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Nobody has mentioned Youtube using Flash initially to create the experience of ‘it just works.’ We had RealPlayer, Quicktime, and others, but video on the web was rather difficult.
http://superior-web-solutions.com/
Enable Flash, turn up the sound and whatever you do, do NOT skip the intro.
I really think from a business perspective Adobe bungled just about everything with Flash. When the tide was turning against them with the rise of iOS, they should have full open sourced Flash player and made the authoring tools free to use, and encourage competing authoring tools. Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers. Adobe's authoring tools would l…
And then Macromedia got "Eloped"...
It's crazy how Adobe never leveraged that community and just pissed everybody off then it died out...
There was also that kind of "friendly" competition where teams add to come up with the most bad ass interactive experience and brands had huge budgets to promote this or that product. It was an healthy relationship between marketing and creativity. Everybody even now, remember at least some Flash websites. "2advanced" anybody? Who remembers the design of the web sites they visit today? It's all the same.
Obviously at some point, Flash ads became a nuisance, and mobile kind of killed it in the browser...
> Flash would likely have then been on a track towards full standardization and native support in browsers.
Unfortunately no, because TC39 rejected Ecmascript 4. Ironically, Microsoft who is responsible for Typescript is to blame for that. Because they had their own solution "Silverlight", it was short-sighted.
Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…
Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.
I was never a Flash developer, but I certainly admired it in its prime. The early versions could be installed simply by putting a 47kb DLL in the plugins directory, and in a time well before the HTML canvas or JavaScript with good performance, this brought dead web pages to life in a way that was very portable across browsers and operating systems. It was much better (lighter, simpler, quicker to load) than Java appl…
Something that's not easy to appreciate about Flash if you weren't there is that it is the first tool that really put multimedia interactivity within reach of non-devs -- and, almost gratuitously, made it dirt simple to distribute your creation at the same time. A tech-savvy artist, who would previously have needed a handful of devs and a publishing company to get a fun toy to a few hundred users, could suddenly buil…
As someone who wrote a complete 3d modeller for a game, including animation, even before 3dsmax was a thing, I was surprised when a few years later (10+) I saw how easy the Flash UI was to understand, especially the way keyfames were added. The UX was rather extraordinary. Unfortunately even at that time (early iPhone) because Flash was so synonymous with security flaws, I would regularly uninstall it. Since then, I've yet to see a solution that's as easy to use and doesn't have some kind of vendor lock in (like Flash did). Maybe I haven't looked hard enough tho.
As much as I personally disliked the artistic Flash- only sites at the time, hindsight shows that they were rather invaluable. We lost a lot of diversity when Apple killed it off.
Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…
This comment is pretty misleading. The parts you complain about have little to do with what made Flash a creative sandbox. The parts that do matter have long been replaced with Canvas/WebGL. But the web as a whole has changed. Just like we don't have as many fun quirky geocities-like websites. The issue isn't the lack of Flash, it's that the web as a whole has grown up and changed.
We have tons of memes uploaded each day, with crude animations, that could have been 10x easier with flash...
I had a formative experience with Flash as a middle schooler. I loved Albino Blacksheep, Newgrounds, etc. I thought the videos were hilarious and the stick-figure-style animation was approachable. So I acquired Flash, and I was blown away by how easy it was to create these silly animations. Automatic tweening was a miracle to me. Since then I've done a lot of video editing with different tools, but I still think back…
Disclaimer: I'm an old git. I think you have deftly described a bigger problem, as the whole industry gets more and more sophisticated and complex. The barrier for entry is so high now that I think it stifles young people's interest too quickly. The great thing about Flash was the developer tool. Part animation studio, part simple programming IDE. It was a great balance. Maybe there is a place in the market for frame…
Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…
What can flash do that modern browsers can't?
In terms of capabilities though there was much less worry about compatibility.
Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply re…
Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.
Mobile killed Flash. It was a poorly implemented technology which was acceptable only during the era where electric power was unlimited, and people were in the habit of frequent reboots to update their OS anyway.