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Internet Archive expands Flash support

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Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#151

Post by rincebrain »

kmeisthax wrote: post #90
cubefox wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite get why the Flash plugins were do slow on mobile. On Windows desktop, Flash was much faster than other NPAPI plugins. Most other plugins froze the whole browser for a second or so (Java even longer), while Flash didn't do that. And at the time, early native "HTML5 replacements" for Flash ads/games were actually slower than Flash.

Flash was software rendered almost exclusively. It also had quality options that let you scale the software renderer down a whole lot. But it still required a beefy CPU to push all those pixels. On mobile, you don't get a fast CPU - you get hardware accelerated EVERYTHING. Everything has to be done on GPU. Hell, iPhones still have dedicated JPEG decoders in them. And vector rendering on GPUs is a pain to do, even mor…

I want you to know that I laughed very hard at finding a comment complaining about Homestuck in Ruffle unexpectedly here, thank you.

To be fair, on the single 100 mbit link the site used to be on, for new things being posted, that would be historically accurate...

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#152

Post by ehPReth »

lucgommans wrote: post #18

They link to a collection called "Software Library: Flash". How do I add something there? I've uploaded gravityrunner years ago and recently (45 days ago, the site tells me) figured out how to activate the emulator for this swf file (not sure why not offer to emulate any .swf file but ok), but it's also not showing up¹ in things like Flash game collections. Is there any documentation on this? Edit: wait, I think I fo…

Try @textfiles on Twitter

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#153

Post by justinclift »

pan69 wrote: post #145
justinclift wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't AIR just a repackaging of standard Flash for mostly internal/intranet use only, as the standard flash player was so full of bugs as to be significant security hazard?

AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies was Flash. According to this Wikipedia page, Adobe AIR received its latest stable release on May 22, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

Sounds like they pivoted to something that would perhaps be ok in less sensitive environments.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#154

Post by fenomas »

pan69 wrote: post #145
justinclift wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't AIR just a repackaging of standard Flash for mostly internal/intranet use only, as the standard flash player was so full of bugs as to be significant security hazard?

AIR was/is basically what something like Electron is today. AIR wasn't just Flash, it was basically an HTML/JavaScript runtime that allowed you to make desktop apps with the web technologies, one of those technologies was Flash. According to this Wikipedia page, Adobe AIR received its latest stable release on May 22, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR

~~This is not correct.~~ AIR was a way of publishing flash (only) content into standalone executables for desktop or mobile - win/mac/android/ios/etc.

As a platform it was basically Flash plus extra APIs for interacting with the OS, and as a tool it was a bundler that also handled stuff like signing certificates for the android and ios app stores (IIRC).

edit: miscommunication, sorry - AIR only rendered flash content, but it could display web content by invoking an OS browser component. So you could have a browser component inside a SWF wrapper, and the runtime could make the wrapper for you so from the author's perspective it was the same as supporting html/js. My bad!

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#155

Post by justinclift »

diggernet wrote: post #135
justinclift wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just tried it here (using Firefox on Linux), and it seems to be running ok. At least, the creature is smoothly turning and travelling towards wherever the mouse is. There don't seem to be any stutters, slowness, or other hiccups.

Thanks for checking. Same setup here. Feels a little jittery to me. I dunno, maybe it's in my head. Of course, the important bit is the poor little guy never gets any food to eat. So, no game.

Yeah. I used to play Flow on the PS3, and thought it was awesome. :)

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#156

Post by duskwuff »

experimenting wrote: post #99
themagician wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple. Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage. It was also hard to get a non-app store version of…

> Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage.

The problem was pretty clearly on Adobe's end. They released a Flash runtime for Android in 2010; it was nearly unusable, and was quietly discontinued a year or two later.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#157

Post by fenomas »

themagician wrote: post #57
bsimpson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was epic for creative coding, and I haven't seen another software environment come close. We lost a really great onramp to UI development when Flash died. I suspect there are deep licensing problems with the Flash codebase. For instance, video was such a heavy investment for them towards the end, and I'm sure they licensed plenty of that tech. I wonder how usable it would be if they just open-sourced the parts…

I don't doubt the licensing and patent issue. But also, it's Adobe. They have the money. Instead of spending tens of millions on ads and media they could just do this.

