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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?

#51

Post by gregjor »

qurashee wrote: post #10
gregjor wrote: post #2

We can't make users download a third-party plugin to use a web site anymore. I suppose that's possible but I don't miss those pop-ups. I still have one customer with a Flash-based web site, even though it doesn't work on any modern browser. They actually have some old version of IE and the Flash plugin available for download just to use their site.

Why don't they setup https://ruffle.rs/ on their website? I've managed to rescue a website using it and seems to work pretty much with all modern browsers.

Will point that customer to ruffle. They are not terribly sophisticated, technically, as you can imagine. Nor do they seem willing to spend any money to fix the Flash problem. Nothing about the site needs Flash, it could be implemented in plain HTML+Javascript. They just don't want to pay anything to do that.

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

#52

Post by viraptor »

madarco wrote: post #27
viraptor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash also took time to load. The sites used loaders with progress bars for larger flash apps as well.

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

You can still do that with wasm by splitting the code. You need to loop through js to connect them, but for things like levels, you can likely do that or just memcpy between those environments.

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

#53

Post by andrewflnr »

captainmuon wrote: post #50
josefx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HTML+JS is "turing complete" so in a sense you can make everything in HTML that you could make in Flash. I love how turing complete gets thrown around every time. Can a turing machine by itself run a voice chat, print documents, display images, stream videos? If I emulated a turing machine on a 1 Hz CPU would it be capable of decoding a 4k video stream in acceptable time?

Jeez, I knew people would comment on this. I put it in quotes because I don't mean turing complete it in the technical sense, but as an analogy. It is "fully functional", you can achive basically any result that you can with Flash. Analogous to the fact that a Turing complete system can simulate any Turing machine, I mean a certain interactive graphical programming environment - like HTML5+js for example - can remake…

For future reference, the relatively casual term you want here is "Pacman-complete". :)

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

#54

Post by piceas »

amelius wrote: post #26
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.

What are these people doing now?

Video killed the flash vector star and games moved to steam.

A good example of the former is a e-card service that eventually chose to move to video. Video is worse for their product but there was/is a more robust path to move to video than modern vector options.

https://www.jacquielawson.com/

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

#56

Post by est »

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…

> Flash was an absolute catastrophe for accessibility at well

Compared to what? All SVG/canvas/WebGL doesn't solve the problem either.

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

#57

Post by kinggencha »

bartread wrote: post #46
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…

Related to this, but building anything interactive in general was made super-easy by Flash because it was basically one IDE with everything you needed included out of the box. No complex toolchain, or ludicrous dependency tree, no nonsense build and deployment (though the fact that the default for Flash content was one giant binary blob wasn't always ideal when bandwidth was at a premium), no having to learn a new fr…

While Macromedia/Adobe Flash was an important IDE for some time, we later developed complex Flash applications in code-centric IDEs (like Flashdevelop) and compiled using the SWF SDK from Adobe. This also came at no cost, as far as I remember.

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

#58

Post by krapp »

MengerSponge wrote: post #48

People's use of the internet has changed, but the fact that there is not a new Homestar Runner or NewGrounds is telling. How much does a weird high school/college art nerd need to know about the tech stack to get their vision online? I'm old enough that HSR is still part of my lexicon. Kids just think I'm weird, which is fine.

The weird high school/college art nerds today are designing their own VTuber rigs, selling art commissions or making indie games. The biggest reason there isn't a new Homestar Runner or Newgrounds has less to do with technological limitations or complexity and more to do with evolving tastes over time.

Also the fact that the new whatever would be either Youtube or Twitter. Or Tiktok. Or something most people here have never even heard of.

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

#59

Post by planede »

The original N game v1.0, released in 2004 [1] had fluid vector animation without stutter on a modest computer at the time. It's a pretty challenging platformer, and any stutter would have killed the gameplay.

Later flash versions regressed in performance and can't run this game without stutter in my experience. A way to play the original game today is to get an old version of "Adobe flash player projector". If you are paranoid, use some OS level sandbox around it.

I did not see an in-browser game since the original N game that matches its low system requirements and smooth gameplay.

[1] https://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n_history.html

BTW, the successor N v2 is also pretty good, and it's not flash-based, AFAIK.

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

#60

Post by paganel »

skytreader wrote: post #29

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…

> resource efficiency

Glad that you pointed that out.

Around 2002-2003 I was working an office night-shift, in front of a computer that was in no way the fastest even by those times' standards. But, even so, I was able to follow almost every at-bat in the MLB, live, through their Flash app (while I was doing my regular work in another browser tab). And it wasn't only showing stuff like Batter X hit a 1B, it showed you the exact location and the speed of the incoming pitch, where the ball landed (more or less), what was the out-field formation of the pitching side etc. Really cool stuff given the limited processing resources.

I'd say a HTML+JS solution (which, obviously, wasn't even possible back then for that kind of stuff) would require at least an order of magnitude more resources on the client side.

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