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Comment by jterrys | Hacker News Reader

It's really a shame that Adobe's absolute garbage treatment of Flash ended up causing, in my opinion, roughly a decade and a half or so of young childrens' and teens' disinterest in making video games. That niche was somewhat filled partly by Roblox and Minecraft, and today it's getting easier and easier to spin something up in Unity, but there's never been anything quite comparable to the level of simplicity of just making some bullshit in Fireworks and fiddling around with Flash for a few hours while recording audio on a shitty microphone and splicing up old pictures to make a dumb joke. Ah nostalgia

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End of the day the people at the top of Adobe only really saw Flash as owning the web video delivery mechanism.

Also it was pretty disgusting how little effort they put into optimization until it threatened them being on iOS. I was knee deep in working with Flash and suddenly one day all the code was running as fast on Mac as it did on Windows. After years of it usually being 30% slower.

On one hand, I kinda stand by being against flash, but on the other hand, we aren't really at a better place today than when Flash was all over the place.

I just wish someone had made a good Flash/ActionScript3 -> JS+HTML-Canvas compiler. There's no reason we couldn't have kept the authoring tools just because we got rid of runtime and all its security issues.

We now have Ruffle which does more or less what Adobe should have done 10 years ago.

https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

If Adobe had seen their ban from the iPhone as a challenge to make Flash player capable of running without a plug-in they would dominate so many areas today. Flex would have become a viable platform to develop web apps/PWAs with - effectively sitting in the same position as what Flutter is doing today (Although I don’t believe Flutter is a one size fits all universal toolkit). I suppose they tried with PhoneGap but without Flash/Flex, which was their super power, they just didn’t have enough value proposition.

I suspect they saw the desktop install base of Flash Player as too important to risk loosing by marking it redundant - innovator's dilemma.

For some reason they just excepted defeat with Flash.

What about authoring tools? Part of what made flash popular was the photoshop effect.

Ruffle is pretty bad what what I've seen so far. It's not there yet.

Mozilla actually had a really impressive one about 5 years ago... but it was shutdown by Adobe lawyers.

The runtime has too much baggage, and Adobe is it’s own worst enemy to keep AnimateCc alive. Instead I would prefer someone rebuild a subset of the authoring tool that sufficiently captures the essence of Flash, with multi-platform targets (including WebGL). I say rebuild Macromedia Flash 5, but with a JavaScript coding environment, and you would have a successful product.

>multi-platform targets

I think WebAssembly is the most natural fit here.

WebAssembly is not a platform.

Yeah thanks.

Perhaps I’m remembering things incorrectly, but wasn’t Flash the source of a large number of drive-by malware installs, which are much rarer today with modern browsers?

The runtime was definitely a consistent security problem. But the games, animations, etc. people made with Flash did really enrich the internet, I’d say. And Adobe Flash was a powerful tool with a relatively easy entry point for beginners and non-programmers.

Nowadays they will install a WebAssembly module or use your GPU instead.

WebAssembly’s sandbox is quite a bit stronger than Flash’s was though.

No need to escape the sandbox to abuse the users computer, or reach out to possible secrets, if they happen to go through exported functions.

For sure. But one of the bigger issues with flash was it’s runtime being a constant source of RCEs

Now you get to enjoy them as JIT CVEs.

Though from my understanding, there is far less of them, they're harder to do, and easier to solve.

And even if it's the same amount, having a sandbox that's harder to escape, holding everything else equal, seems like a win for end-users.

Flash's demise, while it caused me no end of grief back in the day as it was the bulk of my income, was a good thing in the end.

Flash did not went away, thanks to the wonders of WebAssembly.

https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/

May I ask how have you been monetizing Flash up to that point?

I remember reading examples from an e-book on how to build 3D scenes with Flex 3 when I was 17-18 years old. It was a short lived dream of mine to create online video games. Instead, I ended-up making add-ons for PHP-based forums.

During that era Unity had its own web browser plugin and there was at least one Tennis-like game on the miniclip site itself.

I owned and ran a web design agency, but because of my skills in Flash a lot of our "value add" was doing impressive experiences/interactive showcases for our various clients. A lot of it was doing kiosk deployment work, which I think is still done today with Flash sometimes.

Crypto miners don't need to escape a sandbox

Easy solution, don't leave random webgames running when you're done with them, and if it doesn't noticeably impact performance...?

You don't need a game for that, any website will do, specially with background workers.

Exactly!

Who's checking for this stuff on every blog page open, actually? I wish I was, but, usually am not.

Modern browsers will flag and slow down tabs that abuse the cpu. You could probably still mine but it’s a slow drip.

