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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Uh... Flash was a genuine firehose of security flaws. I mean, yeah, they patched them. So "battle tested security layer" isn't wrong in a technical sense. But, yikes, no.

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The Flash revisionism I see around here occasionally is bizarre.

No, Flash was terrible and killing it was good.

There is artistically no equivalent to Flash ever since it died. Nothing else has allowed someone with artistic skills but no programming skills to create animations and games to the same degree and with the same ease.

what is missing was a replacement for the flash editor itself, not the format.

I'd say Roblox is absolutely filling that market need. And as mentioned elsewhere, the "animations and games" demographic has moved on in the intervening decades to social media, and tools like CapCut make creating online content easier than it ever has been.

Honestly I think a lot of the Flash mania is just middle aged nerds fondly remembering their youth. The actual tool was a flash in the pan, and part of a much more complicated history of online content production. And the world is doing just fine without it.

It was terrible from a security POV, but the tooling was superb.

I remember my teenage friends creating things with flash in a way that doesn't happen on the modern web.

Sure, but that's because the media and forums change, not so much a point about tool capability. The equivalent of teenaged geeks hacking on flash games today is influencer wannabes editting trends in CapCut. If anything content production is far more accessible now than in the 90's.

I think it depends on whether you see Flash as competing with webvideo or with downloadable executables.

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