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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

>The web is unable to deliver an experience like Flash could

I think the browser has been on par with Flash Player for a while, but Flash-the-authoring-tool (to my knowledge) does not yet have an equal. (I'm told Adobe Animate, the rebranded Flash authoring tool, is somehow unsuitable for creating games, despite HTML5 export features.)

To put it another way, I think we've more or less replaced the Flash Player, but we haven't replaced Flash Professional. (As others have mentioned, Unity kind of covers the same ground, but not really.)

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You cannot find Flash experiences on the web, nor even Flash-like experiences on the web. There has been no replacement.

This post seems to confuse capability with actuality. Sure, we have the technical capability for a Flash-like player and authoring tool, but it does not exist.

Maybe I misunderstand what experiences you are looking for, but if you go to itch.io and choose HTML5 do you not see the things that used to be made in Flash?

I don't know if it's just a case of nostalgia but itch.io looks like a wasteland compared to newgrounds.

The market is smaller and there are fewer experiences (mostly due to native mobile gaming) but those experiences do rival (and exceed) what was done with flash back in the day.

On that note, Flash games were basically web games (back in the day Java filled the same role to some degree, eg with SodaPlay (RIP)), and web games as a whole seem to have gone away to some degree, I'm wondering why that is. I guess they don't work very well on mobile (relative to mobile games that run fullscreen), and most (~50%) web traffic is mobile now?

There has been a bit of a resurgence of browser games with Friday Night Funken. I feel as the app stores continue to stagnate, the open and creative nature of the web platform will foster a new market for easily distributable games.

There are more specialised tools that can export games for HTML5, but Flash was extremely general purpose. In my time as a Flash developer, I worked on web animations, games, websites (not a great use-case), digital signage, touch screen kiosks, eLearning products, tutorial animations, and I didn’t even touch any of the more enterprisey flex stuff.

You can do all that now with various tools but the ecosystem is so fragmented that you often need specialists for each of them. The Flash tools had so much reach that you could bounce between such wildly different projects with very little friction. As a consultant it was amazing, you just did it in Flash. Nowadays there are so many competing and fragmented solutions that you need to evaluate then glue together.

You are the one confusing "player" and "authoring tool" as there absolutely are players with all the functionality of the flash player and more, they are just called browsers.

What's more there absolutely are "html5" experiences that rival the old flash experiences. In most ways these experiences are much better. Perhaps as an old commerical flash developer youbhave a rosy memory of flash in the naughts. Back in the day, the only time I wasn't pissed to see flash loading was when I played flash games, every other use of flash was generally awful and I would usually immediately close a page if it started loading flash. As much as I hate the bloat and SPAification of the web, it is still far better than what most sites did with flash.

The demise of flash is complicated and has a lot to do with the rise of mobile. Android did support flash but even on that platform, native games simply outperformed flash games and the market demand shifted. If Apple had supported flash on iOS, this shift would probably have been slower but flash would still have lost out.

Adobe Air could target mobile platforms with negligible degradation and generated swfs for web, too. I and most other serious flash devs in this era had a toolchain where you built once in AS3 and published to web and mobile using frameworks like Starling.

Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile. Thinking this is part of the hit job orchestrated by Apple. Flash died because browser games can't be taxed by Apple.

The same thing is happening today with progressive web apps. Ask yourself what Apple could have against those, and now look backwards at their stance on Flash.

> Flash died not because it couldn't do mobile.

I never said it couldn't do mobile. I said it couldn't do mobile as well as native.

Flash died faster because of apple, but was always going to die due to the combination of the rise of app stores, mobile battery issues, and the advancement of web standards.

Apple did the work to integrate flash into the iPhone before they rejected it.

I think it is interesting that Apple gets all the blame here since the decline of flash also coincides pretty directly with it's acquisition by Adobe. Youtube's early moves to offer non-flash video also had significant effects.

While I am a big critic to Apple's approach to called gardens, the decision against flash was as much prescient as it was causative of the decline of flash.

In my experience, having worked closely with these technologies in my day job during this era, the average person talking about it has an oversimplified view of the technologies and comes to the wrong conclusions.

Adobe did not want Flash to die, and their product manager was very involved in the community to figure out what needed to happen to prevent that. I don't think Adobe invested enough into those demands, but still there was steady investment made. If they had more time, and Apple wasn't such a bully, the tech could have evolved and survived.

Adobe built Stage3D so that one API could target GPUs across desktop and mobile. Think WebGL, which was released around the same time. But production-ready due to the distribution advantage the flash player had over browsers at the time.

Adobe funded open source projects such as Starling to create scenegraph-like APIs on top of Stage3D, providing an on-ramp for all existing AS3 devs to the new paradigm with their existing API knowledge and tool chain.

