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Comment by mcpackieh | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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> 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 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.

> 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.

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