Live data from Hacker News

The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

phoronix.com

1–10 of 19 posts

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#4
I am really grateful for this effort! Because of it ancient gems like z0r.de can continue to exist.

z0r had a profound influence on my younger self by introducing the art form of looping way before it was widely understood (Snapchat, TikTok) and combined it with a heavy dose of dadaism.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#5
There have been multiple open source Flash player efforts that get 70% of the way there and stall.

I could surmise reasons, and so could you. But does anyone know the reason?

Is there some common blocker that they all founder on or something?

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#6

There have been multiple open source Flash player efforts that get 70% of the way there and stall. I could surmise reasons, and so could you. But does anyone know the reason? Is there some common blocker that they all founder on or something?

Not an expert at all, but there is a complexity wall when you get to newer Flash with ActionScript (3)?

My very rough guess is that post late-2000s content frequently needs these features and it's at least an order of magnitude work to recreate them

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#8
> annoying flash ads

Thank god that is a thing of the past, right?

In all seriousness, Flash was better than the HTML counterparts that replaced it, in almost every respect. ActionScript is the better Javascript. The graphics are faster than Canvas, had better authoring tools than SVG, and a better API than either. People do not know what they are missing.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#9

There have been multiple open source Flash player efforts that get 70% of the way there and stall. I could surmise reasons, and so could you. But does anyone know the reason? Is there some common blocker that they all founder on or something?

Not an expert at all, but there is a complexity wall when you get to newer Flash with ActionScript (3)? My very rough guess is that post late-2000s content frequently needs these features and it's at least an order of magnitude work to recreate them

I think it's more down to engrained quirks in the existing implementation. IIRC, adobe gave mozilla an open-source implementation of actionscript 3 back in the day to try and help legitimize it as an ECMAscript implementation.

Re: The Open Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support in 2024

#10

> annoying flash ads Thank god that is a thing of the past, right? In all seriousness, Flash was better than the HTML counterparts that replaced it, in almost every respect. ActionScript is the better Javascript. The graphics are faster than Canvas, had better authoring tools than SVG, and a better API than either. People do not know what they are missing.

ActionScript and JavaScript are basically the same language, considering the roots of them both and that they share 99% of the syntax and functionality, ActionScript being a "lite" version of JavaScript. They're definitely more similar than they are different.

The only major difference (which is incidentally also probably why JS "won") was that JS came from development that happened out in the open, as FOSS, while ActionScript was a proprietary language from a company.

Post reply on HN