At this point in the timeline, any AS3 dev could write cross platform games and apps if they picked up a handful of mobile GPU concepts like draw calls, texture maps, and bitmap fonts. (You could take all these things for granted in the traditional Flash scenegraph.) Unity existed at this point but did not yet have dedicated 2D libraries. You'd be rendering your 2D game onto a face in a 3D world, with a fixed camera. Total overkill. They wouldn't be as performant as Stage3D for a couple years.

I disagree with the assessment that Adobe was a bad steward because I saw them trying with my own eyes.

I also disagree that Flash couldn't do native apps with native performance because I built them with my own fingers.

Lastly I disagree that web standards obsoleted Flash because where are the web games? Why aren't they playable on mobile safari? Why don't the web standards come with a dev environment and where are the dominant Flash monetization models?

Apple played hardball so that the only way to be on their platform was to use their tech in their way signed off on by their reviewers and monetized by their app store. They also wrote FUD pieces like the famous Jobs letter.

Who was the villain here? Is Apple justified robbing us of a Maker's renaissance era because it wasn't mobile ready at the literal dawn of mobile computing?

> because where are the web games?

All over the place. I see them regularly posted to HN. Did you miss the entire '.io' trend of web games? The market is smaller because it was partially eaten by native mobile games, but it is alive an well.

> Why aren't they playable on mobile safari?

Aren't they?

> Why don't the web standards come with a dev environment.

That's not what standards are. There are a plethora of web development tools and frameworks that target the web. All of these target different needs and visions.

> Is Apple justified robbing us of a Maker's renaissance era because it wasn't mobile ready at the literal dawn of mobile computing?

> I disagree with the assessment that Adobe was a bad steward because I saw them trying with my own eyes.

Adobe abandoned mobile flash development in 2011, when mobile was a fast growing, but still small part of the market. This is also when android more or less caught up with iOS in terms of adoption.

If adobe had continued investing in mobile development, would flash have survived? In retrospect, this is the decision that put the final nail in flash's coffin as mobile won the eyeballs.

If Apple had included flash in iOS, would that actually have saved flash?

Was a closed source, proprietary ecosystem that was late to mobile ever really going to stay the dominant media delivery platform or even survive?

We don't know the answer to these questions but placing all the blame on Steve Jobs is simply too simplistic to be true.

The market is smaller because the devs can't make money. Since portals were an advertising and profit share model, reach mattered. As more and more users switched to mobile browsers, the games can't run there, and browser gaming can't pay developers and it dies. Now who made it so that the mobile browsers can't play these games? I thought the letter said that open web standards had made Flash obsolete? Apple's ecosystem didn't naturally cannibalize flash gaming. It conquered it with violence.

Next: They weren't playable on mobile Safari, no. Safari finally supports WebGL 2 as of Sept 2021. A full 4 years after the other browser vendors supported it. Why drag their heels on this open web standard? Does their platform have something to lose from a little competition? You condemned Adobe for being 'late' to mobile (citation needed) but don't condemn Apple for being late to a web standard meant to replace Flash like they said in their original FUD letter?

Your retelling of Adobe's history is wrong. They were still very much invested in mobile development up until the end of Flash. In fact to this day you can still use AIR to target iOS and Android with native apps. They release updates regularly.

It's very clear that you don't have any idea what you're talking about, have not interacted with these companies professionally, and have not used the technologies in question or even followed along.

The only way to make sense of the facts is to accept that Apple lied in their letter because it was good for Apple's business and that goodness came at the expense of end-user choice.

> As more and more users switched to mobile browsers, the games can't run there, and browser gaming can't pay developers and it dies.

As an android user with an embarsingly high level on Kongregate back in the day, I can tell you that almost no flash games worked well on mobile, even in browsers that did support flash. The mobile flash gaming experience was just bad, which is a big part of why it died.

> Your retelling of Adobe's history is wrong. They were still very much invested in mobile development up until the end of Flash. In fact to this day you can still use AIR to target iOS and Android with native apps. They release updates regularly.

Yes, Adobe abandoned mobile flash in favor of AIR targeting html5 and native apps in 2011. That is exactly my point, Adobe abandoned mobile flash which was another big part of why flash died. See: https://www.pcworld.com/article/478103/adobe_ends_mobile_fla...

> It's very clear that you don't have any idea what you're talking about, have not interacted with these companies professionally, and have not used the technologies in question or even followed along.

It's clear you don't have a real argument or facts to back it up if you resort to this kind of crap.

I used Flash on my android devices back in the day (Firefox and others had support).

Flash sucked on mobile. The VM wasn't as fast as JS JITs in the browser by a long shot. By the time the processors could keep up, Flash had already been dead for years.

