Flash Back: An “oral” history of Flash | Hacker News Reader

Flash Back: An “oral” history of Flash

goodinternetmagazine.com

46 pointssurprisetalk50 comments

Before it was Flash, it was a vector drawing tool called FutureSplash.. in the early 90s i worked at fractal design corp (creators of what's now corel painter) and the Futuresplash folks were interested in selling it to us.. that was before it had an animation timeline or scripting features. I was kind of an in-house artist and the founders really wanted my opinion on whether or not it would be appealing to our customers, like how i as an artist felt about it.

My feedback was that was kind of cumbersome compared to our other tools, and didn't see the potential appeal to our user base and recommended against it, and we declined the offer.

Ultimately I'm glad Macromedia did acquire it because adding scripting and animation appealed to the already diminishing Director/Shockwave platform.

I do wonder how things might have been different had we decided otherwise and acquired Futuresplash-- there'd have been no Flash as we know it!

It's amazing how little decisions we make in the past can project out over time and have larger repercussions.

Interesting, I always supposed it was related to Fantavision from the Apple II days:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=k4ysfd8r0fA

Never knew Fantavision existed outside Amiga. I was also wondering if this was somehow related to Flash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-bGsZuFZfw

Thanks for name-dropping FutureSplash. I'd never heard of it, but knowing then name sent me down a mini-rabbit hole:

https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/software/futuresplash-animat...

https://web.archive.org/web/20070509070443/http://www.adobe....

In the article (which is quite good to read), they wrote "The iPhone is often cited as the reason for why Flash started to decline, since it led to significant user demand to have Flash-free sites. However, I think Flash’s fate was truly sealed once Google made an HTML advertisement designer app."

I worked in the industry before flash, during flash, after flash, and in my little corner of the world, the iphone not supporting flash was the biggest factor in the decline of flash. Every executive and bigwig could not drop their blackberries fast enough, and grab the newest status symbol iphone. Once management all had iphones, then flash just would not do, and the directive came down to make the website "good" for iphones, which usually entailed adding excessive white space, large lettering, and big buttons.

Yep, I worked in advertising at the time. I was constantly explaining to the creatives "no, we can't have a flash main menu because of SEO" "no, we shouldn't make the website as 25MB flash file" "see, here's the problem with flash..." and so on. Then Steve Jobs said so, and that type listened to Jobs, not techies. And Flash was pretty much dead after that point. (Often replaced by some jquery slideshow plugin, and everything was fine.)

As a Flash developer at the time, I was constantly telling people: “Yes, you can do SEO with Flash, and here’s how. No, you don’t bundle everything into one giant .swf. Your problem isn’t with Flash, it’s with bad code.”

Today, the web is creatively barren relative to the wild innovation of the time. Actual creatives have been cut out of the process, requiring the intervention of people like you and I. HTML5 was supposed to replace Flash, and a generation later, we still don’t have anything close to its expressive power. React takes twice the effort for a quarter of the experience.

I’m still bitter at Steve Jobs and his flying monkeys at Wired. Apple could have worked with Adobe to fix Flash. Adobe was willing. But let’s be honest: the App Store was shaping up to be a cash cow, and Flash was a direct, free competitor. Apple had no interest in letting it survive. So now we’re left with a dismal, sanitized web.

>HTML5 was supposed to replace Flash, and a generation later, we still don’t have anything close to its expressive power.

Are you referring to the tooling around HTML5 + Canvas elements or the technical possibilities?

These are quotes from Steve Jobs:

> "New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too)."

> "HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on a third party browser plug-in (like Flash)."

> "Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content."

> "If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?"

> "HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member."

I view these as cynical. HTML5 has yet to match the experience that Flash delivered, and I believe Jobs knew that it could not even at the time he said it.

Which area is unmatched?

The designer experience with Flash tooling, the end user experience sans plugins or the technical capabilities of HTML5 + Canvas?

Perhaps a synthesis of the two? A lack of friction between the designer's vision and production led to a more interesting, more engaging user experience overall, in my opinion. The web itself then was an art and design medium that it is not today.

You are obviously right, and only the mostest HTML5 stuff has been on the same level as the 'flash splash' stuff which was all over the place... But did anyone care? Or was this is just creative mutually-assured-destruction?

> App Store was shaping up to be a cash cow

Okay, how many apps have some super mind-blowing animations on their home screen? Maybe nobody really wanted that? (And, certainly Jobs did not want companies writing CRUD apps in Flash/AS3.)

