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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

A lot of others here talk about authoring being what made Flash popular, but the other big part of it is the SWF format itself, which is highly efficient because of its compact encoding and ease of parsing. Those who played Flash games on computers over a decade ago may remember what I mean --- a tiny file provides high quality vector graphics and interactivity (and the ads, although I hear that these days they're just as obnoxious even without Flash...) HTML/CSS/JS doesn't even come close, although it feels like they're slowly reinventing bits of Flash with things like WASM.

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Tbf, you can produce very similar output to .swf with the likes of WebGL, Canvas, SVGs, or a combination of those technologies. But the authoring tools fostered a community of developers who didn't see themselves as programmers at all.

They saw themselves as artists. And users benefited a great deal from that.

In fact, some aspects of the IDE were so good, that some 'developers' didn't even care to use it to develop programs. They produced cartoons instead. I think Craig McCracken's Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends was the most successful work of this kind.

In the place of that creativity now, we have cleaner code, to be sure, but we now also have an awfully boring technology war, and a load of unnecessarily complicated UI code.

I might miss Flash a whole lot less, if someone created a HTML5 authoring tool with the same toolkit the Flash IDE once had.

Isn't that what Adobe Animate still tries to be? It has HTML5 authoring support, and inherits from the Flash IDE directly (not just in spirit).

Arguably I think the saddest difference between Flash and Animate is the business model. In the old web, Flash was also partly so ubiquitous because it was sometimes so commonly pirated and passed around among aspiring developers/artists. In the Creative Cloud era it is a lot tougher to pirate, and can be a huge cost overhead for small or aspiring artists.

This. And this is also the reason why gaming on HTML5 hasn't picked up yet: there's no widely supported container format. I can't easily share/distribute/version HTML5 games like it was possible with SWF containers.

On top of that, it's also not easy to "watermark" HTML5 games. With SWF, you could create custom loaders and force ads and logos, both core revenue models for gaming websites.

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