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Comment by DannyB2 | Hacker News Reader

Flash did not run on every possible platform that web browsers ran on. Flash was a 2nd class citizen on Linux.

Flash needed to move aside so that the web standards could advance to the point where Flash was no longer necessary.

Not only did Flash need to die, but all browser plug ins: Flash, Java Applets, ActiveX and Silverlight.

Now we have powerful browsers, web standards, and you can do amazing things in them, confident that it works on any client without 3rd party extensions.

Flash (and Applets, ActiveX) served a short term purpose. Silverlight was an attempt, too late, to capture Flash's success.

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> Now we have powerful browsers, web standards, and you can do amazing things in them

Flash had it's flaws, but it was a much more coherent interface for users and developers than what has become of the web. The mish-mash of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (with all of the different styles of API) is really unappealing to me. It's rare, but when I do make an application out of a web page, I gravitate towards making a large canvas in the middle of a static page. This is exactly like having a Flash applet except the programming experience is worse, and animation is more complicated.

Also note that Flash was usable standalone, and in addition to having much better development tools, giving someone a .swf file was much lighter weight than the Electron stuff. Moreover, Flash had an onramp for non-programmers which is pretty sorely lacking in the web world.

I'll agree that modern web standards can do everything that Flash did, but only in that "Turing Complete" kind of way where you can do everything with Brainfuck but you'd be happier in a different languge.

I hear what you are saying. Long ago when I considered whether to use Flash or web standards, I had to consider all this.

Back then, even though Flash was popular, I could foresee that it wasn't going to be around forever. Even before Steve Jobs announcement.

I understand all the sugar coated addictiveness for developers that you point out. It is indeed very sweet. But if you find yourself (or your end user) in an environment where Flash is not supported, or treated as a 2nd class citizen, then this can be a deal killer. Even a business killer. This is a major DANGER sign that many Flash developers ignore or were unaware of.

> confident that it works on any client

LOL, I think you mean: on Chrome (and if we're lucky, Firefox).

I develop in Firefox and it’s pretty rare that I have to spend time on other browsers, which was not the case a decade ago.

It’s also not like Flash was perfect at this: I ran into compatibility issues where something worked on Windows but not macOS or vice versa, and the frictional cost of having an unstable, primitive IDE was significant — especially since Adobe typically ignored bug reports until the next major release, at which point they’d tell you that you should drop $500 for the privilege of seeing whether they’d fixed it.

Firefox => Chrome works pretty well. The other direction? Not so much…

It really depends on what you are developing. If you are using cutting edge browser features. Things like WASM or new JS APIs, sure you'll likely run into incompatibilities. However, if you are building a pretty standard content website, not a single page app, from my experience, pretty much everything just works between browsers. This was definitely not the case 10 years ago. Especially when including IE in the mix.

> If you are using cutting edge browser features.

This comment section is about Flash. We're only talking about "cutting edge browser features." Otherwise, I agree.

These days, it really comes down to “Do you need to support IE?” — even for fairly new features, if they're standard you should still check https://caniuse.com/ first but it's likely that the answer will be “Yes” for everything except IE11 and, far less frequently, Mobile Safari.

I always love new whizbang browser features. But I avoid them until they are common enough in the end user base that I can actually expect to be able to use those new features.

Now modern browsers that are self updating is a huge help.

The only troublesome browser is basically Internet Explorer. And even Microsoft threw in the towel on that. Edge wasn't bad, but now even it is simply Chrome in Edge clothing. There are other WebKit based browsers (eg, Safari) which are not based on Chrome or rather Chromium.

In practice, I rarely have any trouble in recent years with browser compatibility.

> Flash was a 2nd class citizen on Linux.

Get the point you are making, but it was more that Linux was a 2nd class citizen for Adobe than flash was a 2nd class citizen on linux (though people would have still wanted a free/libre alternative even if Adobe fully supported linux)

Linux wasn't a 2nd class citizen to the people who used Linux. Thus some people see Flash as an anomaly that needs to be replaced by web standards that are so good that Flash becomes unnecessary. That way all platforms get rich client capabilities including ones that weren't even invented yet (Raspberry Pi, Fuchsia, others).

You can only see Flash as a good thing if you're using one of the platforms that are more equal than others. (And I include Java Applets, ActiveX, and Silverlight along with Flash.)

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