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Comment by lucasyvas | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious. Is authorship of new titles even a possibility once this ships, or is all tooling so beyond ressurection at this point that it would mostly serve as away to revive the back catalog?

Obviously the back catalog is insanely massive, but from what I hear a lot of developers loved making Flash games - it would be interesting if anyone were dedicated enough to try to revive the scene.

It's true that it's not really needed anymore and there are some promising web standards evolving every day. But that never stopped the crazy ones from making it work anyway. People are still finding ways to make new games for old Nintendo hardware.

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Adobe still offers Animate as part of Creative Cloud and you can use that to build AS3 movies. If you want AS2 you have to go back to at least CS6, though CS5.5 is preferred as it has significantly wider FLA support. (Don't ask me why that was removed in CS6.)

If you don't like the idea of paying Adobe money you can use Apache Flex, which is the FOSS version of Adobe's toolchain. That's a command line compiler tool, of course, and it only compiles AS3 files, so you'll still need to author and link graphics separately, and for vector art stuff you'd probably need to find a way to convert SVGs to SWFs, embed them in your main SWF thru some weird class declaration magic in Flex, and deal with the subtle masking problems that would cause.

Flash shouldn't have died.

It was an incredibly accessible authorship tool that produced cross-platform single-file animations that were low-bandwidth and scaled.

We still haven't made up for its loss. Javascript + canvas + web stack is a mess. If the Ruffle runtime could quickly start up, I'd start authoring new Flash.

the only thing that really died was adobe's support (if you can call it that) and the web plugin I was kind of shocked how big the community still is

There was the teensy problem of being an unending bag of security vulnerabilities. Java Applets were its only competitor, and Java had the disadvantage of being fundamentally designed without security in mind.

people making login systems in flash should honestly be ashamed of themselves

> Java had the disadvantage of being fundamentally designed without security in mind.

Nonsense. Java is one of very few languages that was designed to handle untrusted code from day 1, and it showed in having far fewer vulnerabilities than Flash.

Unfortunately the JVM was slow to start up, so you had an even worse "grey rectangle effect" than Flash, and applets like all plugins were poorly integrated with the rest of the page. Top that off with Java not being particularly great for writing UI or video in (it's fine, but it's not great) whereas Flash had excellent tools for doing vector animations and you can see why Flash was more popular.

The very idea of having a `SecurityManager` that runs in the same VM is nonsensical, but that's what Java did. Java was designed - and widely used - as a general-purpose language with full platform capabilities.

Flash at least implemented a VM with a fairly minimal surface. It can only blame its quality of implementation.

> The very idea of having a `SecurityManager` that runs in the same VM is nonsensical, but that's what Java did.

Lolwhat? It's fine. It worked great. (It had some vulnerabilities in its history, but so does every sandbox/hypervisor/what-have-you out there)

Not really. The whole SecurityManager thingie was a fiasco from the start.

It granted access to _code_, not to the environment. Basically, you declared in the manifest that "com.mycompany.blah.*" wants to have full access rights, and SM granted permissions to that _code_. So it was predictably easy to subvert this, because Java code was not typically written in defensive style, sanitizing all the input data.

All the modern sandboxes instead isolate the environment.

s/Java had the disadvantage/Flash had the disadvantage/ perhaps?

Don't forget stability issues. Flash was (before being banished to a separate process) the single largest contributor of crashes in Firefox, responsible for about ⅓ of them. Even in its dying days, I'd "fix" a slow page by wandering over to a terminal and typing "kill -9 plugin-container" to kill all the Flash instances on the page.

I shed tears for the Flash games that were killed off by the demise of Flash. I don't shed any tears for Flash itself.

Just tried the Ruffle demo, it crashed my Firefox. :D

Back in the day, before flash added 3d I wrote a flash player emulator in a Java Applet, as a "UI System" for our 3D engine. Looking back, I've literally no idea what the hell I was thinking. :-)

It's a pity the demise of flash killed a games/art scene, but the rest of the web is better off with flash gone and nothing new to fill that role.

The way some people used to make entire websites as flash apps that would bring old computers to their knees is not something I miss. Websites that should have just been static html, like a restaurant's website for their menu, were getting turned into monstrously inefficient interactive nightmares that wouldn't even load at all if you didn't have flash (which btw, broke constantly with Linux.)

This kind of superfluous interactivity is still possible with javascript/etc, but it seems to be less popular and is more likely to gracefully degrade (usually the relevant content still displays even if you have JS disabled.)

Websites have gotten way more bloated since Flash died. I used to have a smartphone with 2GB of RAM, and certain websites would just crash the browser because it used up too much resources. Flash apps look light by comparison.

