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Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

Flash is fantastic and I wish it got the respect it deserves from tech circles. It got an entire generation into animation and software engineering, and had really robust and approachable tooling which is yet to be replicated. I think back to the gaming experiences made in Flash and Shockwave as far back as the mid 90s, and nothing today even comes close. Back then, you could load up a webpage on a Pentium II and play a really robust game made by a teenager in their spare time, and that game will be stable and display extremely good performance. Compare that with the complexity and barriers that come with mobile game development today, or the jank and poor performance of JS based games.

TL;DR: It's been decades and there's still no suitable replacement for Flash, and the web is poorer for it.

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Flash was conceptually fantastic, and today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL. Unfortunately we don't have the authoring tool to do so. Flash IDE became Adobe Animate, but it has relatively restricted output and capabilities, compared to Flash before.

Unfortunately also Flash was full of bugs, FULL. I mean the player, the IDE, everything. And Macromedia and consequently Adobe were increasingly desperate in monetizing the player by attaching downloads to it, like Adobe Reader or anti-virus software. Or adding nonsense features like half-baked 3D gaming to it.

I don't deny that it had lots of issues. In addition to what you mentioned, it was an accessibility nightmare, and had tons of security problems. All that said, it's difficult to argue with results.

slowly lowers flamethrower indeed, you're right, HTML and WebGL with JavaScript or webasm can do anything flash can..

They can't do it in the cycle-count that flash could (I remember seeing 3D vector demos running in 640x480 pixels on my 133 mhz pentium), but they will do it, and probably look almost identical across two different versions of the same brand of browser..

But the real point is the authoring tools, and there simply aren't any.. We're stuck in the early 80s with a f*cking text-editor for GUI work..

Geez, there were authoring tools for making nice GUI applications in the Windows 3.11 era.. But modern web development has yet to reach that level of maturity.

This is admittedly a few years ago, and the scene has evolved _a bit_ since then, but I remember seeing really simple JS games (think tetris, or a very simple sidescroller) being heartily applauded on sites like reddit and HN. We're unironically cheering approaching parity with a toolset from almost 20 years ago! Things could be so much better.

> Tetris or a very simple side scroller

Back when it was still Dynamic HTML and I was in middle school, I copied the page source to put those into my homepage. I even figured out how to edit levels in the Mario clone.

> today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL.

There's one big piece missing: we don't have an animation/gaming interface that's as easy and intuitive as Flash.

Flash didn't become ubiquitous because it was powerful, but because it was easy for any 13 year old to pick up and do something nice in a couple of days without reading any documentation or doing any course. Good luck getting anything to work in WebGL without any web programming experience.

Developers love saying "But you can do everything that was in Flash directly in Javascript today!!"

I wish they could understand that what they're saying would be equivalent to switching out Excel for a Python IDE and saying "but you can do calculations here too!"

The Flash editor is still around, it's just called Adobe Animate now. It can export to web for you.

Adobe never cared about Flash beyond it being the webs video player.

Honestly the whole thing just began to rot from a tool perspective since their purchase.

Their management is too PDF-brained to think of investing in quality work in their tools as insane as it sounds they seem to consider their creative tools an afterthought and B2B PDF solutions their main business. I can’t find any other way to explain their actions.

> and today we can do everything Flash did, and more, with HTML, and WebGL

This is a myth, theoretical true, but practically impossible. Flash was so much more than a browser plugin. With HTML5 it is so much harder to maintain a framerate, while in Flash you almost didn't need to care about that.

Flash did skip frames when it couldn't keep up, and this is what any animation framework would do as well for HTML5, or video in video players and so on.

We don't have a well established (in people's minds that is) framework and IDE for it that did all Flash did. But actually I do believe we have everything in place in terms of APIs and capabilities, and in fact even more, because... have you seen some of the WebGL animations? PixiJS? The others?

I doubt. WebGL + the rest of the web stack is way more powerful than Flash EVER was.

Mindshare matters. Without an established IDE and people knowing about it... it's not happening. Another issue is that Flash-like content was notoriously mobile-unfriendly. So we do less of those types of UIs now. Not that we can't... but it's harder.

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