Comment by dimmke | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dimmke | Hacker News Reader

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It might have been fun/easy to use for some people and encouraged game development that would have otherwise been too complex/too high of a learning curve. But browser games is a niche thing and really only a part of Flash's legacy.

Flash also got used for a lot of other things and in a lot of cases it was basically to add in functionality that wasn't supported by native web standards yet. This was why entire websites were built in flash. Because it gave you the freedom to do things that you just couldn't do with regular HTML/JS.

If the point the author wants to make is that creating games in HTML/JS is more cumbersome because there isn't one authoring tool that is used by everybody and has a comprehensive toolset, maybe that's true I don't know. But I definitely prefer this reality to a reality where Flash is still being used in 2020.

When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now.

And because HTML/JS are open and not proprietary, the people whining about it are free to take a shot at creating their own authoring software for games without having to worry about getting anybody's permission or getting sued by a company that owns the rights to JavaScript.

I will say, I think the niche of browser games played by kids is now taken up by phone games from a consumer perspective. I'm not sure even if an easy way to create them existed that they'd be nearly as popular.

> When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now

Where we are now is that the lock in is so wide that basically everyone is running Chrome, including its competitors.

It's a very different type of lock in. Chrome is based on the open source Chromium anyone can adapt ( sand said competitors, like Microsoft, do), and the vast majority of what it does is based on open standards. If tomorrow Google does something stupid with Chrome, like cutting off adblockers, you can bet your ass there are going to be at least 2 forks within a week. When Adobe did something stupid with Flash, you had and have zero options.

Nobody else can maintain a browser anymore, which is why almost everyone else dropped their own engine.

When google announced the "Manifest v3" thing, which does impact ad blockers, people cried, but nothing happened.

Yes, the standards are theoretically open, but concretely nobody else can keep up, Google-the-server launches X and Google-the-client implements it, and than they propose standardizing it but move on anyway, and everybody else plays catchup.

It's not worse than closed source Flash, but it's huge lock in anyway.

I will say, I think the niche of browser games played by kids is now taken up by phone games from a consumer perspective. I'm not sure even if an easy way to create them existed that they'd be nearly as popular.

That is for me the right way to frame it. Both flash and the web lost out to mobile. Neither managed to get a sufficient foothold there, and in practice people’s primary computing experience is now through fully proprietary apps distributed through vendor-controlled walled garden app stores.

The technical qualities of the underlying platforms didn’t matter all that much. Mobile platform vendors have control, and they made sure native apps made with their tools distributed through their store was the easier path. Apple could have improved safari’s progressive web apps ability to the point that it became a feasible alternative to making native iOS apps, but they didn’t, so people simply stopped trying to shoehorn web apps onto mobile platforms.

Apple didn’t kill flash to replace it with html5, they killed it to replace it with their own proprietary tech. I’m not sure they intended it that way, but they definitely intend to keep it that way (witness for example how web notifications are in safari on desktop but not mobile).

I said much the same in another comment -- my kids (5 & 8) play a bunch of browser games, but eventually they'll have their own phones and steam accounts (and credit cards) and stop playing free stuff in the browser.

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