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Comment by camus2 | Hacker News Reader

> I remember thinking, wait, Javascript will catch up eventually then why would anyone use flash? At the same time, we probably owe a lot to flash existing (especially WebRTC). Flash helped us get browsers to this point faster both through it's tech and increasing consumer awareness/demand for media.

i don't think most people remember how bad Javascript was, how limited web API were, and how different browsers implemented totally different flavors of JS and DOM and standards were weak.

Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to deliver real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and images.

Obviously it also came with a catch: the player was proprietary and full of bugs and security holes.

Ultimately, Web API progress also staled when Flash died. You still can't mesure canvas text properly in most browsers and API such as file system and WebSQL were dropped, which is a horrible mistake IMHO.

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> Flash pushed the web forward and demonstrated that it could be used to deliver real desktop like applications,videos and games, not just text and images.

Java (and RealMedia) did that first. The thing that Flash brought was good tooling for creators and not just programmers.

We have very different recollections of the history. If your website had the Shockwave badge, I was excited. If your website has the RealPlayer badge, I likely went somewhere else. You also can’t underestimate the influence of the ‘new media’ web aesthetic, that was dominated by Shockwave (e.g. Praystation), on current web design principles and tools.

For those that don't remember/weren't online then, Shockwave was the brand that Flash originally shipped under. It's where the "sw" in "swf" comes from.

For an even more thorough history of Flash, this is a great (and relatively quick read: https://code.tutsplus.com/articles/a-nostalgic-rummage-throu...

Sure but my recollection is that Java was the first major plugin that really took off. Then realmedia and other players came along. It was only in the 00's that I remember Flash taking off.

My memory may be faulty so I'll bow to anyone who has decent sources.

It is true that Java was the first widely available plugin, but how many people did really useful things in Java? It was always a pain, slow, difficult to use properly. Most people dreaded using Java and it only had a niche in enterprise applications. It was flash that made plugins look cool and brought innovative things like Youtube to the masses.

Only thing I ever really remember encountering that was decent was Runescape.

Flash player plugin had 90+% browser penetration by the late 90s but yeah, the corporate money really started flowing around 2000.

In my recollection, Java was pushed into browsers as part of Sun’s Write Once Run Anywhere strategy. Browser makers went along because it was the era when everybody wanted to be a platform for plugins. Then Microsoft tried to control the development of Java on Windows, and that was a mess.

The Java plugin was a pain. The runtime took somewhere on the order of 10 seconds to load, and the browser was completely unresponsive during this time. This was also the era before CSS, so if you wanted animated buttons on your web site, you had to use Java. Imagine loading a page, and then seeing a column of gray rectangles that freeze your browser and eventually resolve into dithered (“web-safe” color) buttons. Not a great experience.

Real Media only played video and audio. QuickTime played video and audio and VR snapshots. There were also plugins for specific types of content like VRML.

I feel that Flash took off because Adobe spent lots of money pushing it everywhere, but also because it ran better than Java. The runtime was smaller to download than Java, it started up much faster than Java, and its vector animations played very smoothly compared to the alternatives of the time.

This. Java applets were first, but the plugin was horrible (slow) and tooling was aimed at programmers, not designers.

I hated flash btw (designers were really creative with it), but in the end it pushed JS and DOM forward, so I guess I should be thankful. :)

It was Macromedia that made Flash, not Adobe. Adobe just ignored it and is now killing it.

Edit: Adobe also killed 2 other brilliant Macromedia products, right after acquisition, Fireworks and Freehand.

Right. I remembered that Adobe bought Macromedia, but I thought the acqui-kill was earlier. I was getting the story of Macromedia mixed up with Aldus. And actually, Flash came from FutureWave Software, before Macromedia acquired that company.

But Adobe did not ignore Flash. They may have mismanaged it, but they did invest in it, and tried to push Flash into places it does not belong (AIR, and especially PDF). They also tried to turn ActionScript 3.0 into ECMAscript 4.

https://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/faq.html

Now that the Flash runtime is becoming banned, Adobe renamed the Flash Professional content creation program to Adobe Animate, and made it able to export to some flavor of HTML5. The content creation is where they make the money, after all.

I had the impression that the Web got significantly better after it was released from the Flash lock-in.

So instead of click-to-play Flash, now you have unstoppable, auto playing audio and video ads that spy on you...?

Yes Flash with it's weekly or sometimes daily security vulnerabilities was bad, but HTML5 is not "better".

It is design by giant corporations (DRM inside your CPU, inside your browser, etc.) FOR other corporations. It is not designed for people, for freedom. It is regulatory capture by Silicon Valley "techbros" of... Internet's standardizing bodies instead of government regulating agencies.

Hence when I recently used the browser (designed by an advertising company BTW), websites just freely play annoying sounds.

This is not "better". It's worse IMHO, since at least with Flash you had click-to-play.

/Rant

In Firefox at least, you can disable auto-play media in about:config

Agreed. But on the other hand, with web a browser can select which features it allows and which ones it ignores. With flash there was no such option. I am really hoping Mozilla gets their act together and protects us users here.

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