Comment by zaptheimpaler
1 day ago
Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.
Enabling novice normies to make games was excellent, and I believe the whole game industry benefited from this resulting injection of fresh ideas. A lot of indy developers with fresh takes on what games could be got started this way. Zachtronics is one example of many that comes to mind right now.
On the other hand, for every flash game made there were about ten thousands flash-based ads, and nearly as many websites that used flash poorly for things like basic navigation (remember flash based website dropdown menus?). And for a few years it seemed like every single restaurant with a website was using flash for the entire thing, the results were borderline unusable in the best cases. And let's not forget that as long as flash was dominant, it was choking out the demand to get proper video support into browsers. Flash based video players performed like dog shit and made life on Linux a real chore.
Which made it much easier to block ads than it is now.
This post reminded me about the good time I had watching Salad Fingers and Happy Tree Friends. "Na, na, nanana na".
I wish Flash would have died sooner.
It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser.
Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.
Thankfully now we have WebAssembly/WebGL/WebGPU for that.
Flash players had zoom built in. And I believe there were textareas that allowed people to copy and paste text if they wanted, though it wasn't very common
Flash was the last thing that got people excited for the Web generally
This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
It was both awful when it showed up in the enterprise and amazing at unleashing creativity for many. Most young non-technical people I knew during its rise had regularly made Flash creations or even games, and deeply enjoyed the Cambrian explosion of games and animations for a few years.
I dunno, a whole subtree of the internet died and I’m not sure it really came back. It was a beautiful Galápagos Islands.
It was really meant for animation and games but got misused as a web GUI tool. I think it would've been fine to allow it anyway, and anyone who wants to build a GUI can just not use Flash.
For the most part, people are talking about games and animation, not text based websites.
Did you ever try one of those Flash-based room escape games? It was really amazing to lose yourself in the challenges and puzzles.
Flash was the original web Excel (also Lotus 1-2-3) -- a simultaneous design + data + programming tool.
These are terrible for maintainability, but excellent for usability.
On the whole, I'd say it was easily a loss for the greater web that web programming left the citizen-programmer behind. (By requiring them all to turn into hamfisted front-end javascript programmers...)
Many of the centralized evils of the current web might have been avoided if there had remained an onramp for the neophyte to really create for the web.
I.e. Facebook et al. might have instead been replaced by a hosted, better-indexed Macromedia create + edit + host platform
Or the amount of shit code produced by inexperienced front-end devs throwing spaghetti at IE might have been reduced
Even if Adobe had gotten their act together and fixed all security holes, Apple would have still killed it. It was always a threat as a popular design tool. And decades later, with the HTML canvas hype faded, there's still no replacement to what Adobe Flash could do - any designer could create stellar, interactive design that can be embedded into any website...without a monthly subscription.
True, I do think Godot is on the right path, I haven’t had time to look into it in detail, but their HTML5 export seems solid from the videos I saw.
Eh... it's very hit or miss. It keeps getting better though!
Godot is pretty awesome. Easy to learn, can do 2D or 3D, and can export to HTML5/webasm that works across all major OSes and browsers including mobile.
It’s far from perfect but I’ve been enjoying playing with it even for things that aren’t games and it has come a long way just in the last year or two. I feel like it’s close to (or is currently) having its Blender moment.
Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else.
I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.
> more security holes than anything else.
yeah it wasn't secure
but;
> bad performance
I don't think thats the case. For the longest while flash was faster than js at doing anything vaguely graphic based. The issue for apple was that the CPU in the iphone wasn't fast enough to do flash and anything else. Moreover Adobe didn't get on with jobs when they were talking about custom versions.
You have to remember that "apps" were never meant to be a thing on the iphone, it was all about "desktop" like web performance.
I remember well. I earned my living for a few years around 2010 porting slow Flash sites to regular web tech. It was hard to translate some functionality, but Flash was definitely slow compared to the equivalent regular website done without the plugin.
Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software.
The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of.
Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.
Performance was way better than what we have now with modern web stacks, we just have more powerful computers.
I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem. I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been a web standard.
Lots of people say performance was good, but that seems to be through the nostalgic lens of a handful of cool games.
Those did sometimes run really great, but most implementations were indeed very slow.
I remember vividly because it was part of my job back then to help with web performance and when we measured page speed and user interface responsiveness flash was almost always the worst.
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Flash performance is still better than current web stack's. Probably will always be - you could write non trivial games that would work on 128MB memory machine. Currently single browser tab with simple page can take more than that.
> more security holes than anything else.
Adobe was never known for its security or quality.
Flash was the HyperCard of the 90s/early 2000s.
There hasn’t been a replacement, yet.
The big issue with Flash was how overused it was.
When Flash was on its way out one app made at the place I worked still said they needed it, and I couldn't figure out why... it was a Java app. After some digging, I found it, some horizontal dividers on the page. They could have, and should have, just been images. They didn't do anything. Yet someone made them in Flash.
I'd also say all the drop-down menu systems were an overuse. Splash screens on every car company's home page. It was out of hand.
I guess you could call it a victim of it's own success, where once it was time for it to die (due to mobile), very few people were sad to see it go.
It was actually fantastic even for creating websites. To think that 20 years later we still don't have tools to make similar stuff with similar ease is mindblowing.
Try Roblox! Unless you haven't yet. I was SO impressed. Everything works as expected. 5 minutes after starting the game making kit I totally understood why Roblox is worth billions. It just works. It's magic. All can be scripted, but also any 6y.o. can use it.
Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.
There is still a way to run flash apps via https://ruffle.rs/ You can probably still make flash games and run them via ruffle.
Ruffle is amazing. I launched a 20+ year old game yesterday with zero compatibility issues. Even better than the original Flash because of superior security isolation mechanisms.
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So much college years time spent (wasted?) on Addicting Games.
Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted.
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Kids now create games in Roblox. More constrained, more commercial, more exploitative- but there is still a huge scene of non-developers creating games if you care to look.
Personal pet peeve, but as someone who still makes gifs, Image Ready. Adobe kind of absorbed Image Ready into Photoshop and it's just never lived up to how easy it was to make simple gifs in Image Ready
I was even fine with Flash being misused for web GUIs, just to pressure the open web to get its act together. At least devs got to pick 2 between [fancy, fast, easy]. If you want something better, make it instead of hobbling the competition.
Well, I miss Director which I used a lot for demos/prototyping.
it's called Roblox and it's bigger than Flash ever was