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>Adobe let Flash languish after the purchase of Macromedia.

They didn't just let it languish. They actively tried to enshittify the platform by charging a revshare to game developers for using cross-compiled code with Stage3D. This was intended to stop Unity developers from just compiling Unity games to Flash and not paying for Flash CS6, except what it actually did was just push everyone to Unity's own browser plugin (and later HTML5 export).

As for why they didn't FOSS it... well, they're still selling Adobe Animate. The player probably couldn't have been released as FOSS, because of all the various libraries in Flash Player that Macromedia and Adobe used[0]. Remember that proprietary software is more viral than the GPL.

But they actually DID release a lot of FOSS during the AS3 days: the AS3 runtime and base class libraries were all Free Software, because Adobe and Mozilla were collaborating on it[1]. The intent was that AS3 would actually become "JavaScript 2.0" or ECMAScript 4! But this was killed off as being "too complex" and ES4 is just a weird alternate-universe ECMAScript spec.

[0] AFAIK there's Sorenson Spark, some Samsung font rendering library, some DRM stuff, and a few other things

[1] Originally they wanted to license the JVM but Sun was high on their "compatibility means compatibility" horse and said no. That's why ES4/AS3 has a lot of "Java-esque" features like namespaces and interfaces, and gets rid of prototype inheritance. None of that wound up getting forward-ported into the ES5+ fork of the timeline.

WASM welds powerful potential of advancement. However is limited to only those to who actually know what WASM actually is.

My mother learned flash at night courses, shes in her seventies and still creates flash galleries of her artwork to take to exhibitions. She wouldn't have a clue on what or even WASM is; nor any stranger in the street for that matter.

Flash gave anyone the ability to do anything with its simplicity. Without it, the way of the web has become limited. A great shame, a corporation playground almost.

That's why it's such a tragic loss!

We're still not to a point where we have the same capabilities Flash packaged together, and even if we were, we don't have the easy authorship tools to match.

Flash let you deploy a single file. That's unthinkably easy. No hoops. No transpiler builds. Everything about it was so simple.

The switch from a web where everyone publishes to a web where Facebook and YouTube dominate also helped kill it. I'm convinced Flash was ahead of its time and because corporations couldn't bank off of it, we murdered it.

Flash was amazing and we threw it away.

The game stuff was truly neat. But flash was also used for tons of things like bank websites or other government stuff, employment stuff or even credit card payment system. Flash never worked well on anything but windows on x86 (32 bits). And it often burned CPU (and battery life) like nobody's business. Many ads in flash would just burn your CPU. It also had tons of security issues.

I remember being on Linux x86_64 and I couldn't load flash websited I had to use for some legal documents and feeling stuck.

So as much as the flash games aspect was neat. When flash died suddenly the web was more interoperable. Nowadays I never need to worry that I need Microsoft Windows on a specific hardware to navigate the web.

Different times though. In those days, Linux was seen as an hacker OS and the likes of Ubuntu were niche and nerdy. Those who use Linux today if lived in that time, I'd wager a large majority would of been running Windows. Windows x64 wasn't even a thing in mainstream.

Flash was in Adobe hands and when the Linux plugin arrived, Adobe could of pushed development. Patched the exploits, however it felt like days after the purchase they had started nailing the coffin shut.

It wasn't until Linux threatened the Windows OS later on that development for Linux really took off and corporations took Linux more seriously; long after Flash's coffin was nailed tightly shut. "Flash didn't work on Linux" was because Linux wasn't a usable desktop unlike to what it is now. When Flash was a thing, you still needed to configure X, lucky to have sound, and even then required configuring your screen, mouse and keyboard manually. I'm, not sure that NVIDIA linux drivers were even a thing then.

I would be starting to worry because with the recent antics with Microsoft and Windows 11, they don't want you to install any other OS. They want you to use WSL and that, I wouldn't trust with a toothpick. How long until you require a "WSL license"?

