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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Flash needs to come back. It was incredibly elegant and easy to author. The format is open, so there's no reason we shouldn't resurrect it.

HTML+JS+CSS is such a crappy alternative for animation.

Looking forward, it'll be incredibly hard to archive our "modern" web animations. Everyone does it differently, and the results are spread across dozens of files and a hodgepodge of libraries. Flash is self-contained in a single file and the platform has everything you need baked in. Easy.

You didn't even need a website for flash. You could download the swf and play it locally, like a movie file or gif. And you could even share them with friends. It was amazing.

The only reason we don't have Flash is because of Steve Jobs. He killed it out of greed so he could gatekeep his platform.

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I agreed with everything you wrote wholeheartedly except for the very last line. The fact is that Adobe tried for years to get Flash to be stable and performant on Android... and failed.

So, yeah, there were good technical reasons not to have it on mobile devices in that state.

Adobe couldn't hack it, and they refused to open source it so that anyone else could give it a shot. It's sad, truly. They could have gifted it to the community once it became clear that they were not going to make any more money on it, and there could have been an evolution over time - certainly there were enough passionate developers who loved the platform...

There's been nothing like Flash since then for ease of use and creativity... I know multiple people whose entire careers started with messing around with it as ten year old kids... Now kids are putting that creativity into Roblox or Minecraft I suppose, but it doesn't seem like the same sort of thing. shakes fist at cloud

Although, on the bright side, Haxe [1] still exists, and is very very cool.

[1]: https://haxe.org

Flash needs to come back.

I always associate Flash with security issues and massive resource utilization. While it made some thing easier to implement on a page, the "applet" concept of embedded things like Flash and Java also seems antiquated right now.

Not really of a fan of resurrecting Flash.

"Flash" was the creation environment: code IDE + vector design + timeline animation tool. "Flash Player" was the portable applet-style runtime.

> not really a fan of resurrecting Flash

Sounds like you're not a fan of resurrecting Flash Player. The previous poster (GP) was pining for a resurrection of Flash. You're talking about different things.

> "Flash" was the creation environment: code IDE + vector design + timeline animation tool

I thought that still exists? Adobe renamed "Flash Professional" to "Adobe Animate", and they're continuing to update it.

Adobe Animate is a zombie.

After Effects overshadows it for animation and Animate's "interactive application development" story is bloated and crufty. It's not adapted to the present-day software+hardware ecosystem like Flash&Player were in the 90's/00's -- and it never will be.

Fair point, but I don't recall Flash "things" ever being usable in anything other than some form of a Flash Player, so if the player was suboptimal, it kinda ruins the whole thing, no?

> so if the player was suboptimal, it kinda ruins the whole thing, no?

Agreed! Flash is dead for a reason, and that reason — while manifold and complicated and political and commercial — really boils down to Flash Player.

Back to OP's claim: "Flash needs to come back". I believe they're really pining for (because I pine for) "a creative environment where design, animation, and code coexist — and where every project can be deployed to any device." That was the fulfilled promise of Flash&Player in the 90's/00's.[1]

It will look technically different next time around (WASM? Native mobile targets? Native desktop targets? Modern collaboration/version control?), but I firmly agree with OP that creative environment needs to happen — will happen — again.

[1] Incidentally, that's the presently fulfilled promise of Unity3D for games.

I don’t feel flash necessarily needs to come back, but if we look at current content creation for the web, it is indeed poor in terms of animation or even experiments that can be easily authored. The web is made for coders one could say, not artists. Currently I work with Godot and I hope their html5 export might bring back some of that magic.

> He killed it out of greed so he could gatekeep his platform.

And maybe out of spite... I heard from an Adobe exec that it was payback for not agreeing to make Flash exclusive to mac (something Jobs had requested many years earlier).

I just wish Adobe Open Source Flash.

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