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Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

I will defend Flash all day long, and I think it's death is a regression in technology that to this day has not been rectified. Of course it had it's problems (particularly around accessibility and security), but in 1998, it was possible for a teenager to write a decent quality Mario clone that could run on a Pentium II, from a web browser, at 60fps.

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It was also very possible to write a restaurants website that ran at 5fps on the fastest cpu at the time. and honestly that's why a lot of people wanted flash dead.

The same devs who write that restaurant website produce the same horrifically inefficient code in Javascript now.

Flash wasn't the problem.

Flash was part of that problem.

The infrastructure and tooling should make the easy path relatively benign.

The ecosystem surrounding web standards make hard almost every use-case Flash had. The web standards and its implementation is a friggen mess. Try doing anything non-trivial with audio and you’ll see what I mean.

Instead of slow animated restaurant website we now have blogspam recipe sites or slow electron apps.

The web standards at the time could barely vertically centre a div, and many of the proponents of web standards had the gall to say the web standards would supersede Flash.

Tye easy path was benign in Flash! Flash produced elegant, compact output if you executes the basics.

The "problem" was that you could fuck up your SWF to incredible degrees and still get something that worked.

The problem was that creative people were intruding into the space of old school software developer mentalities and “standards” people. Flash devs got paid extremely well, were highly collaborative, and executed exceptionally fast. But they weren’t “doing it the proper way” and for some reason the software/tech industry at large needed to show Flash how it was meant to be done. No one yet figured out how to properly centre a div or agree on what was restful, but knew for sure Flash was doing it wrong because the <video> tag was now only 4 short years away from viable browser penetration.

And now we finally made it. The 2d canvas context can fill paths, you can loop an audio file, you can even centre divs. You just gotta duck tape all that garbage together, manually through code, forget about animation authoring, in a dry as heck Node.js tooling ecosystem, and spend your nights replaying arguments you had with your co-workers about linting rules.

You're not wrong.

People think of Flash and fondly remember HomestarRunner but that shit was EVERYWHERE for awhile, and not just in banner ads. Entire websites would be built in flash, and not well, either.

This is why I hated flash. The websites for small non-technical businesses were god awful because the business owners, who didn't know better, asked for all kinds of superfluous animations.

At least now that this same sort of crap is done in javascript, I can opt out of it by not enabling javascript and still usually have a workable website to read. But with flash there was no graceful degradation at all; you either ran flash and brought your computer to its knees, or you couldn't use the website at all. It was awful and the best thing Steve Jobs ever did was help nail the coffin shut.

If you allow me....

> But with <javascript> there was no graceful degradation at all; you either ran <javacript> and brought your computer to its knees <with ads that cover 70% of page>, or you couldn't use the website at all.

I remember times when flash is everwhere. Usually flash was present as ads, videoplayer, sometime as full website, and sometime only as fancy-colorful menu.

Honestly, I don't see big difference between flash and javascript from user POV. Same sometime slowness, sometime lags, all the time ads, etc. etc.

Huge difference IMO. JS can be used in moderation. That did not apply to Flash back in the day.

> …in 1998, it was possible for a teenager to write a decent quality Mario clone that could run on a Pentium II, from a web browser, at 60fps.

Today it's possible for a teenager to write a decent 2D or 3D platformer (or whatever) that can run on a low-end machine at good framerates using tools like Roblox, Godot, etc. Flash still exists in the form of Adobe Animate, but it's competing for beginner hearts and minds on platforms with far more capabilities and far better communities.

Change is not necessarily regression. It's fun to remember and honor tools that were formative in our lives, but it's important to note that there are kids out there having the same experiences we did on today's platforms and tools.

Critically, there's no modern equivalent for the `.swf` file that's easy to share and post on random websites. Chrome's Web Bundles could have been a solution, but they're dead now.

> Critically, there's no modern equivalent for the .swf file that's easy to share and post on random websites.

That's an interesting point. I guess today's equivalent would be an embed? https://itch.io/updates/introducing-game-embeds

Yeah, that's what you have to do these days. Maybe I'm just hung up on archival, but loads of the `.swf` files are no longer available from their original source. Itch.io is awesome, but if it goes under, or is forced to change it's business model, all of those embeds that nobody thought to independently save become defunct.

I was able to hunt down an old copy of the Delirium swf like 6 months ago (from Web Archive) and then with another package I was able to run it natively on MacOS.

So not all is lost... for now.

The unity exes would be the closest thing

I wish Godot had the art capabilities that Flash had. With Flash you could sit down to a blank canvas and end up with a game you could pop on the web, without needing a single external program. With 2D Godot there’s always that annoying beginning stage where you have to hop into an art program just to make a basic character and background sprite, fiddle with import settings and atlases, blah blah… it doesn’t feel as seamless and magical as Flash vector art.

Also I miss Actionscript. Typescript tries but it just isn’t the same.

Not to mention with swf-to-exe tools like Zinc, I could create portable and lightweight desktop applications without fighting with compilers and build steps. 20 years ago I built a fairly sophisticated program to allow users to load, view, and manipulate 3D objects. Took me a week and I can still run it today. I supposed I could do the same now with JS libraries and Electron, but it's just not the same. We indeed lost something valuable.

Hypercard died twice, once at Apple's hands, and again at Adobe's.

>I will defend Flash all day long, and I think it's death is a regression in technology that to this day has not been rectified.

It's still strange to think that Flash was the price that we paid for multi-touch smartphones.

That exact same possibility exists right now, it's just called Adobe Animate now.

Did Animate get a huge amount of updates? It was nowhere near a Flash replacement outside of, well, animating, when I last used it if you wanted content that ran in the browser.

What do you think of Flutter?

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