| |
| ▲ | turpentine 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Magical? Those are some rose tinted glasses. Having to install a binary blob from a free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask. Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns and virtually non-existent Linux support. | | |
| ▲ | dpark an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I remember the time of browser plug-ins (not “extensions”). Everyone happily installed Flash, and the Crescendo midi plugin, and multiple other in-retrospect-ill-advised plugins to enable fun stuff to work in their browser. The “everyone hates Flash” stuff came later. It served a purpose for quite a while and people loved it. Newgrounds was a place of magic. | |
| ▲ | echelon 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Having to install a binary blob It was already installed for you. > free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask. Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns and virtually non-existent Linux support. You're not the user here. Average joes are. You're in the 0.001%. Your asks are arcane and orthogonal to most users of software, who just want their PC to do something neat and useful. These issues you bring up are also entirely technically solvable. If we threw Flash out because of these misgivings (read: it was that Jobs didn't want to allow runtimes on his platform), then we truly destroyed some of the most valuable tech on the planet to satisfy "standards" boffins. What a waste. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I was an average-joe high school student back then. People hated flash. Even non techies. | | |
| ▲ | dpark an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | What’s “back then” to you? Flash grew up in the time of dial up when you could still get AOL install discs with 100 free hours in your typical grocery store PC magazine. I don’t recall people hating Flash a lot until later when it wasn’t a technical necessity anymore. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg 19 minutes ago | parent [-] | | The first computer I remember using was a Compaq Portable with a green screen and DOS that my dad was allowed to bring home on weekends. I vividly remember going to Circuit City as a family to buy our first windows 3.1 machine. Flash was very cool, at first, then it got used for WAY too much stuff that had no graceful degradation so you were stuck waiting a few minutes for an animation to load so you could see the content stuck behind flash. |
| |
| ▲ | radley an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > People hated flash. Even non techies. Billions of people enjoyed using Flash for games, video, music, and animated entertainment. | | |
| ▲ | dghlsakjg 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Enjoying a game, video, or music is different than enjoying the underlying means of delivery. Do people love Javascript and HTML5, or do they like streaming entertainment? Do gamers love Unity, or do they love playing fun games, some of which are made with Unity? I played games on every Windows from 3.1 and up (and MS-DOS before that), but I'm not pining for the days of Windows ME despite how much fun I had on that machine. People used Internet Explorer to run all their Flash entertainment, but nobody is arguing that IE was loved even though it was part of the flash stack for a huge majority of users. Notably, Flash is dead, and no one is arguing that we bring it back. If I never have to sit through a flash loading bar gating an HTML website with a completely unnecessary splash page, you won't find me mourning. (yung'uns: this was a thing. If you wanted to go see a website sometimes you had to sit for a while so a dumb flash animation would show and you could click through to the actual HTML content. Jobs did you a favour) | |
| ▲ | kortilla 14 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Doesn’t pass the smell test. “Billions” is >2 billion. There weren’t that many people online when iPhone came out with its famous flash ban. https://ourworldindata.org/internet | |
| ▲ | basch 29 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | or they enjoyed the games despite flash. |
| |
| ▲ | keithnz 10 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | what? no? people generally loved, especially with the likes of frog in a blender... for the younguns https://archive.org/details/joe-cartoon-frog-blender# | |
| ▲ | xboxnolifes 40 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | People loved flash games. |
| |
| ▲ | miladyincontrol 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The average person didnt really care what tech was involved, they dont romanticize software in the same way as tech inclined people do. People hated it when apps were glitchy, when it wanted "constant" updates, or how they couldnt share a page because the entire site was some bloody flash applet. | |
| ▲ | marcus_holmes 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > You're in the 0.001%. Your asks are arcane and orthogonal to most users of software, who just want their PC to do something neat and useful. Right up until enshittification kicks in and suddenly everyone cares and there are shouts of destroying the evil techbros who are poisoning the minds of our youth to buy a new yacht. Can you imagine the situation if Jobs hadn't killed Flash? Most of the commercial websites required a Flash blob to deliver full functionality even back then in the early 2000's. Adobe never even vaguely pretended to be the good guys, they would have enshittified as soon as they possibly could, as hard as they possibly could (as they have done with the rest of their software). The entire web would be held to ransom at this point. | | |
| ▲ | akoboldfrying 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Most of the commercial websites required a Flash blob to deliver full functionality Being a binary blob is not a strong argument all by itself. chrome.exe, firefox.exe, etc. are also binary blobs. I have no love for Adobe, but that specific criticism is weak. |
| |
| ▲ | likeclockwork 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure, but Adobe was never going to solve them. |
| |
| ▲ | mvdtnz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The overwhelming majority of computer users simply DO NOT CARE about things like "install a binary blob" or "free-software hostile vendor" or "non-existent Linux support". They installed the plugin and got a way better experience. > Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of Flash versus Javascript (or other browser technology) vulns over their respective lifespans. | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | If Flash hadn’t sucked harder than a neutron star, that would be an argument to have. People install lots of proprietary plugins today. Flash would’ve been just one more on that list. But it did suck, and badly. It crashed the browser all the freaking time, often hard enough to crash the whole OS. (“But the OS shouldn’t let that happen!” True, although even with that said, it was in the short list of common apps capable of crashing that badly. It was almost a talent.) Flash was horrid. While idea was fine, the implementation was terrible. No mobile OS could have run it solidly and without sucking batteries like no tomorrow. Flash in the right hands could have been nice. We’ll never know because that never happened. | | |
