Remote code execution.
Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
91–100 of 159 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#92Look the same on all platforms. Allow artists to create simple animation quickly. run fast. The key selling point of flash was that it was an author once, run anywhere tool. I could use keyframe animation along with a simple scripting language to make almost anything. Not only that it was fast to build and deploy. Nothing I've seen recently allows an artist to do the same. I've tried a couple of times over the years…
>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 trends/fads in JavaScript frameworks/UI libraries, but if you pick one and stick with it, it won't magically break because JavaScript changed. I think what's causing your problem is here is the want/need to stick with the latest flavor of frameworks/libraries instead of becoming deeply familiar with one and sticking with it.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#93[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#94HTML+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…
When I was reading about Turing Completeness as a child, I remarked to my mother that "Computers can do anything". She quickly told me that wasn't right. I went back and thought about what I actually meant. My revised statement was "Computers can do anything that computers can do", which sounds significantly less grand.
> My revised statement was "Computers can do anything that computers can do", which sounds significantly less grand.
Unless they're quantum computers where they may as well create a wormhole or something https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33802711
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#95One thing that comes to mind: Flash could do rawish TCP socket communication. You could implement various protocols on top of it in user code.
That's not possible with Web APIs. Web APIs are more high-level (complex, purpose-oriented), e.g. WebSockets, WebRTC, WebTransport. The low-level stuff is not exposed to user code and probably never will. One of the reasons is security.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#96A 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…
> mostly because I'm too cheap to upgrade to an SSD Wow, that is cheap. We’re talking, what, $40? Basically everything these days assumes fast random disk IO, and will be slow if you don’t have it. If you’ve upgraded your computer at all in the last 10 years then you probably have been better off keeping the old one and getting an SSD.
> Basically everything these days assumes fast random disk IO
I think the point is that they shouldn't. The majority of things that people do every day should fit in memory, requiring only short bursts of sequential access when loading and when saving files. Even databases and filesystems are pretty good at avoiding or overlapping random accesses. Exceptions exist, to be sure, but if "basically everything" gets slow when it doesn't have fast random access then "basically everything minus epsilon" is broken.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#97Look the same on all platforms. Allow artists to create simple animation quickly. run fast. The key selling point of flash was that it was an author once, run anywhere tool. I could use keyframe animation along with a simple scripting language to make almost anything. Not only that it was fast to build and deploy. Nothing I've seen recently allows an artist to do the same. I've tried a couple of times over the years…
>Look the same on all platforms. Provided you have Flash player installed. Doesn't the same apply to web technologies provided you have the same browser installed?
Kinda, but for example you could have mobile flash and it would look the same on that as it would in opera, IE, netscape or what ever browser you wanted.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#98A 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…
As an embedded developer it always surprises me that simple programs are still barely any faster, take 100s of MB of RAM, require a decent CPU despite the fact we're all using supercomputers compared to the Windows 95 days. How is it that physicists and engineers are pushing the limits of physics to bring us ever faster processors and we still can't smoothly scroll a webpage, where as I can design an embedded product…
Simple answer: because the software industry is a goddamned joke. It's full of complexity-fetishists who are arrogant enough to try and call themselves engineers while producing objectively terrible products and patting themselves on the back for it.
Remember a while back, when Casey Muratori told Microsoft their terminal emulator could be a lot faster if it used a glyph index, and professional Microsoft engineers told him that was complexity worthy of a doctoral thesis [0]?
There's a reason he got so mad at them, and its because this level of "competence" is pervasive in our industry and he has to see it every single f'ing day. See also: "When does the draw window change?", a demonstration of how Microsoft's flagship IDE's debugger fails to compete with a one-man project.
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/voting_software.png
[0] For anyone not in the know, this is essentially just emulating how a real dumb terminal from the 70s would work, is the blindingly obvious implementation, and would be familiar to just about any game developer on earth. Casey spent the next weekend coding a 3-orders-of-magnitude faster terminal display demo that was completely unoptimized as a demonstration of the lower bound of how fast a terminal should be. Microsoft's terminal is still not as fast, even though they did eventually implement his solution without, initially, giving him any credit.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> mostly because I'm too cheap to upgrade to an SSD Wow, that is cheap. We’re talking, what, $40? Basically everything these days assumes fast random disk IO, and will be slow if you don’t have it. If you’ve upgraded your computer at all in the last 10 years then you probably have been better off keeping the old one and getting an SSD.
> Basically everything these days assumes fast random disk IO I think the point is that they shouldn't . The majority of things that people do every day should fit in memory, requiring only short bursts of sequential access when loading and when saving files. Even databases and filesystems are pretty good at avoiding or overlapping random accesses. Exceptions exist, to be sure, but if "basically everything" gets slow…
I mean yes and no. One might make the same claim about an FPU for example. It should be possible for most software to be fast without assuming fast floating point calculations. But if it can reasonably be assumed that the deployment platform does have that capability then does it make sense to focus effort into optimising that.
I think there's an argument to be that programs should focus more on when they're reading from disk because some programs can end up slow or laggy even on SSDs. But systems not running on SSDs (outside of embedded and object storage use cases) are exceedingly rare these days. And that's only likely to be more true over time.
Re: Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
#100[deleted]