The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024 | Hacker News Reader

The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

phoronix.com

45 pointsvmbrasseur18 comments

> annoying flash ads

Thank god that is a thing of the past, right?

In all seriousness, Flash was better than the HTML counterparts that replaced it, in almost every respect. ActionScript is the better Javascript. The graphics are faster than Canvas, had better authoring tools than SVG, and a better API than either. People do not know what they are missing.

ActionScript and JavaScript are basically the same language, considering the roots of them both and that they share 99% of the syntax and functionality, ActionScript being a "lite" version of JavaScript. They're definitely more similar than they are different.

The only major difference (which is incidentally also probably why JS "won") was that JS came from development that happened out in the open, as FOSS, while ActionScript was a proprietary language from a company.

Not accurate, look up ActionScript 3 and the ECMAScript 4 kerfuffle.

What do you mean is not accurate?

AS3 derives from the ES4 proposal, which honestly felt like a bigger shift than Python2->3 transition. In fact, AS3 came out after work on ES4 already ceased, so in my understanding, "the JS we know today" won even before AS3 came out.

Also referring to Brendan Eich's comment in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25388721 :

> When Adobe bought Macromedia, we saw a path to ES4 as a standard. This ended only partly in tears, as AS3 was too static and different (namespaces!), but the good parts got into ES6.

Since Typescript is largely borrowed from bits of ActionScript/ES4, people aren't missing much at all. TS+React isn't too different from AS3+Flex.

The associated headaches with tooling and configuration do make it quite different.

I haven't had meat as much odor with vite or parcel. Let alone Deno or bun.

I am really grateful for this effort! Because of it ancient gems like z0r.de can continue to exist.

z0r had a profound influence on my younger self by introducing the art form of looping way before it was widely understood (Snapchat, TikTok) and combined it with a heavy dose of dadaism.

Off-topic but I really want to try to get this idea out into the public subconsciousness: It's time for the open-source world to make a competitor to Flash.

"But can't JavaScript do everything Flash could do?" Nope, not even close.

"But isn't Ruffle good enough?" Not in my experience. It fails to the orange-screen-of-death on more than 50% of the flash ads/games/etc. on the Internet Archive.

"But wasn't Flash insecure?" Yep, but that's just bad implementation, not inherent to the concept of Flash.

"But Chrome won't support it because they're the new IE6 and they're stuck in the past" You know what, I don't have a good answer to that. ;(

There have been multiple open source Flash player efforts that get 70% of the way there and stall.

I could surmise reasons, and so could you. But does anyone know the reason?

Is there some common blocker that they all founder on or something?

Not an expert at all, but there is a complexity wall when you get to newer Flash with ActionScript (3)?

My very rough guess is that post late-2000s content frequently needs these features and it's at least an order of magnitude work to recreate them

I think it's more down to engrained quirks in the existing implementation. IIRC, adobe gave mozilla an open-source implementation of actionscript 3 back in the day to try and help legitimize it as an ECMAscript implementation.

Erm, because most things get to 70% and then stall?

"The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time." —Tom Cargill, Bell Labs

The differences between something having 90% and 99% and 99.9% coverage is GIGANTIC at each step.

I guess the question is are there any open source replacement for Adobe Flash Professional ?

https://www.synfig.org/

How does this compare to say Flashpoint?

Very different kinds of projects. Flashpoint is concerned with archiving games and providing a one-stop desktop launcher for them. Ruffle reimplements the Flash Player, providing both a desktop player and a JS library that polyfills the FP plugin on a website, but the actual .swf file to run needs to be provided separately.

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