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HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

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Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#31

Post by ogre_codes »

jcfields wrote: post #19
ogre_codes wrote: post #12

The author is right. But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed. Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.

My experience was that Flash ran like garbage on anything but Windows/Intel. Linux/Intel? Trash. Mac/PPC? Trash. The web at the time was unusable on my PowerBook G4 without FlashBlock. Maybe Flash would still be around if Adobe bothered to make it run well on anything but one platform.

I had similar experiences.

Adobe had zero F*s to give about anything not mainstream.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#32

Post by larsiusprime »

amelius wrote: post #26
larsiusprime wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You certainly CAN. My point is this is not standard or even typical behavior and so you rarely see it. Likewise, you could split up a Flash file into as much spaghetti as you wanted. But most of them were single SWF files. Honestly, I think efforts like FlashPoint will have a better time archiving flash content for this reason than trying to preserve HTML5 content of today.

> My point is this is not standard or even typical behavior and so you rarely see it. It could easily become a standard if someone writes a convenient JavaScript library or composer tool to do exactly that. My point is that the underlying platform is not the limitation.

Understood.

My point is that whatever convenient library/composer tool that can do that doesn't exist yet (or isn't widely adopted), and it's been 10 years, and 10 years ago a bunch of people said that everything Flash was offering would be perfectly replaced in short order.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#33

Post by nicolas_t »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #24
larsiusprime wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is not that you can't reproduce any single thing with an HTML5/JS workflow. You certainly can. My point is that: The technical burden to do all the things you would typically use flash for (quickly create some complex animated vector art + stick some code on it + distribute it as a single file) is much higher and requires multiple toolsets that are not necessarily standardized or obvious to an entry level us…

The title says HTML5 but you seem to actually want better tools.

The point is that flash was both the technology and the tools and that the tools for flash were refined and easy to use for a lot of people who were not necessarily deeply technical.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#35

Post by amelius »

larsiusprime wrote: post #32
amelius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My point is this is not standard or even typical behavior and so you rarely see it. It could easily become a standard if someone writes a convenient JavaScript library or composer tool to do exactly that. My point is that the underlying platform is not the limitation.

Understood. My point is that whatever convenient library/composer tool that can do that doesn't exist yet (or isn't widely adopted), and it's been 10 years, and 10 years ago a bunch of people said that everything Flash was offering would be perfectly replaced in short order.

Perhaps the "single file" feature is no longer very high on the wish-list of the average user, especially since people now tend to share stuff online rather than via physical media like in the old days; this could explain why there is no widely used library to support this use-case.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#36

Post by ogre_codes »

ramraj07 wrote: post #23
ogre_codes wrote: post #12

The author is right. But Jobs was also right, Flash was fundamentally to resource intensive for mobile and arguably still is. Without mobile, Flash was doomed. Flash also has a bunch of other issues in terms of security and performance on PCs which were never really addressed.

I call a bit of BS about this. In the end, the code that creates js or HTML5 equivalent (poorer versions in fact) end up being far more resource intensive and buggy than flash was. Importantly, this is after millions of man hours were put into optimising the hell out of the js engines. Further, apple itself ended up optimising it's processor architecture to allow faster JS execution. What would have happened if Steve…

> In the end, the code that creates js or HTML5 equivalent (poorer versions in fact) end up being far more resource intensive and buggy than flash was.

I doubt it. Adobe tried to make a go with Flash on Android to spite Jobs and it was a train-wreck. While Android makers were willing to put giant batteries in to support sloppy code, Apple wasn't.

> The iPhone might have taken a few more iterations, but eventually they would have figured out how to support flash well in their phones.

Apple shipped a phone with barely a day's battery life and it remained that way for years as features and performance caught up. If they'd shipped Flash, it would have cooked the CPU on every site it visited ruining the limited battery life the phone had. This is one of those cases where shipping less made a better product.

> In the end, the reality is that Jobs made a tech forecasting mistake assuming HTML5 (not js) will eventually catch up with flash.

You are splitting hairs. Nobody has made a perfect technology prediction 10 years out.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#37

Post by larsiusprime »

amelius wrote: post #35
larsiusprime wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understood. My point is that whatever convenient library/composer tool that can do that doesn't exist yet (or isn't widely adopted), and it's been 10 years, and 10 years ago a bunch of people said that everything Flash was offering would be perfectly replaced in short order.

Perhaps the "single file" feature is no longer very high on the wish-list of the average user, especially since people now tend to share stuff online rather than via physical media like in the old days; this could explain why there is no widely used library to support this use-case.

The single file aspect isn't really a feature for the end-user, the end user just gets content they like. The single file aspect is more about the workflow for the content creator , content aggregators like flash portals, and the ecosystem that affords. Flash portals are all but dead now, but that's another story for another time.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#38

Post by saurik »

devwastaken wrote: post #27

The proof is in the pudding. Nobody makes webgl+javascript 2d animations hostable anywhere. There's little to no websites that will host arbitrary content like they could with swfs. Luckily browsers don't matter, and newgrounds has their own flash player you can launch content with.

Yeah: the "real winner" here is simply the closed garden of native applications, all purchased from a two-party oligopoly (which is where all of those use cases now exist, de facto); it isn't a coincidence that Apple not only spearheaded both results, but also holds back a lot of standards for the open web on their mobile devices :/.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#39

Post by danShumway »

olyjohn wrote: post #11

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash p…

Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked.

Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do.

Flash was really important for its time, and I agree there are things I still miss about it that the web hasn't been able to replicate. But my goodness, as someone who uses Linux today, I can't express how glad I am that the websites that never worked on my Linux machines now do work on my Linux machines. Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored because Flash was a proprietary blob of insecure DRM-riddled code and Adobe couldn't be bothered to give anyone any attention unless they were big enough that they were impossible to ignore. Yes, I'm incredibly disappointed that the web hasn't captured everything Flash did, but it is good that we have gotten rid of Flash because mobile and Linux users deserve to have a version of the web that works on their machines.

These people who are lauding Flash as a universal environment either just have rose-tinted glasses or they lived in an even smaller programming bubble than the one they accuse HTML advocates of inhabiting.

Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

#40

Post by niftich »

mtmail wrote: post #2

Why didn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR take off as successor to Flash? It is available for all platforms, runs ActionScript.

AIR was wildly popular for making games and cross-platform applications around 2010. These could even be submitted to mobile apps stores, even for iOS.

But AIR produces packaged applications you need to install, and not the embedded-in-a-webpage experience that Flash was.

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