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Comment by ckocagil | Hacker News Reader

What was atrocious about Flash? AS3 was a decent language. Better, more open tools were coming along. Insecurity and privacy concerns were addressed by properly sandboxing it. The biggest downside of Flash is that it wasn't an open web technology, but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established. All in all I don't see what all that fuss was about.

If WebGL and Flash competed on an equal footing the WebGL tools (including Flash-like, newbie-friendly frameworks) would be forced to get better than Flash.

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It was great from a development point of view, looking back it completely pushed the bounds of what we thought was possible and pioneered Alma y things which only later finally made it into the browser.

- Strongly typed language (js is still not there) - interestingly Microsoft killed Ecmascript 4 which was AS3, but are now championing typescript) - Canvas api is basically the flash.graphics api - Tweeting libraries - It didn't invent Ajax at all, but wow was it great at the times for dynamic data - 3d in your browser, and it was fast too for computers of its time - 2d / 3d transformations per object - custom font loading - reusable components

There was a lot about flash that was bad also, like compiling it was a chore, flex was a disaster, but it pushed the web forward so for that I am thankful

haxe was a great strongly-typed language that compiled to flash

>but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established

An open alternative was available - HTML5 games were possible before Chrome started disabling Flash by default. Smartphones and social media really killed the market for online browser games - you really don't seem them anymore other than .io games. For anyone developing games, the return is far greater in the app store vs. online. Ad Revenue, if your name isn't Google/Facebook is a joke. I can't imagine why anyone would develop a browser game today when the App Store exists.

For artistic expression? I know plenty of Flash games that are not for-profit at all. Small interactive toys hosted on personal homepages.

Sure, but that ignores the reason why sites like Newgrounds had the massive library they did, you could get paid to put your content on newgrounds because you got a slice of the ad revenue. Massive games libraries like Newgrounds didn’t exist for solely for artistic expression

Still waiting on a freely available toolkit that allows for easy game creation with animated vector assets.

I'm relieved I'm not the only one who thought AS3 was decent. It had the structure of Java without the absurdities of Java (first-class functions always come to mind immediately).

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