I worked with a few different types of Flash guys. The top guys were artists, they delivered awesome stuff that nobody has seen since. (But, like the website, it was hardcoded to desktop dimensions.) They made a great living doing this stuff. Some of them jumped to HTML5, but that whole 'flash splash' thing largely went out-of-style.

There was also more of the run of the mill 'hero animation', jquery was good enough for that. I think they still use Adobe Animate for banner ads.

And then there was the junior guy who was good at flash and just wanted the entire web to be flash, and that was more of the debate because some assistant creative director thought it was slick.

(And lest I forget, there were also the ActionScript guys who spent all day in their IDE writing MVC code, and rarely using the Flash editor.)

I was the parenthetical latter. I see the same kind of dynamic with React Developers these days: the platform itself encourages poor coding practices and a detachment from the core technologies of HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

True.

But on HN, I commonly see the opposite "retro manchild" take that Flash was all just all web fun & games applets, totally unlike all this awful Node/React stuff. They have no idea how professional ActionScript programmers did things.

Yep ... I never used flash studio, we used to use FlashDevelop and then Haxe to develop games and other applications using ActionScript

There were a lot of things that made Flash good for creatives / non programmers.

I think the "one big file" is a part people neglect to mention, it means you can just copy that to ftp and the site is deployed.

Modern Web tech takes a lot of experience before you can even deploy a site.

In the ad space, definitely, the iPhone killed Flash.

But the games space hung onto Flash far longer. Right up until Adobe thought it'd be a good idea to start charging revshare for certain Flash features... that were used by Unity's Flash cross-compiler... which just scared everyone over to Unity.

Both of these were downstream of Adobe not wanting to invest money in Flash Player. Apple had begged them to make Flash work but Adobe didn't wanna put money into something people could use for free. So they'd send over a build of Flash that didn't work with iOS's input handling[0], or they'd send over source code Apple couldn't figure out how to build, or whatever. If Adobe hadn't penny-pinched on Flash Player they probably could have gotten a few more years out of the platform, and also stuck around as an animation development platform for JS[1].

[0] More specifically, Flash Player didn't support the rollover menu detection Safari had for desktop sites. If you touch an element on a website, it sends both hover and click events, but the click events only happen if the hover event didn't reveal any new content.

[1] Yes, I know modern Adobe Animate can export to JS. It sucks. It doesn't support the Flash drawing model at all, so all your artwork gets rendered out at 1x onto a sprite-sheet. This was also a problem with the GPU rendering frameworks available for Flash, except HTML5 / JS apps also had access to efficient vector rendering.

Seconded. I worked in film marketing at the time and a portion of my week was always creating flash ads (the better kind driven by action script) I was there at the shift to JavaScript ads. Google’s tool was, in my opinion, a reaction to flash being abandoned. From memory… it was around 2012-14 when I became aware of it and it tended to generate really bloated ads and was very inefficient for what I needed to do at the time. I switched over to just building ads using plain JavaScript and in time using Greensock (GSAP) which also moved from action script to JavaScript.

I moved away from that industry, and while there are now tools to do interactive ads I’m not sure the talent is there to do it well. The move to JavaScript though was great, I built closer working relationships with the media buyers and ad platform reps who also wanted to do more interactive ads and wanted to be reactive and supportive rather than dismissive.

I appreciate the nostalgic tone here, but its core critique that Flash allowed Adobe to dominate the web feels oddly selective, especially looking back now.

Flash wasn’t perfect. It had major security flaws, a proprietary runtime, and a clunky update system. But Flash emerged when browsers themselves were insecure, standards were immature, and the web could not deliver expressive, interactive content. Flash filled that gap, and did so brilliantly in a way not matched even today.

The real irony is how quaint worries about Adobe’s control seem today. Google and Apple now hold that same power, wielding it with more reach and less accountability. Chrome effectively defines the web, and Apple’s restrictions on Safari for iOS block entire categories of web apps. Where Flash was a creative toolkit, today's web prioritizes tracking, monetization, and App Store lock-in. Previously one company defined the runtime; now a handful dictate standards, browsers, ad models, and even UX paradigms.

Flash may have been proprietary, but it sparked a wildly decentralized creative culture, from Newgrounds to weird experimental microsites, that today's web hasn’t matched. Flash let creatives take risks and lead the conversation. By contrast, today’s web is sterile, cautious, and suffocated by performance metrics and SEO compliance.

