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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Man I hate Flash. But for all the shit it gets, I can't help but be grateful for it. Because of Flash, we've had easy to use video on the Internet for a decade. It's 2014, and browsers still can't do video as well as Flash.

Yes, it's time for Flash to die. But it really stepped in and moved the web forward when the browsers and W3C were too slow. It deserves an honorable discharge.

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I also hate flash, but my view is that in combination with IE, it kept the web back 10 years.

When I first started out as a dev, barely anyone knew HTML or CSS, because flash was all you needed. It's seems bizarre now but I took a lot of ridicule from people when I tried to insist on building things the standard compliant way back in 2004. I remember being told that things I had personally designed specifically to be built in HTML couldn't be done. The situation was bananas, flash had turned everyone into zombies. And while you wouldn't be fired for mentioning JavaScript, you would jump to the top of the naughty list. Advocating JavaScript back then was like advocating kiddie fiddling.

And so web standards were kept back. So browsers were held back. (Why should Microsoft make a better browser? Nobody uses HTML or CSS anyway?) and so the whole web was held back. I look at a lot of the stuff we do today, and I see no reason we couldn't have been doing it back in 2004 other than the fact that flash was easy. It's was the crack that turned the web into a digital ghetto with developers high on their own success, site owners tripping off the rich, colourful and "fully immersive experiences" (there's a phrase you don't hear anymore) of their own all singing, all dancing and utterly unusable websites. Meanwhile, users were left to scrounge around in all that dirt looking for scraps of anything barely edible.

If IE was Hitler, Flash would be Stalin. Sure Hitler was a bad guy and he shoulders all the blame, but he was rank a rank amateur compared to our friend and ally Joseph "evil personified" Stalin.

On top of all that, the flash player is a piece of junk. Always has been, always will be and I make no apologies for feeling smug when they started scrambling to get it working on mobile. "Oh no!" I would say, "have all those years of showing nothing but contempt for the people who have to run you're buggy, resource hungry piece of shit plugin left you up shit creek without a paddle?" Good riddance I say.

Oh, and and I don't agree that flash is better for video. I would argue that the current state of affairs, while tricker for a dev is much better for the end user. I'd also argue that back in the dark days, there was QuickTime, which was measurably and undisputedly better than flash both for developers and for end users.

It was a huge step up over the genuinely awful RealMedia. For a while, that was the de facto standard for audio and video on the web.

Lmao! Oh god yes Real Player!

Is the Real Player still going?

For me "easy to use video on the Internet" always was a direct link to a file that I can download just like any file, and play in my media player of choice just like any other video file. Flash never worked so well; it only ever caused grief for its crashes, slowness, security problems, nonportability, compatibility issues, etc. So far HTML5 hasn't worked much better.

I don't see how flash moved the web forward, it certainly didn't do so for me as a user. Maybe it did for the guys upstream who would rather have control over all my access to their data, instead of letting me just download it and do what I want with it.

For me the great thing was it allowed streaming video in a quality not matched by the terrible RealPlayer and the like. Downloading videos is easy now but back on slow ADSL to download a video was an overnight task but streaming was pretty much instant.

That makes no sense to be honest. If you have the bandwidth to stream a video for uninterrupted playback, you start downloading that file and begin playback while the download continues in the background. In fact there's no difference between streaming and downloading in this case, it's exactly the same thing. The use of the former term in a scenario like this always bothered me.

There's two kinds of video on the web.

If I'm going to watch a movie, would I prefer to use VLC? Sure.

But do I want to download 10 second YouTube clips? God no.

Given a direct link to a file, you're free to deal with it however you like. You don't actually have to wget it to your ~/Downloads/ if you don't like.

Regardless of what the user interface is going to look like on your end, you're still getting the same bytes and playing them the same way. There are two types of video: video you play back and video you play back. For both, you need to download (or "stream" if you're hip) these bytes.

It's some kind of synergistic relationship. I don't think Flash dev planned to use it as a standalone video interface. I believe video was added first as prerendered animation embedded in flash applications. Whoever decided it would be good to use it as a video player made flash ubiquitous.

update: I take it back, Jonathan Gay (futuresplash/flash creator) was the reason behind flash video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay#Flash_video:_Tin_... .. crazy

ps: in 2010 he stopped programming computer to program nature : breeding grass fed beefs http://www.coldhardflash.com/2010/05/flash-co-creator-jonath...

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