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.

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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.

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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.

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dghlsakjg 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I was an average-joe high school student back then.

People hated flash. Even non techies.

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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 16 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.

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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 23 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 11 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 26 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		or they enjoyed the games despite flash.

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keithnz 7 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#

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xboxnolifes 37 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

People loved flash games.

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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.

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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 41 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.

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likeclockwork 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure, but Adobe was never going to solve them.

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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.

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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.

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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 43 minutes 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.