Flash didn’t kill the open web. It kept it interesting while standards matured. Once those standards caught up, Flash was pushed aside. But let’s not pretend what replaced it is a victory for openness or creativity.

I loved tinkering with Flash as a kid in the early 2000s. I taught myself programming through ActionScript and wrote a little physics engine that modeled 2D physics using loops, conditionals, basic trig, and increments.

It's definitely outdated at this point by HTML5 and WebGL, but I will always fondly remember all those little flash games and experimenting with ActionScript, learning programming fundamentals.

I would highly recommend tinkering with the HTML5 Canvas element and WebGL if you were a fan of Flash. The web browser has evolved into an OS of sorts as personal computers have evolved along with the introduction of mobile devices.

Web browsers now handle email clients, word processors, photo editors, even video and code editors. Check out this neat fluid simulator experiment in WebGL, you can build even more advanced applications of this nature with this technology.

https://paveldogreat.github.io/WebGL-Fluid-Simulation/

Nice quick read, but this isn't a proper oral history of Flash.

I've chatted with a colleague who used to work at Macromedia, and she has some great stories.

Also any history of Flash which doesn't mention shockwave.com (or Princess[1]) is incomplete.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_(web_series)

Or mBED. But who's counting. Future Splash sold to Macromedia and it did become dominant.

Shockwave died pretty quickly after that.

I'd love to hear an actual oral history of Flash. Your colleague's stories would likely be great. The Computer History Museum has archived some oral histories. There might be an opportunity there to have her recollections recorded.

I like to tell people I was a professional ActionScript developer at Microsoft. This was during peak Silverlight days.

I was working on the MyFordTouch system and the UI was written in Flash by a contractor, then handed off to Microsoft to fix the bugs. It was a nightmare to work with and flash in a car worked about as well as you'd expect it to in 2012 (badly).

I worked for a company called Chumby ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby ) a few years before that and our device was Flash focused. It was basically an "Internet Alarm Clock" that could run Flash apps. Having a dedicated "Internet Alarm Clock" made sense back then though after the iPhone caught on it became a pretty hard sell to have a dedicated device for this purpose.

At the time I found ActionScript 3 to be a very good language that one could structure programs in very nicely, but ActionScript 2 was kind of nightmareish and any project in AS2 that had grown to a certain size was bound to be horrendous unless the person creating it was extremely meticulous with how they structured everything.

Chumby devices were stuck on the AVM1 (ActionScript 1 & 2) virtual machine for most of the company's lifespan though we did support AVM2 (AS3) very late in the game when the larger 8" devices were released.

For most of my time there I worked in the Haxe language because it allowed you to have an ActionScript 3 like language that could be compiled down to AVM1 bytecode (among other targets) and it had a pretty amazing compiler macro system that was great for doing all sorts of precompute optimizations which were very useful given how anemic the hardware we were running on was. Its been years since I've used Haxe but it appears to still be a thriving, if somewhat niche, language targeting a lot of different platforms.

We also had access to the underlying Flash Plugin C++ code as part of our deal with Adobe and I worked in that code directly for a while to extend a custom Chumby flash player to support braille devices as output for a joint project accessibility demo we did with NPR. Whatever suspicions people who have worked with the Flash Player as a blackbox might have about it being a horrible ball of spaghetti inside, I can vaguely confirm.

I had a Chumby One! I loved that little alarm clock.

Being able to wake up to Pandora felt magical at the time.

fun, googled for the braille thing and the best google hit was an old post of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287689

Yeah unfortunately (in this case, but probably fortunately in others) the Internet isn't as "forever" as we once thought.

Looks like the link I provided in that post is dead, but there's still a wayback machine snapshot of it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160624205520/https://sites.duk...

The device with the card "Captioned Radio" under it in the 2nd photo is an Insignia Infocast 8", which was basically the same thing as the Chumby 8", just a white-label version produced for Best Buy with a cheaper plastic outer casing and a customized dashboard app with their branding all over it.