| ▲ | radley an hour ago | parent [-] | | > No mobile OS could have run it solidly and without sucking batteries like no tomorrow. By the time mobile could run Flash, it was too late. Between Apple & Adobe, it had no shot of making the transition. But before that, Flash was pretty amazing. | | |
| ▲ | kstrauser an hour ago | parent [-] | | It was never amazing. It was adequate to give creative people a way to work around its many shortcomings and make something cool anyway. The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it. For all the many reasons people might dislike Apple, they were 100% in the right on this topic. Flash needed to die. It got everyone to collectively push the web standard technologies ahead into something way, way better. |
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | drtz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)? | | |
| ▲ | fdgfikgfv 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Flash had its problems but as a user, it looked sharper and smoother than even current websites. And its editor gave non-tech users ability to create amazing animations, interfaces, and even games. | | |
| ▲ | eichin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | wasn't some of that smoothness because it ran at a 100hz tick without any way of adapting it (and still running existing code)? That was the complaint I kept hearing from people attempting to make flash on phones viable (this led to ludicrous battery consumption) | |
| ▲ | dredmorbius 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Image-wise, SVGA + JS probably gets you the clarity. Standard gif / image animations not so much, if that's what you're referencing. This isn't my baliwick, so I've absolutely nothing to say about the ease with which these options can be created. |
| |
| ▲ | ricardonunez 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | what’s he is referring is the editor and the easy way of drawing things, still agree we can do things today but a easy to draw editor like that is missing. I was a fan of flash and fireworks. | | |
| ▲ | radley an hour ago | parent [-] | | The editor was a scripted timeline, similar to a video or animation timeline. It was fantastic for creatives, but counterintuitive for programmers, so most devs hated it. |
| |
| ▲ | Kaliboy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There was more unique content/UI in the Flash era. | | |
| ▲ | preg_match 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This went away not only because flash died, but also as the internet commercialized. I mean, consider this: McDonald’s used to be fun and colorful. Now every McDonald’s is boring and gray. And, wait, every store is boring and gray! And flash had nothing to do with that. |
|
| |
| ▲ | Papazsazsa 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You'll get hammered for this on HN, but the web was magical and weird with Flash around, and now it feels quite vanilla and boring. I long for the days of weird experimental art and goofy animations and bonkers UIs. | | |
| ▲ | dpark an hour ago | parent [-] | | It was a fun and experimental time for sure. Way more stuff was weird in a good way. Standards hadn’t settled. All kinds of fun stuff was created in Flash that could not have been built with the standardized web tech of the day. I don’t really miss Flash but I do miss the early internet sometimes and Flash was part of that. (Remember when it was FutureSplash?) I would be remiss if I didn’t post the most early-Internet-type thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Dungeon Soup. https://m.youtube.com/@DungeonSoup Once upon a time this would have been my favorite Flash cartoon series. “Season one” playlist:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSq76P-lbX8Ws6vgAAC2WhwSu... |
| |
| ▲ | m104 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah but the execution still mattered. I'm a Flash / Shockwave fan as well but there's no point pretending that package was sufficient for the job it was pitched to do. Macromedia seemed to be on a really good track with Shockwave and Flash, but either didn't set up the technology for internet success, or really just sold out the goods with the Adobe acquisition. In any case, take heart though. If we did it once, we can do it again. | | |
| ▲ | intrasight 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | But we won't because this isn't something that can be done by consensus or by an ad company. |
| |
| ▲ | LooseMarmoset an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | this is unfortunately, the most revisionist take I can imagine. I don’t mean this in a personal way, mind you but while it may have been magical to publish interactive websites, using flash, that magic is utterly outweighed by the mundane vulnerabilities that flash was riddled with. It’s safe to say we all miss sites like Homestar runner, and I had a co- worker who generated many meme – worthy flash presentations of his coworkers, which were hysterical. however, flash generated security vulnerabilities on the daily, and unfortunately, these vulnerabilities were very conveniently cross platform. These vulnerabilities, which Adobe couldn’t, or wouldn’t, resolve resulted in many many lost hours fixing virus – and Trojan horse – infested PCs, Macs, and cell phones. Adobe never managed to sandbox flash at all. I miss a lot of old flash content, and I’m sure many people miss the ease with which you could create interactive content for websites. The fault here lies squarely on Adobe, who wouldn’t fix the situation. | |
| ▲ | LeFantome 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You know you can use Ruffle if you really want Flash right? https://ruffle.rs But the only standard you need is WASM. All browsers support it. Use whatever you want to make it. In fact, Ruffle is just a WASM app. | | |
| ▲ | ameliaquining 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The problem is that, while there's no theoretical barrier to an authoring tool with a Director-like user experience that exports to Wasm, no one has actually written one, and it's not a small amount of work. (I agree that we're better off without Flash, but this particular problem is real and unsolved.) | |
| ▲ | superkuh 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ruffle is not complete or comprehensive. In my test of a dozen swf ruffle could successfully display about half. Compare to the actual flash plugin Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202 (11.2.202.643) in my retro machine browser which displayed them all perfectly. |
| |
| ▲ | fragmede an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Compared to the best that someone can vibe code? Not to show my age, but we were kids when flash came out. That copy of macro media? I don't know about you. We spent hours and hours and hours with that spend hours and hours and hours with vibecoding and tell me that you really can't accomplish similar shit. Then you just to deploy it you and I might be to smart to just paste your Vercel API key in ChatGPT, but pretend you're 16 right now. I can tell you how much tsc sucks off the top of my head but what I can't do is tell you to hit ctrl+enter in Claude desktop to play movie. What kids know today is how magical Claude desktop and ChatGPT are. The deploy story is trivial. just give the AI the key. We can judge someone for being dumb enough to do that, but unless you're selling consulting services, it's not nice to laugh. if you are selling consulting services then let's talk sales channels lol |
|
