Gone in a Flash: The Race to Save the Internet's Least Favorite Tool

It was simply mind-blowing at the time to see a page with rich graphics that would load so quickly.

There's still stuff you can't fully do with JS on all browsers with market shares large enough to cater to. The problem with Flash IMO was more how people used it than the technology itself; if we wanted to make sites with large photo backgrounds that blur and have some slight movement of elements, that was pretty easy to do with Flash 10 years before it became easy to do with JS. The vector stuff was huge at the time.

Lastly, re: CPU usage (mentioned in article), Flash could be a hog, but plenty of sites still eat 100% of 1 core just to re-sort a list of things on screen on a maxed-out rMBP because of their poorly-implemented logic in whatever the new JS framework is this week. Flash at least wasn't usually that bad, and graphics smoothness was way higher with Flash than stuff I've seen using JS animations.

I don't think this is an indictment on browsers and how they "sucked" back then. Browsers did their jobs just fine as tools for viewing static hyperlinked documents over the network, but it was the huge level of adopters who wanted to build full application stacks on top of the web that necessitated browsers host a concurrent application platform beside the host OS, by any kludgy means necessary.

In some ways, we have a Pyrrhic victory of sorts.

Flash was essentially dead when Adobe introduced the Flash Builder / Flash Designer mess.

Also, games. I still have a directory full of various Flash games I've saved over the years. They packed a lot of content in a tiny file, due to their vector-based nature. SVG looks absolutely obese compared to the compact vector format used by SWF.

Since my family doesn't pay money into these games, their style involves playing broad coverage of games: They play each for a little bit until the life meter runs out, and often try new games. Again, 100% have been flash.

There are also tools & frameworks like Starling for converting either AS3 code, Flash assets, or full SWF files to other non-Flash platforms. For instance, I wrote the sorting algorithm in as3isolib, and noticed that Ubisoft ported one of their games using it to iOS, using Starling.

Flash is certainly alive and well.

I run a flash blocker and I don't remember the last time I had to enable a pee I run a flash blocker and I don't remember the last time I had to enable Flash on a page. Facebook games (if I were to use that kind of thing) would be the one exception I can think of.

I'm not against AIR. On the contrary, I had high hopes that it would become the STANDARD for cross-platform desktop deployment. In a mobile-first world, desktop apps are lowest priority and last to be deployed to an ever shrinking base (ex. compare iOS quality to OSX).

A single code base such as AIR could be critical for smaller apps for OSX / Windows / Chrome.

Adobe's best course forward would probably be to rename Adobe Flash to something like Adobe Vectorshop, discontinue support for .swf and replace it with SVG animations. Adobe already owns Snap.svg (https://github.com/adobe-webplatform/Snap.svg) so there's definitely a lot of potential there.

There is nothing left from Macromedia anyway,Flash is almost dead, Fireworks an excellent image editor for web projects is dead, Dreamweaver is a zombie. They eliminated all competition, but at the end of the day Adobe didn't won the web authoring tool market. They destroyed that sense of community Macromedia helped create. There is nothing like the Flash community anymore.

They were basically four uses of Flash on the Internet. Some people used it to make entire websites, which generally ended up looking nicer but been much harder to use (I am STILL looking at you HBO). I was didn't work on the iPhone at all.

Next up you had games, which also didn't work on the iPhone. Games basically all assumed a mouse and keyboard so the chances of them actually working well if you try to play them on an iPhone would've been terrible anyway.

  A highly despised use with advertising. Thanks to the incredible power of flash not only could pop ups be made, but you could have dancing around little distracting graphics with lots of sound and even video sucking up all your bandwidth. 

But the most important thing you have to remember is that flash absolutely sucked down resources. On a (at the time) recent laptop you could easily tell when a website loaded flash. Not only did things respond better with flash off but battery life could be significantly affected. You could get extra hours on your computer. And if you think flash on windows was bad, you should've tried living in the Macintosh ecosystem. Adobe clearly didn't care so flash performance was drastically worse.

If it was bad on a laptop, you know how much worse it would've been on the original iPhone. The original (and even the 3G) were very constrained devices. Even if flash could've been put on them, I doubt it would've been performant at all for real content.

I think Apple was completely correct. I had already started using a flash blocker by that point just so my laptop wouldn't get too hot and drain the battery too fast. There were better ways to do video, answer now less of noxious since they can't play sound, and games run better than ever since they are apps.

Incredible popularity of the iPhone and the iPad was the thing that finally put flash out of its misery you. It should've died long before that for being so on optimized but no one else had enough power to do it. Apples move did more than anything else to get us into the modern HTML5 Web 2.0 world. I imagine there'd still be tons of flash only sites if it wasn't for the iPhone.