Yeah the beauty of flash is that it would crash your browser using way less than 2GB of RAM.

> the rest of the web is better off with flash gone and nothing new to fill that role.

What has filled the role of flash for commercial websites is native iOS and android apps, which still somehow end up being way larger than a flash payload and also drain battery faster.

The truly magical bit of flash though was the small scale culture of making tiny little once-off things to share for the love of it, for free. Hacker culture, if you will.

In the flash days, you could make a little toy for fun as a 10 year old kid without a credit card, post it on newgrounds for free to let others see it, brag to your friends, and feel good. Now, you need to buy a macbook ($1000) and apple dev account ($100/yr) to be able to share your dumb joke with your friends at school.

No wonder young kids instead use the even more closed roblox platform to make dumb jokes rather than building iOS apps.

> Websites that should have just been static html, like a restaurant's website for their menu, were getting turned into monstrously inefficient interactive nightmares

> This kind of superfluous interactivity is still possible with javascript/etc, but it seems to be less popular and is more likely to gracefully degrade

I'm sorry but— do we live in the same planet??

Either you only browse websites you find on marginalia.ru or there's no way you're possibly serious about this.

I'm completely serious and I'm talking about normal websites found with a normal search engine. Most random websites I browse through work just fine with all javascript disabled. There will usually be things like comment sections or videos that don't load, but the content I'm actually looking for loads and renders fine. Sometimes the rendering of the website breaks and puts things where the designer didn't intend, but even in those cases the website is usually still legible.

By my estimation, 90% of websites work better with all javascript disabled (by works better I mean they displays the content legibly and doesn't waste my bandwidth or CPU time with superfluous nonsense). 9% need first party javascript enabled. 1% need more.

Here's a short clip of me browsing the top results for pecan pie recipes: http://0x0.st/HJUU.webm

I chose this example because I think it's relatively representative of normal web browsing without a techie/retro bias, but the same demonstration works with links from HN too. All of these pages are rendered with javascript disabled. Most websites behave like these. Websites that need javascript, like youtube or various social media sites (including github, the only site presently linked on the HN front page that needs javascript), are a small minority.

> Flash shouldn't have died.

The only way this could ever have been possible is if a widely-available and -adopted Flash runtime was made that was ironclad in security and reasonably performant. Ideally, it would also have been open-source.

Honestly, while I absolutely sympathize with you and people who share your feelings on Flash, I genuinely believe that its demise was better for the web, especially given that Adobe very clearly had either no interest in or no ability to make such a runtime. With Flash dead, there was huge impetus to make reasonably open and widely-accepted standards for more explicit layout, animation, and other kinds of presentation on the web—and now we have that! It may not reproduce absolutely everything Flash did (particularly on highly Flash-specific sites like Newgrounds, where you're guaranteed to have people trying to push the boundaries of the medium), but it does reproduce the vast majority of what Flash was actively used for on the web in general.

Like, my God, do you remember the restaurants that used Flash just to do simple mouseover drop-down menus? Do you really think that kind of bullshit should still be done in Flash?

> do you remember the restaurants that used Flash just to do simple mouseover drop-down menus?

They've moved to restaurant specific apps (written in Swift or an Android equivalent), that you need to install on your mobile device just to order from their menu. While in their store already. :( :( :(

And the user experience is still better.

My first job was doing Actionscript + mxml. It was fine for the web, even as people talked about things like crashes and/or security vulnerabilities. The same can be said to be true of Javascript today (to a much lesser extent though).

But the iPhone and iOS really killed it by not supporting it, at least that's my memory of it. I remember feeling fundamentally "uncool" by doing Flash/Actionscript/Mxml because right when I got that first job out of college was when Steve Jobs was doing the "Flash sucks" rounds. "It's dead." etc.

I remember a couple of the Flash folks at my job went to a Flash conference where they would do cool things with art and animation. When they got back they bumped into some members of the iOS team who back then were the new hot commodity (both in demand and salary). And they said to the flash folks: "Oh people still use Flash?" snicker snicker.

As an entry-level at the start of my career it made me feel like I was deprecated out of the gate working with legacy tech.

I still remember Actionscript fondly though as well as all the web games I'd play.

Flash didn't die because it was bad.

The reason why Flash became so popular is that while the development tools cost money, the player was free for anyone to install. Browsers eventually started installing Flash by default (mostly so they could solve some of the security issues with prompt updates). By 2005, Adobe had a major monopoly on dynamic web content.

