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

31–40 of 159 posts

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

#31

Post by Dylan16807 »

captainmuon wrote: post #16

HTML+JS is "turing complete" so in a sense you can make everything in HTML that you could make in Flash. In practice, I think the authoring experience has been lost. There is still Adobe Animate (which is the renamed Flash application), but I think you can not export to a fully interactive HTML application - only to static videos or simple HTML (like interactive ads). Maybe it is now possible, but I haven't seen much…

> turing complete

The question is what you can do, not what can you write a function to calculate.

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

#32

Post by rendall »

I would say no, that modern browsers have the potential to do everything that Flash did, but it's not nearly as easy.

While it is possible in modern browsers to make a) cross-platform, front-end web applications with b) smooth vector and c) bitmap animation incorporating d) multimedia sound and e) video driven by f) a backend API (called dynamic data back then), it is not nearly as prevalent as it was. Animations and multi-media objects were first-class citizens in Flash in a way they are not in browsers.

I do think that's not entirely the browser makers fault. Web aesthetics have changed. Users liked swooping and diving logos with dramatic drop-shadows then, and not so much now.

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

#34

Post by trilbyglens »

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 figured out UI or UX patterns yet at that point, and there was massive wheel reinvention taking place all the time.

Flash was an absolute catastrophe for accessibility at well. A screen reader would just say "Flash movie" as that's all that was actually in the page.

We've had to reinvent a lot of that stuff, true, but we've also gained interoperability, security, and accessibility. I think those are all worthy trade-offs.

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

#35

Post by rob74 »

rendall wrote: post #32

I would say no, that modern browsers have the potential to do everything that Flash did, but it's not nearly as easy. While it is possible in modern browsers to make a) cross-platform, front-end web applications with b) smooth vector and c) bitmap animation incorporating d) multimedia sound and e) video driven by f) a backend API (called dynamic data back then), it is not nearly as prevalent as it was. Animations and…

I agree with the "not nearly as easy" part as long as you are limited to the usual HTML/CSS/JS stack. I think WebAssembly has a lot of promise here, as you can theoretically do anything you want in any language of your choice and have it run in the browser. Of course, this is also a threat to the "open web" where you are free to use your browser's DevTools to dissect the internals of any site.

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

#36

Post by fxtentacle »

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 vector animations than people nowadays can squeeze out of a 3070 with WebGL is beyond me.

In my opinion, we still DO NOT have any worthwhile replacement for the ease of cross-platform development combined with excellent performance that Flash had.

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

#37

Post by CJefferson »

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…

When I was 12, me and my brother made simple flash games. You could produce something with cool animation, basically functional, in a week or two.

What is the modern replacement for my nephews now? There might be one but I haven't seen it.

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

#38

Post by exceptione »

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 remember that loading a flash plugin would choke the browser for a while. I think we always had to to pay a startup penalty.

I have experienced flash for the last time a while ago though, so my memory might have been corrupted in the mean time. Also, I am talking about computing capacity of a decade ago, so the comparison is never going to be fair.

But I am definitely sure that the java applets were a disaster in terms of UX (slow to load, interaction feeling very foreign).

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

#39

Post by thom »

Given broad support for the Web Audio API these days I can’t think of anything that’s not been standardised, unless you wanted some form of preloading baked into the spec. ActionScript had actual integer types, if I remember correctly.

As others have said, it’s mostly tooling and workflow. As much as I’d like to sneer at Flash in general, my experience with it on projects was positive. The IDEs and tools were good, you could approach everything code first with unit tests. The process of cutting up PhotoShop PSDs from a designer and building UIs in FlashBuilder, while orchestrating everything in code in an MVC style was very pleasant.

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

#40

Post by tsukikage »

rob74 wrote: post #35
rendall wrote: post #32

I would say no, that modern browsers have the potential to do everything that Flash did, but it's not nearly as easy. While it is possible in modern browsers to make a) cross-platform, front-end web applications with b) smooth vector and c) bitmap animation incorporating d) multimedia sound and e) video driven by f) a backend API (called dynamic data back then), it is not nearly as prevalent as it was. Animations and…

I agree with the "not nearly as easy" part as long as you are limited to the usual HTML/CSS/JS stack. I think WebAssembly has a lot of promise here, as you can theoretically do anything you want in any language of your choice and have it run in the browser. Of course, this is also a threat to the "open web" where you are free to use your browser's DevTools to dissect the internals of any site.

The tooling is the main issue here, and that's even worse for webassembly than the usual HTML/CSS/JS stack.
Post reply on HN