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

Compressed frame-by-frame animation.

I've been thinking about this sometimes, I don't understand why there hasn't been any editor suite to generate HTML5 + JS animations like Macromedia Flash did. On the foundation it's basically the same concepts: a canvas that can draw vectors and a scripting language based on ECMAScript. The editor then has a timeline control and can render the appropriate assets for animating it: vectors and scripts that animate those vectors based on the timeline information.

Is there some technical limitation I haven't figured out? Or is it simply a matter that no one has done it yet?

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 animations. One job we did was creating 3d renderings of printers. The printers could be torn down in the flash app to the smallest screw. A technician could choose what they wanted to do to the printer, and the flash movie would show them step by step in full animation what to do. At any time they could rotate the printer in all an axes to view different angles. It was amazing. And it was animators who knew nothing about code that built it all. The things they could do you just don’t see anymore.

I remember another project we worked on that had these mini games you could play in place of being multiple choice quizzes.

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.

The best part was, it was all vectors, so the file sizes for even long animated movies was incredibly small. Back in those days we had very low bandwidth, but flash worked great. We had retailers in Asia that consumed our content no problem. Now our content is mostly text, images and videos. Those same retailers have higher bandwidth, but really struggle because the files sizes are enormous compared to flash.

But it supported progressive loading. You could load only the first level and then load the next on-demand

A lot of answers already boil down to, basically, superior developer experience. But there's an aspect of this that I want to highlight: resource efficiency.

Around the latter half of the 00s, I had a Windows XP machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor, with a matching spinning metal-disk hard drive. I could make decent Flash animations and games with it. I could view entire websites in Flash with Internet Explorer 8.

Today, my personal machine is a laptop I bought from 2016. Core i7 (4 cores), AMD graphics card, 16GB of RAM. It's not top-of-the-line even when I bought it but I put in ~200 hours of The Witcher 3 in it, finishing the main quest and the two paid DLCs. That said, modern web dev is a PITA in this mostly because I'm too cheap to upgrade to an SSD. Oh, also, the GitHub homepage that showed live commits on the globe makes the fans scream with Chrome unless I enable hardware acceleration. (In fairness that's enabled by default, but it so happened I had to turn it off and forgot to turn it back on.)

I still can't figure out why my personal machine can't provide a decent feedback loop on a React/Angular+Typescript stack (that's not even doing animations!) just because I don't have an SSD. In my very opinionated opinion, only a database server needs an SSD.

A Phaser+Typescript project (my preferred modern web gaming stack) is just a slightly better experience than React. But, again, I wonder why it needs hardware acceleration at all to function well and I've only implemented very "static" boardgames so far. Maybe I'm just a sloppy programmer but I'm definitely better than when I was making stuff in Flash. This shouldn't be eating that much resources, right?