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Comment by halvo | Hacker News Reader

Downsides to the tech don’t negate the millions of great experiences flash enabled

You can only say this if you haven't met people who have suffered from being hacked. Enormously painful stories. Flash is a trash fire, and Adobe and Microsoft externalised the penalties.

There is no reason we couldn't have had safe Flash except Adobe didn't care.

I've heard the Flash codebase described as a big steaming pile of C++. Perhaps they cared but making a secure Flash was an impossible task. Windows has magnitudes more resources working on it and it still gets exploits all the time.

They could have reimplemented it in a safe(r) language and runtime. It would have been a big effort, and Adobe extracted the maximum cash for least effort.

Comparisons with Windows don't make much sense because it is an OS and a thousand SDKs and ever growing attack surface.

And hopefully wasm sandbox with Ruffle will provide a better start for security than Flash had too.

Yea, Ruffle seems like the best option for making all the wonderful content built with Flash available.

https://developers.ibexa.co/blog/embed-flash-swf-content-wit...

The comment talked about "goodwill and nostalgia".

The only people with "goodwill and nostalgia" about Flash, are either wearing ridiculously rose tinted glasses, or have zero clue about technology.

It can both be true that flash was a security disaster and also was the basis of many successful startups and indie casual game developers.

I have huge amounts of nostalgia, from when my parents bought me a version of flash from my birthday to kickstart my whole interest in programming, to building animations and games for Albinoblacksheep - Without flash I would never have learned to code.

So yes, some people have nostalgia with no rose tinted glasses, and I would like to think I have a clue about technology.

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