I feel like I am the only one who absolutely loved ActionScript, especially AS3. I wrote a video aggregator (chime.tv[1]) back in the day using AS3 and it was such a fun experience.
1. https://techcrunch.com/2007/06/12/chimetv-a-prettier-way-to-...
There is the universal hate for flash because it was used for ads and had shitty security, but anyone I know who actually used AS3 loved it.
At its peak, with flex builder, we also had a full blown UI Editor, where you could just add your own custom elements designed directly with flash ... and then it was all killed because Apple did not dare to open source it, or put serious efforts on their own into improving the technical base of the flash player (that had aquired lots of technical dept).
Maybe it was the standalone flex player instead of the web Flash player?
(Flash for desktop, with file access)
I blame the runtime. The quality of the code was good. It was not normal.
A few sources of people complaining about the same, some from hn with the same solution I had to adopt, some from CVE, some from users:
- https://community.adobe.com/questions-638/flash-player-23-24...
- https://advisories.checkpoint.com/defense/advisories/public/...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45813026
> The memory leaks were so bad that Adobe advised us to just restart the app periodically
- https://blog.gskinner.com/archives/2005/10/major_flash_pla.h...
That's only one side of it. Flash was the precursor to the indie/mobile gamedev industry we have today (Newgrounds, Miniclip, Armor Games), before smartphones become ubiquitous. Not to mention some rather creative websites, albeit at the cost of accessibility .
Flash's only fault was it's creators were gobbled up by Adobe, who left it in the shitter and ignored the complaints people had about it's security issues.
I think they just had the focus on features and speed and fps. Not security nor efficency (battery life).
I don't think Flash was harder to secure than HTML itself. People just gave up trying because browser vendors used security to purge the web of anything they didn't control.
Your take on why Flash didn't survive is more cynical than mine. I genuinely think Apple threw up their hands at the prospect of attempting to solve a security problem on the same scale as the browser itself (something it took them a long time to get a handle on --- along with everyone else --- even after they put the kibosh on Flash).
There are certainly obvious issues with securing a third party codebase you don't control, and it's likely that the browser makers had more budget to spend on security than Adobe. But there was no technical reason Flash couldn't have been treated as an alternative rendering engine from a sandboxing perspective, and I think Chrome did it. Pepper was an initiative to generalize that. Blink is full of holes as other comments point out and it's only the kernel sandboxing that makes adding new features viable at all.
I'm cynical because when the browser makers talked about phasing out plugins it wasn't primarily security they talked about. This blog post talks about speed and energy usage first:
https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/chrome/s...
The same language can be found in the announcement of their HTML5 by default strategy here:
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/chromium-dev/c/0w...
"While Flash historically has been critical for rich media on the web, today in many cases HTML5 provides a more integrated media experience with faster load times and lower power consumption."
Security isn't mentioned, perhaps because trying to argue that their own pile of C++ was somehow meaningfully more robust than Adobe's big pile of C++ wasn't going to be convincing.
Their writings about this were also very heavy on "open web" ideology, although the SWF format was documented by that point and openness doesn't go well with deliberately wiping out a tech that was voluntarily deployed by 80%+ of websites. If openness means anything it means open to extension, which plugins provided and forcing everyone to use HTML5 did not. When they deprecated NPAPI they even sort of admitted to this:
https://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-...
"The Netscape Plug-in API (NPAPI) ushered in an early era of web innovation by offering the first standard mechanism to extend the browser. In fact, many modern web platform features—including video and audio support—first saw mainstream deployment through NPAPI-based plug-ins. But the web has evolved. Today’s browsers are speedier, safer, and more capable than their ancestors."
I always found this blog post curiously worded. It has a Fukuyama-style "end of history" vibe to it. Yes plugins boosted innovation because the web platform always lagged years behind, but now the web has "evolved" and the innovation era isn't needed anymore.
Did you or, more likely, your phone mistype Adobe? I don’t think Apple ever had the rights to the source or even the source, did they?
So what would have taken a day or two back when Flash was available is now taking a week of hand-writing tweens and animations in raw Typescript, one layer at a time.
Since I happened to write the first canvas-based interactive screen graph code that Grant Skinner partially ripped off to create EaselJS, and since I'm sure he's making a fine living from Adobe licensing it, it's especially galling that I'm still paying for a CC license and this is what I get when I want to use a GUI to make some animations to drop into a game.
It's the first time I've done a 2D game since 2017, and I had over a decade of experience building games in Flash/AIR before that. It's just mind-blowing how stupid and regressed Adobe's tooling has become in the past few years, and how much harder it is to do simple things that we took for granted in the heyday of Flash authoring. There really is still no equivalent workflow or even anything close. I guess that post-Flash, there aren't enough people making this kind of web game content for there to be a solid route without using Unity or something.
Pixi is great for anything that is a texture, then it is really fast. Otherwise it is not a flash replacement.
I do not use it for vector animations, but spritesheets or a webm video overlay is what I would use in your case.
But .. it bothers me of course as well, having a full video of rastergraphic what could be just some vector and animation data.
I might try Spine, I've heard some positive things. They'll still end up as textures in pixi but maybe at least they can pack well.
IIRC, they couldn't open source Flash due to its use of a number of 3rd party C/C++ libraries that were proprietary.
Adobe's license with these 3rd parties permitted binary-only distribution so it would have meant renegotiating a fresh license (and paying out $$$) for an EOL codebase that had enormous technical debt, as you also acknowledge in your last sentence.
I never really worked with it, but it seems whenever it comes up here or on Reddit, people who did, miss it. I think the authoring side of Flash is remembered very positively.
For a while RIM/Blackberry was using Adobe Air - on the Playbook and also the built-in app suite in the lead up to the launch of BB10. The latter never saw the light of day though, a late decision was made to replace all of the built-in apps with Qt/Cascades equivalents (if I remember right this was due largely to memory requirements of the Air apps).