Best Buy/Insignia was a retail partner of chumby for a time (they also sold a rebranded version of the Chumby One).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuNIUkg3GZc

https://flashpointproject.github.io/flashpoint-database/

^Search 177,508 games and 32,156 animations, all playable online without a plugin

Flash made it ridiculously easy to animate and export to the web. One tool and you could make an animated video, or an interactive app, or a game. There were fantastic competitive showcases of work, which made kids excited to learn and do it. It was low threshold multimedia and it on-boarded a lot of people into tech, including me. I worked on the Flash apps behind CNN and other Turner properties. The flipper tickers during the Obama election on CNN and Time inc, the Times Square billboard, all flash. My first visit to Silicon Valley was by invitation from Apple. Steve Jobs brought the developers from all major media sites (NY Times, Turner, ESPN, etc) to show us how to run non-flash video on safari. We had to redesign the video players on CNN and a dozen other big sites so jobs could demo the upcoming unveil of the iPad and have enough content to show without “ipad doesn’t support flash” boxes. That was beginning of the end.

The reality was that since Flash wasn’t indexable, search engines couldn’t index it but also you could pre-screen the content either. There could be really bad stuff hiding into easy to release apps. Plus if people could make cross-platform games on flash, why would they make them for app stores.

It was also too energy intensive and would have made battery life much smaller on iDevices.

Recalled that Pale Moon is the only modern browser still capable of running Flash, and, looking that up I discovered that the last Flash installer for windows was around 425 MB! (Source: https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?t=24724 ). Guess every web engine has to try and become an OS!

Seems like an appropriate place to reshare this fun little retrospective: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/881533

(previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35649245)

Fun facts, in the very early days of YouTube it used Flash Player to display compressed video content on the web [1].

Just wondering what's the today's equivalent of Flash like technology open or proprietary?

[1] Adobe Flash Player:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player

Most of the embedded webgames I see these days use Unity.

I still remember Flash 5 launch screen and its glory back in the day. Lots of stunning creations and lots of jobs.

btw Adobe Flex anyone?

I was just today looking to see who owns Flex and Air. There is Apache Flex but it does not look like it is widely used. And it looks like Air was sold to Harman an audio electronics subsidiary of Samsung.

It would be cool if there was a browser that had a full set of components that would allow fast construction of internal dashboards, CRUD apps, etc. via new html tags. if not that then maybe a custom browser with flex enabled for internal use only. The security and performance would have to be improved but seems like a really fast way to prototype and build internal only sites.

From about 2000 util about 2010 I was a die-hard ActionScript developer. I used to work for a number of digital advertising studios building gigantic full browser Flash monstrosities for our clients. Never really dabbled in Flex but it was on my periphery. I do remember that it was part of the RIA [1] push of the mid-2000's. Interesting times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_Application

There was a good two years or so where I was working in Flex for desktop app publishing. It was okay.

I enjoyed this article. But Godot, SDL, and TIC-80 still have a much higher learning curve vs. tweening animations and throwing in some Actionscript to make a stick figure fighter, which gives you a self-contained artifact .swf you can pass around.

It's amazing how much creativity that used to go to Newgrounds and Flash games is now funneled into TikTok shorts.

Kids these days! But Super Mario Bros 63 is still fun.

It’s a shame nothing has really come along with the same functionality that the Flash editor had. The vector based graphics, animation and scripting all in one. And easily exportable to the web. Yeah you have Godot / unity etc etc but nothing as easy as flash was to pick up

Adobe Edge was supposed to be the successor to Flash, to target the web and other platforms, but ultimately never caught on and was discontinued in a few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Edge_Animate

Not familiar at all but the article says Ruffle can still run flash games now. Is the issue just that flash editors aren’t great?

Yes, that's the issue. There's no good Flash replacement AFAIK combining its accessibility and power for 2D game/animation development. Godot is awesome but 3D sucks a lot of resources from the team.

Great article. I’m a few years older than the author but Flash (the developer software trial) was the very first application I downloaded. On dialup it took forever, but it was the thing that blended my artistic side with tech and showed me a way forward that lead to my career today.

Tumult Hype is a very slick, modern equivalent to Flash and it exports HTML5! It's definitely the easiest way to develop Flash-like html5 apps if you miss the Flash workflow.

https://tumult.com/hype/

Just because it's less popular it doesn't mean it's dead. You can still create flash animations, you can still share them, and there are still flash game websites that exist.

Yep, I sometimes go on 4chan's /f/ board to see what people are creating. They even have a little on-site emulator so you don't need to have Flash installed on your system.

It's not impossible that what's now called HTML5 would have been Flash, had Adobe not acquired Macromedia. Steve Jobs had long-running personal bad blood with Adobe.

Salad Fingers https://www.fat-pie.com/salad.htm

Reply on news.ycombinator.com