HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

> but I don't think the Linux audience in 1999-2008 was exactly who most of us were targeting

Well, but... yeah. I know people weren't targeting Linux in the early 2000's, that was the problem. That's what I'm saying.

One of the biggest advantages of dumping Flash was that it got replaced with a runtime that worked on every OS even if people weren't deliberately targeting it. I'm saying that's a big enough advantage that it's worth the tradeoff. The Linux market share on desktop computers was tiny back then, but it was big enough that the community deserved to have a web in its entirety that worked for them. Not just a couple websites, they deserved to have full access to the platform that claimed to be a democratizing environment, and they were never going to be a part of that platform as long as Flash existed.

I disagree that Linux compatibility back then was a non-issue. It was not. It was a serious problem that held Linux back as a platform and as a daily driver and we all hated it, and it feels very dismissive to say that it was just a tiny side effect or that it's irrelevant to the broader point. Flash was never cross-platform and it held back the entire web from being a universally accessible platform. And it only got fixed because developers were forced to use a runtime that supported Linux. That is the only reason that Linux browsers are usable today.

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I am kind of skeptical that distributing SWFs is actually that much easier than distributing zip files. Even downloading/stealing and re-hosting JS code is not that hard. This is coming from someone who agrees with many of your points about the overall accessibility that Flash brought. But I do not believe it's harder to distribute content on the web today than it was back then.

I uploaded SWF files to those portals, I put them on flash drives. My process today for distribution is pretty much the same. And once this stuff is on the web, the web is vastly better at distribution than the Flash Player plugin was.

There are multiple tools now that have filled the Flash niche. YouTube, more advanced game engines, AppStore’s, modern JS... free to play games really killed the money side of it too. Flash games were the only free/ad driven games in town. Now you’ll be battling against billion dollar companies in that arena.

Sorry, no. HTML5 exists. Web “standards”? Lmao. Is whatever the Chrome team develops the web standard now?

> Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons.

I think we might be arguing past each other.

I fully, 100% agree with this point. I just don't think it has anything to do with the web.

When people brought up replacing the Flash runtime with the web, there were two things being claimed:

A) that the platform itself could handle all of the technical requirements of Flash

and

B) that tools would exist that replaced Flash.

I believe that the first claim mostly came true, that the web today is about as powerful as Flash was. The second claim never even came close to happening. A lot of platforms exist that export to the web, but even the really popular ones like Unity just don't feel the same. Unity is, unfortunately, not an adequate substitute for Flash.

And I think that's a real tragedy, but I feel like we're at a point where the web should be left out of the conversation. There are game-related APIs that I want on the web, but for the most part there is nothing that browser makers can do to solve your problem.

Someone has to make a development environment. It's a separate problem. The web today is capable of doing the stuff you want it to do, but there is no development environment that replaces Flash.

And that's kind of revealing because it's not just that there isn't a web-compatible alternative to Flash, or there isn't an Open Source alternative. Proprietary game engines that aren't even targeting the web are not as good as Flash was for rapid content prototyping. Why can't anyone, commercial or Open Source, build a Flash replacement for any platform/runtime? That's the conversation we need to be having, not whether or not the web is mature enough as a runtime.

This doesn't get much attention on HN, but Apache Royale is the legitimate blood-line successor to Flex Framework.

Adobe provided the initial resources (developers and hosting) to get the project into a stable state. The project is now managed by Apache.

The team solved a couple monumental challenges (converting AS3 to JavaScript, and putting a GUI framework on top of it).

https://royale.apache.org/