Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 372 posts

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

#11

Post by olyjohn »

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 player.

Flash on the web only worked if you had Flash player plugin installed. Both browser and Flash updates themselves would break the Flash plugin constantly. That was across all browsers and platforms. Keeping plugins updated and reliable was a mess, for a long time there weren't even auto updates.

Flash was a mess the whole time. Let's not pretend that it ever really "just worked" because it didn't.

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

#12

Post by ogre_codes »

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.

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

#14

Post by larsiusprime »

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.

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

#15

Post by larsiusprime »

amelius wrote: post #8

> For 95% of applications you can just distribute a single SWF file You can do the same with HTML5+CSS+JavaScript, all in a single file. You can even include images, audio and video e.g. with data urls.

You certainly CAN.

My point is this is not standard or even typical behavior and so you rarely see it.

Likewise, you could split up a Flash file into as much spaghetti as you wanted. But most of them were single SWF files.

Honestly, I think efforts like FlashPoint will have a better time archiving flash content for this reason than trying to preserve HTML5 content of today.

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

#16

Post by larsiusprime »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #10
larsiusprime wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm well aware the Adobe Animate still exists, a fact I'm glad for. I'm well aware that it can export to HTML5, and even Haxe/OpenFL, an open source project I've personally invested a ton of time and money into. It's great those initiatives exist, I've spent years of my career supporting them, but at replicating what Flash did in its prime, it's still not quite the same. The abstraction leaks around the edges and the…

That's just restating your claim, you still didn't explain what specifically you think is missing or impossible.

My point is not that you can't reproduce any single thing with an HTML5/JS workflow. You certainly can.

My point is that:

The technical burden to do all the things you would typically use flash for (quickly create some complex animated vector art + stick some code on it + distribute it as a single file) is much higher and requires multiple toolsets that are not necessarily standardized or obvious to an entry level user. An entry level flash tutorial would show you how to do all these things and it would just work. An entry level HTML5/JS tutorial requires multiple dependencies and scary toolsets to a newcomer, assumes a lot more background technical skill, and is more likely to randomly break around the edges.

There was a special happy circle of toolset + community that made something we've now lost, and I feel that the critics spent all their efforts on narrow technical points, and thus missed what really made things special for us.

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

#17

Post by larsiusprime »

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.

100% agreed.

The one ultimately responsible for Flash's death was Adobe, who neither felt it was worth investing in to overcome these issues, nor worth open sourcing to let the community give it a try.

What a loss.

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

#18

Post by larsiusprime »

mtmail wrote: post #2

Why didn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_AIR take off as successor to Flash? It is available for all platforms, runs ActionScript.

A shocking number of "native" applications are actually Adobe AIR. Brawlhalla on Steam (one of the top F2P games) used AIR as of a few years ago and still might! (They use a HAXE-based client on consoles)

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

#19

Post by jcfields »

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.

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

#20

Post by jimbob45 »

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…

Came to say this. Versioning was a nightmare and still is if you want to run any legacy SWFs. I guess that you could levy the same criticism against HTML with infinite NPM libraries though.
Post reply on HN