I worked at Adobe in those days, adjacent to the Flash team, and AFAIK everyone involved would have loved to open-source the flash player. (And they did open-source significant parts of it, like the script VM - that didn't just randomly happen, people fought hard for it.)

But the overall player was a massive codebase - buildable for literally hundreds of platforms - that was developed over a decade with tons of external tech and external partners involved. Open-sourcing something like that (legally) isn't something you can just pay money to do.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#158

Post by dharmab »

readyplayernull wrote: post #88
themagician wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

> Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe... I was working as Flash dev for a large company and we used to send support tickets to Adobe, some included weird compiler bugs that could be dodged by exchanging two lines of Actionscript. Adobe didn't respond a single ticket. My theory is that Macromedia's code base was just way too complex to be fixed o…

I was inside Adobe during the final death of Flash. Adobe as an organization is fully capable of maintaining a frighteningly complex product; Document Cloud is a testament to that. Steve Jobs and Apple's decision that iOS should be focused on mobile web (and later, the App Store) without Flash is what directly led to the end of the project.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#159

Post by noduerme »

eropple wrote: post #146
noduerme wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe mostly spends their time now releasing new versions of Illustrator that remove critical features at each iteration. 3D support removed from Photoshop. Save to web, save locally by default, both being removed from Illustrator. They're worse than worthless. If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore.

> If Affinity was just slightly better at parsing existing Adobe files, no one would need to pay for Adobe products anymore. Maybe for Illustrator. After Effects doesn't really have a great competitor and the integration with Premiere is excellent. Resolve and Fusion show potential and the price is compelling, but after my last Adobe subscription lapsed I spent a few hours fighting with Resolve and it pushed me to re…

If you're doing motion design, I'd agree, I guess you're stuck with Adobe. In the realm of print, we are so close to never needing them again. Affinity is great. The only problem is that vector groups are lost when you need to import or export to Illustrator/PDF. Adobe is fully aware of this and makes their bespoke file format as difficult as possible to parse. When you're working with a dozen designers and 6 separate print houses for different things, you have no choice. It's the most monopolistic system I can think of, worse than anything Microsoft did with Windows and IE in the 90s. It's pure extortion as they take away features. And they know it. Adobe is doomed. Their entire attitude as a company is one of stripping as much as they can out of their current market dominance without adding any value. Adobe will not last another few years as far as cornering the print market. But right now, no one in the industry wants to be the first to bail on them. Everyone would love to.

Re: Internet Archive expands Flash support

#160

Post by fenomas »

experimenting wrote: post #99
themagician wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flash was a great technology for so many reasons. I really wish Adobe had open sourced it at the end. I suspect it would have paid dividends somehow. Flash died because Adobe couldn't get a version running on iOS that wasn't garbage. I was working with Adobe when the iPhone came out and they did have dev versions where it was running, but it was awful. Visibly laggy, nearly unusable. No real thought into UI mapping f…

I thought Flash died, because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits. So yes, Jobs shot it down several times, because Flash would have allowed games and apps outside the direct control of Apple. Flash could run great games and apps on Internet Explorer 6. If it was then impossible to get a non-garbage version on iOS, then maybe iOS was garbage. It was also hard to get a non-app store version of…

> because Apple did not want Flash to eat into their app store profits

Here's a fun fact nobody remembers anymore. Way back when (2010?) Adobe built a Flash feature that let you publish iOS apps. The feature went through an open beta and lots of flash devs made iOS apps, they worked fine, Apple accepted them into the app store, fun times.

Then riiight as the tech left beta, Apple changed the iOS terms to nonsensically restrict what language apps are "originally written" in - the source language had to be one Xcode supported, and apps converted from other languages were disallowed. Apple then removed the flash-based apps from their store, Adobe had to discontinue the feature, and a bit later Apple quietly removed the restriction.

(Working from memory here, details are approximate.)

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