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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

We should have frozen the web from 2006 - 2010 or so.

We had Ajax, lots of modern CSS, but weren't hell-bent on CSSifying and "SPA"-ing everything. Web standards hadn't yet jumped the shark.

It's also before Steve Jobs murdered Flash.

Killing Flash was one of the biggest mistakes we've made. The modern HTML/CSS/JS stack can't replicate how simple and functional it was. We're easily dealing with 100x the complexity now.

We let Google trick us into going down this path. And now they're going to kill the web to keep us on their LLMs and platforms.

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> Killing Flash was one of the biggest mistakes we've made.

Flash was a proprietary extension to the Web. That important parts of the Web were implemented with it was a travesty and reason enough for it to be killed as it threatened and subverted the open nature of the Web. The useful functionality it provided has been incorporated into Web standards and current implementations are no more complex or less efficient than Flash was. The rest is fluff which can readily dispensed with, there is no need to re-implement it, although lately I have been wondering if it is possible to replicate its functionality with a combination of SMIL and SVG.

Flash was a bigger privacy hole than HTML5 canvas. I think we need to mandate browsers that block those APIs on default and only enable them via permission. <canvas> is often used in fingerprinting. So blocking its introspection APIs would already benefit us.

That sounds like a big deal until you realize that nothing was private back then.

Most internet traffic wasn't even over SSL. It wasn't enforced until 2018!

No CORS (first standardized in 2014), no cross-site protection (first standardized in 2012).

Everything was the Wild West.

Flash was fine and could have adopted the same mechanisms.

If Adobe (or the earlier owners) had open sourced the player and the format standard, they could have won and had the best authoring tool for the format.

To this day, Flash is the only downloadable binary bundle format that can still run on your PC after being downloaded. You can't download and SVG animation. It's a bundle of brittle web tech slop.

> No CORS (first standardized in 2014), no cross-site protection (first standardized in 2012).

This is not correct. CORS doesn’t protect anything, it removes security barriers. The same-origin policy that stops cross-site requests goes back to the 90s, it’s been in there about as long as JavaScript.

Flash was basically a remote shell with some animation tools on top. The Windows malware hell of the early 2000s, with random websites (even a banner ad on the New York Times once) doing drive-by-installs of early ransomware. (Thankfully, cryptolocker ones hadn't started yet...) And if you were a Windows escapee, the Flash experience was absolute trash on OS X and Linux.

It also became clear that the source code was borderline unmaintainable and/or Adobe lost everyone who knew or cared about it after they bought Macromedia.

Adobe killed Flash by letting it die. It had plenty of issues, none of them unfixable. Adobe didn't fix these issues (security, accessibility,...) all while keeping everything proprietary. It was unsustainable and unfortunately, Flash had to go.

I agree. Personally I think we'd be better off without social media sites or smart phones

Punch cards. We need to go back to punch cards.

Why would we want to do that? The data density is quite low.

Oh man, the good old times when you could get a job just knowing a bit of HTML, CSS and JS. I so wish I could go back.

Now I am micromanaging a LLM that gets to do the fun parts. I have become the middle management I always hated.

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