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Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

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Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#121

Post by dspillett »

agent008t wrote: post #108
dspillett wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All of that is just gone. There was so much animation and interaction and fun that has been replaced with boring, text, images, and videos. This might be partially a fashion thing: people want the flashy interactions less. I for one appreciate some boring text with minimal animation! Also away from games where animated interaction is part of the point, designing a good animation that works better than text+images i…

Switch to mobile played a larger role I think. People used to browse on PCs with mouse pointers and keyboards, now they do on phones with touchscreens.

That would be one of the reasons that “people want the flashy interactions less” – though for good interactive animations, assuming screen-size is not a massive issue, touch could be a more natural interface than a mouse or similar.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#122

Post by ac29 »

mike_hearn wrote: post #103
hackshack wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About once a month, I dwell on this. Modern web pages can easily be 20MB. You can do a lot in 20 megs. Re-reading Apple’s “Thoughts on Flash” tonight, I was surprised at how many times Apple mentioned vendor lock-in. JavaScript is definitely here to stay. Ten years later, though, I wonder if we have ended up in nearly the same place we strived to avoid - high power consumption - but with worse authoring tools. But wi…

Worth noting that the SWF format was towards the end of its lifecycle and open standard as well. Fully documented with open source players and tooling available.

As someone who has used Linux on the Desktop for 20+ years, I can say with pretty high confidence that open source flash players could not run more than a trivial amount of real world flash content at the end of its life cycle ~10 years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#123

Post by _jezell_ »

singularity2001 wrote: post #45
fxtentacle wrote: post #36

Nowadays with WASM and WebGL you can do basically everything in a web browser, but you'll take a 100x performance hit. Every game using Unity/Unreal + WASM needs to download 10-20 MB of JavaScript before it even starts loading the actual assets. With Flash, that could have been a 10 KB SWF instead. Similarly, Flash had really fluid animations that were drawn purely on the CPU. Why my 266 MHz P2 could have better vect…

A Unity wasm empty scene is ≈1MB: https://blog-api.unity.com/sites/default/files/styles/focal_... couldn't find a live demo to confirm, which strongly speaks against Unity being anywhere as flashy.

Unity is not a good example, it's bloated as hell and takes like 15s minimum to load a square. It wasn't built for WASM and uses a toolchain that makes WASM hard.

Bevy loads pretty instantly in comparison. That's where I'd invest my time if I was doing web games.

https://bevyengine.org/examples/

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#124

Post by kome »

warrenm wrote: post #104
kome wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bartosz Ciechanowski is indeed awesome; and indeed the web got worse. Boring. A template repeated million of times by people that know libraries, but no html+css.

I'd say "boring" is not - usually - "worse" Most of the time, it's far better: boring works. Boring pays the bills. Boring gets more people to use something. Boring is ubiquitous. Everything "new" eventually becomes "boring" - and that's good

fair, but it's still boring. i have seen a better internet...

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#126

Post by philwelch »

dspillett wrote: post #90
irrational wrote: post #25

Maybe there is a vector animation tool that is as easy to use as Flash was, but that fact that we rarely see vector animations like we did back in the day makes me think not. I used to work with a group that created training materials using Flash. We had a bunch of animators that knew nothing about coding, but they could produce all of these amazing animated videos using Flash. They could also produce interactive ani…

> All of that is just gone. There was so much animation and interaction and fun that has been replaced with boring, text, images, and videos. This might be partially a fashion thing: people want the flashy interactions less. I for one appreciate some boring text with minimal animation! Also away from games where animated interaction is part of the point, designing a good animation that works better than text+images i…

For websites qua websites, sure. But Flash enabled a lot of animation qua animation on the web, natively. And unlike the videos you see on Instagram/YT/TikTok today, Flash cartoons didn’t require high-capital monopolistic intermediaries to host online.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#127

Post by esparrohack »

warrenm wrote: post #116
stuaxo wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a whole segment of the web that is now gone, things have become boring and uniform, and while that's fine for all sorts of sites, it's sad that we have just thrown all that out.

I wouldn't say it's so much "we have just thrown all that out" as it is "we found out the overwhelming majority of it wasn't wanted or even 'good'"

Homestar runner.

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#128

Post by esparrohack »

jjk166 wrote: post #118
danuker wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more to do with evolving tastes over time. Among the top HN posts of all time is an interactive watch visualization: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31261533 This is evidence that people still enjoy interactive experiences, but they are just harder to create.

That's only evidence that interactive experiences can be enjoyed under the right circumstances. In that particular instance, such interactivity is both useful and fresh. But there's no evidence that people want to make more content like that but can't, nor that all such content would be appreciated.

How do you know there’s no evidence? You gotta prove that too

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#129

Post by resoluteteeth »

irrational wrote: post #25

Maybe there is a vector animation tool that is as easy to use as Flash was, but that fact that we rarely see vector animations like we did back in the day makes me think not. I used to work with a group that created training materials using Flash. We had a bunch of animators that knew nothing about coding, but they could produce all of these amazing animated videos using Flash. They could also produce interactive ani…

> Maybe there is a vector animation tool that is as easy to use as Flash was, but that fact that we rarely see vector animations like we did back in the day makes me think not.

Doesn't the animation tool still exist just not under the name "flash"?

My understanding is that the free browser plugin to view the animations that got killed, but the the actual animation software that was used to produce them got bought by adobe and is still widely used to produce animations, it just doesn't have the option to produce swf files anymore (and even during the flash plugin era it was also being used to produce animations for tv, etc.).

Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?

#130

Post by esparrohack »

warrenm wrote: post #104
kome wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bartosz Ciechanowski is indeed awesome; and indeed the web got worse. Boring. A template repeated million of times by people that know libraries, but no html+css.

I'd say "boring" is not - usually - "worse" Most of the time, it's far better: boring works. Boring pays the bills. Boring gets more people to use something. Boring is ubiquitous. Everything "new" eventually becomes "boring" - and that's good

Yeah, that’s a HN fortune cookie.

You’re saying boring is popular which goes against the principles of aesthetics. People think pretty things are better quality. You do too.

Boring gets forgotten and replaced. Boring is not ubiquitous.

Notice how zed Shaw tried that quixotic ugly website trend. Supposedly that’s what the world wanted. The world ignored it.

I know what you mean tho. Boring refers to old tech vs new hype. The issue is they used the word “boring” to denote “mature” software, and that’s where it all went wrong.

Bad form.

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