And then smartphones and tablets became a thing. Adobe didn't want to keep giving flash away for free, they wanted to exploit their monopoly for profit, by charging phone manufactures 25 cents per device for the right to include the flash runtime on their phones. Many Symbian, Windows CE, and later Android phones were paying this licensing fee to Adobe.

I suspect this royalty fee is large part of the reason why Job's "Thought's on Flash" letter came about. The letter mostly talks about need for open standards, and it is right. But I think Adobe's insistence on royalty fees really rubbed Apple the wrong way. Maybe if Adobe wasn't trying to extort smartphone vendors for royalty fees, it would have survived, and Adobe could still be charging money for the flash creative tool today.

Hell, if Adobe weren't trying to profit of the runtime, they wouldn't have had any objection to making the runtime an open standard and allowing anyone (including apple) create their own flash runtime implementations.

Flash didn't die because it was bad. Flash died because Adobe tried to exploit their monopoly for profit, and the wider industry responded to the threat.

> Flash didn't die because it was bad.

Well, it certainly wasn't helped by the Flash Player being a never ending source of serious security exploits, sandbox bypasses, and more. :(

Yes, but that's only a problem with the runtime implementation.

I remember a number of people pushing Adobe to transform the runtime into an open standard. Then every browser would have been allowed to create their own implementations that actually fit with their security model.

> that's only a problem with the runtime implementation.

"Only". Heh. Bit more than just some minor implementation detail, seeing as until Ruffle there's never been a successful 2nd implementation. ;)

Plenty of false starts and half arse attempts to make one, but none that gained traction until now. :/

Because nobody ever dedicated serious funding towards a 2nd implementation. Even Ruffle is doing it on a shoestring budget (some sponsorship and a lot of volunteer work)

If Adobe had committed to turning Flash into an open standard back when it was still relevant (certainly before 2010, maybe as late as 2013), various companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Mozilla would have committed dozens of full-time engineers towards working with Adobe to document flash as a proper standard. And then those engineers would have gone back to their browsers to create implementations.

None of those companies would have made a 2nd implementation of flash back then without Adobe's permission. Not only did they all have working relationships with Adobe (mostly around keeping adobe flash player updated and secure), but there was a risk Adobe might sue them.

Also, without an offical standard, Flash was a moving target. Part of the reason why Ruffle is viable now is that Flash is dead, and there is no offical implementation that might change at a moments notice.

That's an interesting perspective. I always liked Flash. The web, frankly, was a lot better when it was in its prime.

> Flash didn't die because it was bad.

Which is a shame because it was bad. Like having to run an app from Adobe to clear out pernicious tracking cookies kinda bad.

On Windows, you can still run old versions of Flash no problem. On macOS, however, it's more complicated because all those versions are 32-bit. On an M1 Mac you would be better off setting up a Windows VM and running Flash in that. On Intel you can install macOS Mojave, the last one with 32-bit support, on a separate partition.

>Is authorship of new titles even a possibility

We still write fresh new AS3 code at $work. All IDEs and tooling are running fine on W10/W11.

Why? For what? Flash/flex is dead?

It's a profitable game with an active user base, some of which are stuck on old HW, which can't run WebGL. Flash, surprisingly, is still better at graphics than what current browsers provide.

Realm of the Mad God?

No, it's some Farmville clone.

Curious, are you writing Adobe Air apps? I assume the only reason anyone would be writing new AS3 code is to maintain an old Adobe Air app. I ask because the I maintain one and I find the tooling and IDE experience brittle and horrible.

We had one Air app, but it got rewritten into Unity (mobile) and is now retired. No, this one is a real Flash app (MMO game), users run it in one of two ways:

- flash plugin bundled into electron, for players with old hardware, ~30% user base

- Flash transpiled into TypeScript transpiled into ES5 JS, with custom runtime based on WebGL

The whole runtime is kinda like Ruffle, but we don't support all Flash capabilities, just what was required to make app running (but it's still a lot of API surface).

What do you use for the Flash authoring?

IIRC, some version of Adobe Creative Suite.

Thanks. :)

New grounds has a "flashforward" event every year or so.

Very cool. It would bring a smile to see this community grow large enough to make some noise.

One of the best parts of a "dead" platform is that it doesn't change!

is the authorship of bew titles possible? yes, it never stopped. check out the flash forward jam NG hosts annually

there are a few open source tools that can create SWFs, but the old adobe tools are the best unfortunately (up until cs6) thankfully those programs are floating around out there

the only thing about flash that really seemed to die was support from adobe (and they had long since stopped caring, good riddance) and the browser plugin itself. all the rest is all still up and going

Yes, it's still possible. Unity has a lot more mindshare though. I think what made flash work was everything was made with flash, so there was a community around it

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