And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere). My kingdom for some way of gatekeeping platforms so that entities like this are forbidden from participating | | |
| ▲ | tliltocatl 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | pls dont - Lack of gatekeeping was THE advantage that made Web viable and competitive against traditional media. - You can't gatekeep crapmakers without also gatekeeping that kid in his parent's basement with an awesome idea. - Crapmakers with enough money will punch through any gatekeeping. - Sometimes you have to accept that vendors don't care. Can't expect a transport company to give too much love to their timetables app. Yes, they are expected to hire someone competent to do it, but the "someone competent" also rarely care. Still better than having no access to the timetables. | | |
| ▲ | pdntspa 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, there was gatekeeping, it was knowledge. You had to be knowledgeable enough to work the system. You had to have the time to dedicate to learning the system and how the internet and how computers worked. Those twin gates kept the internet as it was in its early days. Unfortunately every peabrained enterpreneur saw that and began eroding the moat until it was gone. The knowledge required to build things has been on a steady decline, and now with AI that decline has completely destroyed it. Now, every fucking hack with an "idea" is not only able to act on them but now they act like they are as good as the people who paid a heavy price to get to the same level through years of study and hard work. |
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| ▲ | Bengalilol 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | As a side note, Apache Royale is still alive (or is it?). <https://royale.apache.org> |
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| ▲ | nottorp 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable. Seriously? Is that why I ran all my desktop browsers with flashblock even before the iPhone was out? Dare to tell me Adobe was feverishly working in secret on reducing pointless CPU usage and saving my battery? |
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| ▲ | jodrellblank 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You say the security and battery issues "were solvable", so why didn't Macromedia or Adobe solve them? Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, the era of Palms, Blackberries, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Phone, Microsoft Tablet PC; mobile devices were not a new surprise by 2005. Adobe did get Flash onto Palm mobile devices and TVs and early Android smartphones, and the experience was poor[1][2] - not just from those two issues; Flash sites weren't designed for mobile or touch or small screens. Customers had a choice of Flash-mobile devices, and preferred iPhones. > "Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch wrote in 2012 "Jobs was right", adding Android users had poor experiences with watching Flash content and interactive Flash experiences were "often wonky or didn't perform well, even on high-powered phones".[9] Mike Isaac of Wired wrote in 2011 that "In [our] testing of multiple Flash-compatible devices, choppiness and browser crashes were common", and a former Adobe employee stated "Flash is a resource hog [...] It's a battery drain, and it's unreliable on mobile web browsers".[10] Kyle Wagner of Gizmodo wrote in 2011 that "Adobe was never really able to smooth over performance, battery, and security issues".[11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash [1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-fl... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_... |
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| ▲ | titzer 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some utopian thing. |
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| ▲ | antod 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| "Run anywhere" was getting pretty stretched long before it was killed, Linux support was orphaned, old, buggy, vulnerable and hard to run in contemporary browsers. I was stoked to watch Apple nail the coffin shut, and see it consigned to history along with Java applets. |
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| ▲ | thisislife2 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Macromedia Flash was indeed a beautiful, innovative piece of software. HTML 5 still doesn't match its features vis the ease and usability that Flash offered in creating and deploying content online. But after its acquisition by Adobe, it just ever so slowly went downhill. It should have been open sourced. |
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| ▲ | ajross 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks Capcut and Roblox would like words. No, that's kinda just wrong. Content generation for non-technical folks has never been easier or more effective. Flash is just something nerds here remember fondly because it was a gateway drug into hackerdom. Some of us are older and might feel the same way about Hypercard or TurboPascal or whatnot. |
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| ▲ | marcosdumay 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Just like Microsoft before them. But flash specifically deserved to die. |
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| ▲ | NewsaHackO 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Absolutely. Apple had the balls to be the first major tech company to take the first material step to actually end the security nightmare that was Flash for good. | | |
| ▲ | as1mov 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | I'm sure it was the security that of Flash that worried them, and not the fact that a third party was encroaching on their walled garden that couldn't be extorted. | | |
| ▲ | LoganDark 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just because they can be worried about multiple things doesn't mean they were only worried about the worst of them. Security in Flash was a total and utter nightmare. It was awful. |
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| ▲ | teaearlgraycold 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of control over the web? Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable. |
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| ▲ | echelon 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ironically, Macromedia / Adobe didn't try to assert any control back then. They were even opening the standard, IIRC. They learned this much later after learning the game from Meta, Google, and Apple. |
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| ▲ | raw_anon_1111 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| This myth that Apple “killed” Flash on mobile should die. When Flash finally came to Android in 2010-11, it required a phone that had a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM and barely ran on that. The first iPhone came with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz CPU, it couldn’t even run Safari smoothly. If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard while you waited on the page to render. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011. Adobe was always making promises it couldn’t keep. The Motorola Xoom was suppose to be the “iPad Killer” that could run Flash , Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t go to the Xoom home page on the Xoom at launch because it required Flash. |
