Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 159 posts

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

#141

Post by noduerme »

capableweb wrote: post #92
manscrober wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Worse still all of those libraries are deprecated now, so if I want to do it again, I'll need to start again from scratch and select a new animation library. This is why I stopped being interested in modern web anymore. Everything is deprecated at unbelievable pace, you can't keep track of it unless you work full time in the field. If it was all for great efficiency and performance, I'd get it, but it seems to just…

> Everything is deprecated at unbelievable pace, you can't keep track of it unless you work full time in the field. Is this really true? The same JavaScript I wrote 3 years ago still work, for multiple different applications. It's really uncommon that browsers break "user-space" JavaScript, I can't even remember the last heavily dependent API that got removed and cause havoc. What does change very often is the latest…

3 years is no time. I have userland code that still works 15 years on. The problem is only if I want to change from jQuery 1.x or some ancient CSS library... it would break completely. I can live with that. What I can't really live with is the 500,000 loc I wrote in Actionscript 3 being permanent unusable and unable to run anywhere, ever again. That kind of thing makes you never want to work on another project.

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

#142

Post by noduerme »

yawnxyz wrote: post #44

AS3 was very powerful in terms of prototyping games and sound design. A long time ago I worked on lots of "music games" that combined game mechanics (like top down space shooters or "flappy bird" style stuff) with synthesizer code that made music. I have no idea how to go about recreating my projects today in JS at all...

As an old AS3 hand, if I were going to do it now I'd go with HaXe and OpenFL, building the asset files with whatever the last existing version of Flash was. I've been meaning to try this route but I've been feeling too defeated for the last few years to work on anything creative in this vein again.

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

#143

Post by noduerme »

trilbyglens wrote: post #34

ActionScript was a terrible language. More complex flash projects were really a hacked together mishmash of things, none of it standard, none of it supported without plugins, and oh, have we all forgotten about the weekly zero-days that flash had? It might have been more "creative" but that was also due to the fact that it was around at the beginning of the web, when everything was more creative. People had not figur…

AS3 was a gorgeous, concise, incredibly fast, strongly typed ES4/5 language with GPU access and all kinds of native APIs at a time when nothing remotely close to that existed in the browser. I humbly suggest that you never worked with it and/or don't understand what it was capable of.

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

#144

Post by seydor »

Lots mainly because it was integrated. Video conference was supported right away with the free red5 streaming server, decades ago. Compare that with webrtc thats so hard to make it work right

Html does most of the stuff now in theory, but its so much more difficult to access that it's not fun

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

#145

Post by seydor »

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…

I consider that intentional

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

#146

Post by seydor »

fimdomeio wrote: post #88

I don't think the problem is the the web, the problem is screen sizes. Things where a lot simpler when all you had to think about was 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768. As soon as you got mobile and all kinds of resolutions it became a lot more technically complex which hinderes creativity.

Surely it would have adapted to become the defacto for touch apps, and it would be great for that. Apple's decision to kill it made that future impossible

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

#147

Post by seydor »

wodenokoto wrote: post #7

I'd say you can do anything with java-script and a canvas as flash could, but the number of people who could do it in flash was much higher than the number of people who can do it with "modern" tools.

Can't even have a hyperlink in canvas. Flash was much more 'web native' than canvas and webgl

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

#148

Post by seydor »

BoppreH wrote: post #79

As a refugee from the collapse of Flash myself, about once a year I'll check what's the state of similar tools and be disappointed. This year the situation is a little better. There's gdevelop, Rive, ct.js, Godot, Construct 3, and Wick Editor. None of them feel as friendly as Flash (except maybe Wick), or as efficient (I just played a small Rive game that made 500+ network requests to load assets). But they come with…

Money is in Mobile games. People need a carrot

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

#149

Post by warrenm »

noduerme wrote: post #140
warrenm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'"

well, it would be nice if Adobe hadn't unilaterally nuked the ability for anyone to even look at it and judge for themselves.

Adobe spent years telling people the end was coming - ending Android in 2011, deprecating in 2017, and only finally EoL'ing in 2020

If that wasn't enough time to move on, I don't know what to tell you :)

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

#150

Post by warrenm »

kome wrote: post #124
warrenm wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

>i have seen a better internet...

I've been online for just shy of 30 years

Can't say I've seen a "better" internet in terms of aesthetics ever

Post reply on HN