Firefox is tearing at the seams and soon we will see the web dominated with chrome only websites. Heck, it's already happening.

NVIDIA drivers were a thing, the manual config of X was hell.

I agree with your depressive prediction on WSL, Firefox and Google Chrome.

Some time back someone made a dart / canvas based framework that copied actionscript's semantics http://www.stagexl.org/index.html

I wonder if GPT would ever get large enough token size to auto convert most programs to another framework.

Flash was the OG 2D indie game engine before Unity happened.

Your assets went into library, movieclips were asset + code, themselves also part of library. You would script and combine those into higher level movieclips and those would be aware of each other by parent/children realationships. Those were prefabs before era of prefabs.

It was however also massively inefficient, to the point that this quality is one that I remember Flash the most for. I don’t miss random websites with flash ads and YouTube videos spiking CPU to 100% on my single core system, slowing everything down and spinning fans up.

Had Adobe fixed this (along with the numerous vulnerabilities) I don’t think users would’ve so eager to rid themselves of it.

That's the implementation, not the format (which is very well designed for low computing power.) You're right that Adobe made it worse, however; when it was still called Macromedia Flash, the hardware of the time was more than enough to produce smooth animations and interactive games with it.

Now we have Electron apps and other JS abominations doing much, much worse.

The AVM was not resource hungry. It was the bad SWFs that ran on it which were resource hungry.

Guess what? It is now bad Javascript code that is resource hungry.

> Flash also competed with YouTube for eyeballs.

Flash made YouTube possible. Before Flash, sites and users had to worry about installing different codecs and video players, like Windows Media, QuickTime, and RealPlayer. Flash, pre-installed nearly everywhere, allowed YouTube full control of a ubiquitous, seamless video experience.

> the work being done in Flash was leagues above the web games you see today.

Wait, what? I’m not into gaming but that would surprise the hell out of me if you’re being literal.

Can you give me concrete examples?

iirc its somewhere along the capabilities of flash compared to the limitations you get with html5, css, canvas, and early versions of webgl.

those strengths of flash came with responsibilities though, 0days being used for sprrading malware was common back then like an endless whack a mole.

You'd have to look through the archives of Newgrounds, but it was like itch.io with lots of content landing every day. That community created and popularised some things we take for granted now. For example Tower Defence games existed before to some degree, but I don't believe they would become a big genre without all the different flash variations. The low barrier to entry meant that you'd get hundreds of crappy knockoffs and 1 gem every week.

Just realised they published year summaries https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/about-newgrounds/history/fla... The stickman fight games and sniper games triggered some memories...

The history pages go back to 1999!

https://www.newgrounds.com/wiki/about-newgrounds/history/fla...

Ah, for specific examples castle crashers, samorost, battleblock theatre, super meat boy all came from the flash developers initially I believe.

I think the parent comment may have been slightly exaggerating with their comment regarding game quality, but I certainly agree with them on the overarching point they are making. Around 2005 to 2013 there was an extremely vibrant and creative ecosystem around browser web games facilitated by Flash. Had Flash not died, and instead been allowed to flourish I think there would now be a huge market for web games that would co-exist alongside mobile games and steam, and I’d probably be using Flash to deploy games to all platforms.

Some great games at the time were N, Meatboy, and Quadradius. The were so many memorable, creative, boundary pushing, and subversive games. It was just really exciting being a part of that ecosystem as both a developer and a player. Aside from a few .io games I can’t really think of many non-Flash web games that are very memorable.

Flash was such a fast and creative tool to work with that you could pump out quality games extremely fast, which turn facilitated better quality in the ecosystem as a whole.

Edit: I should also mention that the most popular web game in recent years, Friday Night Funken, was made with a Flash based workflow.

The authorship tool still exists, it’s called Adobe Animate now and can export projects to all sorts of targets, including web.

Can it do games?

I don't see why not, it's literally the same software just renamed.

Web users hated Flash for being present everywhere and used for serving obnoxious resource-hungry ads.