331–340 of 372 posts
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Ah, yeah, that reading does make more sense. Guess I have a raw nerve.
I'm less positive of it after rereading the post to be honest. Netscape in 99 was just starting it's plummet, so it's hard to say it was booming but it also wasn't really outdated either. I probably should have thought my post through more, sorry.
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It might have been fun/easy to use for some people and encouraged game development that would have otherwise been too complex/too high of a learning curve. But browser games is a niche thing and really only a part of Flash's legacy. Flash also got used for a lot of other things and in a lot of cases it was basically to add in functionality that wasn't supported by native web standards yet. This was why entire website…
> When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now Where we are now is that the lock in is so wide that basically everyone is running Chrome, including its competitors.
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My experience with Flash is completely opposite to yours - I'd say we're for the most part pretending that by letting Flash die we're better off today. My fans spinning up every time I open a random website definitely disagree with you. Wasn't that the #1 argument for getting rid of Flash? I started developing Flash websites in Flash 3 in school, transitioned into Actionscript 2/3 and did some complex projects over t…
I can't upvote this enough. Anyone who developed in that ecosystem loved it, including myself. When you read negative comments, it's always someone who didn't really use it. It worked for developers, it worked for gamers. My guess is that the haters are just very loud in their hate.
This is generally true, and for a simple reason. When people don't like something, they avoid it. And therefore they wind up not really using it.
Take me for an example. All that I needed to know about Flash is that someone, somewhere, thought my computer should randomly start flashing and making noise. And the way that they did it really sucked to experience on Linux. (Not that I wanted the intended experience.) The fact that the plugin that I needed to let them do so was a repeated source of security holes was just icing on the cake.
So I avoided Flash. And disabled the plugin at some point. With the happy result that a lot of particularly annoying ads went away.
Now I'm sure that there were a lot of people whose experience was better. It was popular for a reason. But it wasn't a better experience for me.
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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.
Not sure I follow. Does “boomer” not mean “person born between 1946 and 1964”? Does it just mean ”old” now?
I'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…
Flash was offering things that the normal web couldn't do (like video). It took a long time for the web to catch up nominally, and it's still lacking
Macromedia would still be selling Flash if there was an open standard that replaced swf and was equally performant
After all the web is now full of SPAs which are a very bloated version of flash pages with much less functionality
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There is no "Newgrounds as it was at Flash's peak" for HTML5.
I don't think this is true at all. itch.io and Gamejolt are very popular platforms for indie artists. You submit a zip instead of a swf but the end result is the same, your work is online and playable by anyone. Be it games or animations. They might have not had a big cultural impact like Newsgrounds but they're serious platforms and they definitely fit the requirements (host arbitrary html5 content with ease)
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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…
The kids of the time already knew by 1998 that IE was the future of the web. Netscape had already made their open source announcement and spun off Mozilla in 1998. Navigator was effectively dead.
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We'll there we have it: we lived in a world with good tooling for creative works but a bad runtime, and we replaced the runtime without replacing the authoring tools. I think that's a shame.
Adobe produced Flash and the authoring tools. They mostly gave up when Flash's runtime was deemed bad. Turns out, they have an authoring tool for HTML5 that looks a lot like flash: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html So, yeah, I'd question why Animate isn't good enough to fill Flash's role.