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Comment by hackthemack | Hacker News Reader

In the article (which is quite good to read), they wrote "The iPhone is often cited as the reason for why Flash started to decline, since it led to significant user demand to have Flash-free sites. However, I think Flash’s fate was truly sealed once Google made an HTML advertisement designer app."

I worked in the industry before flash, during flash, after flash, and in my little corner of the world, the iphone not supporting flash was the biggest factor in the decline of flash. Every executive and bigwig could not drop their blackberries fast enough, and grab the newest status symbol iphone. Once management all had iphones, then flash just would not do, and the directive came down to make the website "good" for iphones, which usually entailed adding excessive white space, large lettering, and big buttons.

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Yep, I worked in advertising at the time. I was constantly explaining to the creatives "no, we can't have a flash main menu because of SEO" "no, we shouldn't make the website as 25MB flash file" "see, here's the problem with flash..." and so on. Then Steve Jobs said so, and that type listened to Jobs, not techies. And Flash was pretty much dead after that point. (Often replaced by some jquery slideshow plugin, and everything was fine.)

As a Flash developer at the time, I was constantly telling people: “Yes, you can do SEO with Flash, and here’s how. No, you don’t bundle everything into one giant .swf. Your problem isn’t with Flash, it’s with bad code.”

Today, the web is creatively barren relative to the wild innovation of the time. Actual creatives have been cut out of the process, requiring the intervention of people like you and I. HTML5 was supposed to replace Flash, and a generation later, we still don’t have anything close to its expressive power. React takes twice the effort for a quarter of the experience.

I’m still bitter at Steve Jobs and his flying monkeys at Wired. Apple could have worked with Adobe to fix Flash. Adobe was willing. But let’s be honest: the App Store was shaping up to be a cash cow, and Flash was a direct, free competitor. Apple had no interest in letting it survive. So now we’re left with a dismal, sanitized web.

>HTML5 was supposed to replace Flash, and a generation later, we still don’t have anything close to its expressive power.

Are you referring to the tooling around HTML5 + Canvas elements or the technical possibilities?

These are quotes from Steve Jobs:

> "New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too)."

> "HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on a third party browser plug-in (like Flash)."

> "Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content."

> "If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?"

> "HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member."

I view these as cynical. HTML5 has yet to match the experience that Flash delivered, and I believe Jobs knew that it could not even at the time he said it.

Which area is unmatched?

The designer experience with Flash tooling, the end user experience sans plugins or the technical capabilities of HTML5 + Canvas?

Perhaps a synthesis of the two? A lack of friction between the designer's vision and production led to a more interesting, more engaging user experience overall, in my opinion. The web itself then was an art and design medium that it is not today.

You are obviously right, and only the mostest HTML5 stuff has been on the same level as the 'flash splash' stuff which was all over the place... But did anyone care? Or was this is just creative mutually-assured-destruction?

> App Store was shaping up to be a cash cow

Okay, how many apps have some super mind-blowing animations on their home screen? Maybe nobody really wanted that? (And, certainly Jobs did not want companies writing CRUD apps in Flash/AS3.)

I worked with a few different types of Flash guys. The top guys were artists, they delivered awesome stuff that nobody has seen since. (But, like the website, it was hardcoded to desktop dimensions.) They made a great living doing this stuff. Some of them jumped to HTML5, but that whole 'flash splash' thing largely went out-of-style.

There was also more of the run of the mill 'hero animation', jquery was good enough for that. I think they still use Adobe Animate for banner ads.

And then there was the junior guy who was good at flash and just wanted the entire web to be flash, and that was more of the debate because some assistant creative director thought it was slick.

(And lest I forget, there were also the ActionScript guys who spent all day in their IDE writing MVC code, and rarely using the Flash editor.)

I was the parenthetical latter. I see the same kind of dynamic with React Developers these days: the platform itself encourages poor coding practices and a detachment from the core technologies of HTML/CSS/JavaScript.

True.

But on HN, I commonly see the opposite "retro manchild" take that Flash was all just all web fun & games applets, totally unlike all this awful Node/React stuff. They have no idea how professional ActionScript programmers did things.

Yep ... I never used flash studio, we used to use FlashDevelop and then Haxe to develop games and other applications using ActionScript

There were a lot of things that made Flash good for creatives / non programmers.

I think the "one big file" is a part people neglect to mention, it means you can just copy that to ftp and the site is deployed.

Modern Web tech takes a lot of experience before you can even deploy a site.

Seconded. I worked in film marketing at the time and a portion of my week was always creating flash ads (the better kind driven by action script) I was there at the shift to JavaScript ads. Google’s tool was, in my opinion, a reaction to flash being abandoned. From memory… it was around 2012-14 when I became aware of it and it tended to generate really bloated ads and was very inefficient for what I needed to do at the time. I switched over to just building ads using plain JavaScript and in time using Greensock (GSAP) which also moved from action script to JavaScript.

I moved away from that industry, and while there are now tools to do interactive ads I’m not sure the talent is there to do it well. The move to JavaScript though was great, I built closer working relationships with the media buyers and ad platform reps who also wanted to do more interactive ads and wanted to be reactive and supportive rather than dismissive.

In the ad space, definitely, the iPhone killed Flash.

But the games space hung onto Flash far longer. Right up until Adobe thought it'd be a good idea to start charging revshare for certain Flash features... that were used by Unity's Flash cross-compiler... which just scared everyone over to Unity.

Both of these were downstream of Adobe not wanting to invest money in Flash Player. Apple had begged them to make Flash work but Adobe didn't wanna put money into something people could use for free. So they'd send over a build of Flash that didn't work with iOS's input handling[0], or they'd send over source code Apple couldn't figure out how to build, or whatever. If Adobe hadn't penny-pinched on Flash Player they probably could have gotten a few more years out of the platform, and also stuck around as an animation development platform for JS[1].

[0] More specifically, Flash Player didn't support the rollover menu detection Safari had for desktop sites. If you touch an element on a website, it sends both hover and click events, but the click events only happen if the hover event didn't reveal any new content.

[1] Yes, I know modern Adobe Animate can export to JS. It sucks. It doesn't support the Flash drawing model at all, so all your artwork gets rendered out at 1x onto a sprite-sheet. This was also a problem with the GPU rendering frameworks available for Flash, except HTML5 / JS apps also had access to efficient vector rendering.

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