What is the reason why Java and Flash runtimes were somehow more prone to malware but JS seems fine? Is it some specific sandboxing technology or something else entirely?

All three runtimes are/were regularly compromised, so there’s no fundamental difference between them.

Flash suffered from not having a spec other than its implementation. Made it hard to fix bugs while being backwards compatible

We definitely are. Flash websites were super common at all levels; Now you rarely get the over-the-top website with zero accessibility, they’re more expensive.

I’m not counting ad tech and the various user-hostile websites because they’d have happened in Flash too (rather, Flash ads were already a thing too)

I think the over-the-top interactive sites died off partially because of that but also because it really is a terrible experience in mobile. And mobile web became so important.

I don't blame Adobe. They tried, but it was the avalanche of negativity (some of it warranted) from all corners of tech that sealed the fate of Flash.

What was and is surprising is that when Flash went away it killed Web-based gaming. Capability wise HTML/JS/CSS can replicate anything that Flash could do.. and yet, the scene is still dead.

Doesn't surprise me at all. The platform upon which the entire web game community was based just disappeared, and "Oh don't worry, here's a radically different stack with much worse tooling that you can learn to use to continue your low-paying passion-driven job as a web game dev" is a pretty bad pitch. So the artists just left.

Because learning Flash was easier than learning HTML5. The tools and scripting were incredibly easy. No one has made a good easy-to-use HTML5 editor. As complex as Unity can get, it's a better option than learning HTML5 these days. I hope one day a powerful low-friction successor to Flash will appear.

I would say that Flash was artist-oriented, while HTML5 is programmer-oriented.

It's really easy to write simple games with the canvas element. I recognize it lacks a lot of the WYSIWYG tooling flash had but you don't need frameworks.

I was a kid who tried to teach myself to make flash games and I couldnt figure it out. I had lessons in Fireworks at school and could make gifs, but Flash I could not understand. I couldnt find good tutorials online either.

It's way easier for a kid to make a game in Godot today than it ever was in Flash.

Also, Godot games run great in the browser. I dont think your general thesis holds up. Way more games are made by young people today than at any point in history.

>Flash I could not understand. I couldnt find good tutorials online either.

You were probably trying to learn in the late AS2 or AS3 era. The tutorials all became too high level and driven by Flash dev ideas of grown up processes that sure are what you want for building professional work but all raised the roof and the floor at the same time cutting off what was the entry point for teenagers to start creating in Flash.

Earlier days there were great resources for getting started.

I'd also put Roblox in there as well. It absorbed many (IMO) of the minigame creation efforts from Minecraft, FPS mods, and RTS games. Nowadays, probably bigger than all 3 combined (I know one is a game, one is a classification of communities, and the latter is an entire genre), though I only have my own guesses and no hard data to go off of.

> It's really a shame that Adobe's absolute garbage treatment of Flash

People praised Steve Jobs' decision that the iPhone shall have no support for Flash, and evangelized that Flash shall be dead - the future shall be HTML5.

Everybody who said something else was treated as an Adobe shill.

All points that Jobs made against Flash were correct, as Adobe had really dropped the ball on Flash.

After that it was too late, and Adobe killed flash only two years after Jobs' letter.

Wasn't Fireworks paid? How would a random teen create a game in it?

The secret ingredient is crime.

More specifically, street bazaars or a friend from a friend on the school playground.

Progz, crackz, and warez.

Not GP but we were taught to use it in ICT lessons. Could've used it in any lesson/break/after school where computers were available if I'd been so inclined.

> How would a random teen create a game in it?

Create an Adobe (or, back then, Macromedia - memory is a bit hazy there) account, download the trial of whatever you wanted, download a keygen off of eDonkey or Pirate Bay, run the keygen in some VM so it would not dump some virus on your actual machine, blacklist a boatload of Adobe/Macromedia domains, done.

Mute your computer because the otherwise non-malicious keygen is going to blast some chiptune at max volume for no reason.

Nah, it's got a reason. Celebrate the names of the people who brought you this toy, have a little tiny rave with them for a moment. Say "hey thanks, The Ma$ked Fucker, I'm gonna have some fun with this tool."

I don't see what's wrong with that. Most keygen groups back in the day put some serious effort in their music and artwork.

I seem to recall just installing the trials and then setting my computer’s clock back every couple weeks.

Many school computers also had Macromedia installed, which is how I got into animation and my first forays into web development.

>run the keygen in some VM

lol.

You just downloaded a cracked version from whatever torrent site showed up on google or yahoo search and it 'just worked'. No account creation. No VMs. No Blacklisting. :)

I used some of my savings from my part time job to buy the student version of flash, then earned the money back getting paid to make websites for people.

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