HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by hypertele-Xii » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:33 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #75

This is true but it is a common misunderstanding imo. Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime. So why doesn’t that tool exist? Well... as far as I know it does. I’m pretty sure this is…

Adobe Animate costs 20$/month. I don't recall exactly how much Flash cost, but it sure wasn't that much. The barrier to entry is higher, thus popularity wanes.

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

#132

Post by dimmke » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:33 AM UTC

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…

The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on.

Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had its own proprietary scripting language called ActionScript and you definitely needed to have some coding skill to do most things in Flash beyond basic animations.

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

#133

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:41 AM UTC

What prompted Adobe to try to rename .swf as "Small Web File".

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

#134

Post by easton » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 4:41 AM UTC

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…

>there weren’t even auto updates

I remember a point where just about every time anyone logged into a XP machine, the Flash player would start begging to be updated. There seemed to be multiple updates a week sometimes to fix stuff. When Chrome started embedding Flash it was just about revolutionary since you didn’t have to keep as much of an eye on whatever CVE popped up that day.

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

#135

Post by bitwize » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:01 AM UTC

danShumway wrote: post #39

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.…

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac.

Flash only ever worked properly if you were running it in Internet Explorer for Mac OS 9. Any other browser/OS combination and you were looking at low framerates, audio/video desync, or both. Linux was worst of all.

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

#136

Post by asddubs » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

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 remember cheering apple on as they were killing flash because of how abysmal it was on linux. I do miss flash in a way, but also good fucking riddance

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

#137

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

recursive wrote: post #80

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…

That point is very curious, since you actually can email someone an .html file, and it will "just work".

When was the last time you saw a web app that was a single html file and nothing else?

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

#138

Post by kaslai » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:04 AM UTC

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #131

jchw wrote: post #75

This is true but it is a common misunderstanding imo. Nobody is arguing a tool like Flash shouldn’t exist; it should. People are arguing a runtime like Flash shouldn’t exist, and that HTML5 has all of the components that are needed to be that runtime and then some. A tool should give us what Flash did but with the HTML runtime. So why doesn’t that tool exist? Well... as far as I know it does. I’m pretty sure this is…

Adobe Animate costs 20$/month. I don't recall exactly how much Flash cost, but it sure wasn't that much. The barrier to entry is higher, thus popularity wanes.

If I recall correctly, it has always cost roughly as much as Photoshop during Adobe ownership. That is to say: prior to the Adobe CC pricing model, Flash cost many hundreds of dollars. I did a quick spot check on Archive.org and it looks like "Flash Professional 8" had a retail price of $700 in 2006. $20/mo is definitely a lower barrier to entry than a one-off $700 payment.

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

#139

Post by QuantumYeti » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:10 AM UTC

larsiusprime wrote: post #14

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…

My experience was to upload to Newgrounds and Kongregate and send it to my mom on an ancient computer and she'd run it just fine. I am sorry for oversimplifying but I do think many people had the same experience as I did.

I definitely remember downloading SWFs and running them from my desktop. I don't recall having problems getting them to run. Just wanted to add that my experiences match up with what you're describing.

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

#140

Post by SimianLogic » Thu, Dec 31, 2020, 5:12 AM UTC

dimmke wrote: post #132

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…

The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on. Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had…

Actually Flash was fantastic (for games). AS3 is one of my favorite programming languages I've ever worked with, but Flash wasn't just a programming language. The display tree (put simply: game engine) was baked into the runtime, which made it very very easy to make games. The tight coupling between art (movieclips created in Flash the program) and code (AS3 written in FlashDevelop or notepad) made for very fast iteration compared to today's highly siloed environments (make art in W. animate in X. export with Y. hand off to developers working in Z).

The amount of hoops you have to jump through to run something interactive in Unity is mind-boggling by comparison (without even talking about sharing that thing with another human on another computer). Processing was also pretty good at the first bit, but it wasn't as tuned to games and sharing your stuff was pretty awful (java applets).

Just because I <3 Flash doesn't mean it didn't have security problems, though. I wish someone had bought the tech off of Adobe and turned it into a gaming platform a-la Steam with proper input support.