Web video satisfies all the good things he lists about flash. Mp4/webm is the new swf, not html. Flash became irrelevant because web video subsumed its use cases as well as other use cases. YouTube killed flash.
HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
281–290 of 372 posts
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#282The 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.
Also, the whole auto-update story is a bit of a tangent anyhow - nothing updated reliably back then. People were lazy, or didn't trust updates; but it was common for people to delay updates sometimes indefinitely, even if in the long-term that was unwise. That may have been one of chromes big selling points; that meant that you knew what you were targeting back when FF and especially, especially IE always required coding for 5 or so major versions - you'd have IE compat mode (~5.5), 6,7,8, and sometimes IE9 or mac-IE, which all had pretty significant feature and bug differences, and it took years to obsolete a version. And ironically, IE's fractured nature kept the web alive; because it meant that you needed to invest in the kinds of processes, habits, and webdesign that catered to multiple rendering engines. IE's dominance appears huge only if you add all those versions together; but from a webdevs perspective, you needed to do many of the things cross-browser support requires anyhow - unlike today, when you can get pretty far by simply testing on chrome only, and likely iOS (though even that is ignorable for some quite influential market segments, e.g. india, and it risks obsoletion in china and africa too).
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, not sarcasm at all. I tried Flash on a variety of different operating systems and browsers at the time -- and IE5 on Mac OS 9 was the only one that consistently delivered good results. It seems weird, but when you consider the context at the time, it makes sense. Back in the late 90s -- when Flash was on the rise and being rapidly developed -- IE5 was the browser to have on Mac just as it was on Windows. The reas…
The turn if the century really was a different time. > boomer tech Since we are talking about events ~25 years ago isn’t all of this “boomer tech” because the boomers were at the peak of their careers at the time? Aren’t they the ones that created, like, everything ? Seems like a strangely modern phrase to use to describe what is now ancient history. Also I’m not that old but I already see the ageism in tech. I see i…
Internet generations seem to be much quicker, with big shifts every 3 to 5 years. Mary Meeker's yearly summary often illustrates aspects of this.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#284I've come across a lot of similar sentiment from ex-Flash devs, who romanticise its heyday as a period of fertile creativity (true) and say that HTML5/JS/CSS/SVG is an inadequate replacement (false). In truth, the fundamental capabilities of the modern web platform matches and typically exceeds anything that was offered by Flash. What these people are really lamenting is the ease of authorship that Flash provided to…
There are actually a number of tools that allow easy HTML5 authorship for non-technical users. We make one too - Construct 3 [1].
I think one reason Flash had such prominence was their effective monopoly. Remember when you had to install a browser plugin to get Flash? They reached ubiquity, but it was basically an impossible job for anyone else to achieve. So if you wanted Flash-like content, Flash was your only real option.
Since HTML5 is based on open technologies, there are lots of competing tools on the market doing exactly what some people apparently lament are no longer available. They're out there if you look, and arguably it's a healthier marketplace since there's real competition - although the choice is more complicated now, since there isn't that one option everyone uses.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#285The 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…
Honest question: why does it matter if it's one file or not? For example if you're deploying to a web server, it doesn't seem a big deal if you're uploading one file or several... so why the issue?
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
there wasn't really a mobile market to speak of during the hey-day of flash. it was an awful and wonderful time to experience the constant breakage and delight that was the www.
I thought the same until I discovered flash lite. It quietly powered the gui on many more devices than I ever imagined in its time.
Nokia adopted it and it was quietly embedded in far more devices to provide custom functionality than I realized.
Flash lite even appeared to power the internet channel on the Nintendo Wii.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
Adobe moved right on to supporting HTML5 in their Adobe Animate tool: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht... The support for using simple tools to make HTML5 animations and interactive content has been there for years (since at least 2013, when CreateJS was released: https://www.createjs.com/ )) Adobe Animate: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
And now that's a proprietary authoring tool, again. Back then, one of the arguments against Flash was that it was closed and proprietary, both authoring- and runtime-wise. Browsers nowadays are arguably open-source runtimes, but we still don't have a good open-source authoring tool that replicates the magic of Flash.
We have adopted closed tools with iOS. How might that compare to Flash ultimately?
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#288The 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…
Honest question: why does it matter if it's one file or not? For example if you're deploying to a web server, it doesn't seem a big deal if you're uploading one file or several... so why the issue?
One file allows it to work offline, from anywhere which was more common.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#289The 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…
Macromedia Flash allowed you to export to an .exe and it just worked (on Windows). The executables weren’t big either, I remember taking my Flash presentations to school on floppy disks.
Re: HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash
#290The 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…
Everytime a lost or abandoned technology is mentioned on HN, someone will claim it was amazing and much better than anything current. You have people claiming was better than CSS, that Gopher was better than the Web, that FidoNet was better than the Internet.