Adobe Air existed on mobile and it wasn't a good experience either.

Most of it comes down to an integrated and cohesive development/creative experience for the content author. The current tooling provides such a level of friction that people aren’t experimenting and pushing boundaries of web content like they did when Flash was popular.

I typically work for creative digital agencies, and every single project requires so much tool/framework/library exploration now. Back in the day, you would always just use Flash, and you got the project done really fast. Everything takes so much longer now, and it’s because of tool fragmentation, or just plain lack of tools.

If I ask the question, “what animation tool should I use for animated web content”, there just isn’t a good answer. Back in the day, you would just use Flash.

> Back in the day, you would just use Flash.

And back in the day, I would close your site as soon as it opened if it started loading a flash animation. Using flash for a website animation was never a good choice, at least not for the end user.

I am perfectly happy to have a higher bar for rich web content if it means a less user hostile web than we had when flash was everywhere.

If we really need a more integrated and cohesive experience for content authors, then go out and make it. The fact that one doesn't exist may indicate that there isn't a cohesive demand for such a tool.

Flash was used for a massive variety of use-cases: Digital signage, touch screen kiosks, eLearning experiences, games, web animation, etc. No one is just gonna go out and build a new Flash along with its ecosystem. I used web animation as one obvious example, but the reality is that there is an extreme lacking of cohesion when you look at just about any part of developing for the web. The ecosystem is currently such a slippery foundation that creation of an authoring tool with the scope of Flash is basically impossible to achieve.

> The ecosystem is currently such a slippery foundation that creation of an authoring tool with the scope of Flash is basically impossible to achieve.

I would say that the scale, scope and complexity of that ecosystem outgrew the ability of one or even a few tools to satisfy it.

The idea that flash was ever going to survive as the one tool for interactive content, videos, games, animation and more is simply silly.

It’s not silly at all. I’m not talking about Flash competing with Unity, Unreal, and every other web app. I’m saying there is a desperate need for something that just does what Flash did circa 2007. HTML5 was meant to do that (that was the promise) and still it doesn’t. The old Flash guys aren’t harping on about it just because of nostalgia, but because it has become much more difficult and expensive to produce the kinds of content that Flash excelled at in 2007.

If there's a market for tooling to go make that content, then go make that tooling.

I think that market is actually pretty small since most of the use cases that flash was filling are better served by the varieties of tech that exist today.

> Using flash for a website animation was never a good choice, at least not for the end user.

And yet Flash persisted across the web, until a giant like Apple decided to de-platform them in favor of its own lock-in solution.

Consumers for the most part have no idea what tech lies under the hood for the websites they visit.

> And yet Flash persisted across the web, until a giant like Apple decided to de-platform them in favor of its own lock-in solution.

Flash was a proprietary technology that bootstrapped the early web but was doomed due to a combination of ongoing security issues (which pushed browsers to move it to a plugin and disable autoplay) and poor support for emerging platforms.

> Consumers for the most part have no idea what tech lies under the hood for the websites they visit.

The vast majority of of the tools and languages that lie under the hood for websites, especially on the frontend, is built on open source tech.

There are plenty of shady things that Apple has done, but it is ridiculous to blame Apple for single handedly taking down a doomed technology. This is an example of Apple's prescient side, not it's nefarious side.

I still use Animate CC as an animation tool for web. I don’t like the HTML5 export feature. The “export texture atlas” feature is much more useful. I have built a runtime for this feature, designed to integrate into whatever renderer you use (Canvas2d, WebGl, DOM, Three.js). It’s kinda like Lottie I suppose, but allows for more dynamic behaviour.

https://github.com/jackwlee01/animate_cc_runtime

I recently came across https://rive.app/ which seems to make some steps in the right direction as a replacement for Flash-the-authoring-tool.

Interesting, thanks for sharing! I spent a few minutes playing around with it and it, it seems to target a different niche from Flash. You can't make games with it, only animations for games you'd make in something else.

There's no brush or pencil tool, only a very bezier-oriented Pen tool. You're supposed to take the results and integrate them into your game/app using one of their various cross-platform integration libraries. So you'd still have to use something else to make the game, this would just help you make animations (and maybe art, if you like bezier curves).

Still, in an era of "render your vector art to bitmaps and dump them in Unity" it's nice to see a tool that does realtime rendering of vector-art animation :)

It doesn't seem like it would be too hard to use this to make a HTML5 game (they provide a wasm module for playback of assets) but it's definitely a ways off from a fully integrated solution (and they don't currently seem interested in that aspect).

Re: the player exists, but the creator is lacking: in that sense the Web, even today, is a "Turing tarpit, where everything is possible, but nothing of interest is easy."

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