Comment by acdha
21 hours ago
Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner.
I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbugs where changes in one area would affect unrelated functionality in other modules, etc. — and while it cost something like $800, it was completely unsupported: I filed a number of trivially reproducible bugs with reduced test cases but never heard anything back until the next release came out and they sent automated suggestions that the bug might be fixed so I should buy a full-price license and find out.
Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.
The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%.
And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...
> And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive.
One of his arguments, and not the most important one. Looking at https://newslang.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Thoughts-on-F..., he says the most important reason is that Apple doesn’t want Adobe to be in control of a major API on iPhones (he buries that’s the main reason somewhat by mentioning it last because, I think, he knew that argument is more “because it’s good for Apple” than “because it’s good for our users”)
Yes, he mentions reliability, battery life, security, too, but those are things Adobe (in theory) could have fixed.
He also mentions Flash isn’t open. Again that is is something Adobe could have fixed, but I doubt they were fully willing to do that at the time
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I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream.
The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
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I'd love a browser switch to disable JS in N layers of IFrame... maybe you can have it one layer deep, but nested, it just disables. That would save a lot of grief.
There was also the argument that "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash"
Flash had many issues for sure, first and foremost security. But I can’t help but feel sad of what was lost since then. The Flash era produced some really unique experiences on the web.
It was always fun when you were trying to find a contractor or something and got greeted with https://web.archive.org/web/20101028145116/http://industrial... .
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it was about as unique as seeing corn in my poop sometimes.
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And now were back with WebAssembly, WebGL, WebGPU, targeting 10+ year old graphic cards, without comparable easy of use tooling.
Those that think using Godot or Unity is the same, never did Flash games.
Those are all open web standards, though. Flash was a proprietary platform. I can't even run Flash stuff anymore because it was proprietary.
I worked in eLearning in the early-mid 00's and Flash/Flex were king at the time... Came to find so many flaws that were used, and kept me from using Flash at home.
A bit earlier... when Adobe had taken over Macromedia, my hopes were really that Flash would become something like a .zip file with assets as SVG, audio, etc. and ActionScript/JavaScript as the glue... I think it could still be a good package format for browsers. Given Adobe's work prior to that on advancing/enhancing SVG support for browsers etc. Making Flash just the best of breed tool for creators.
That's not what happened though. Adobe is just a massive rental scheme at this point, and I think the time may be up sooner than later... I honestly think at this point, the first well-placed competing product with solid Linux support will unseat them. I know a lot of people are using Davinci Resolve and Photopea, and if those work well enough for you, that's great. Not sure the effort it would take to get some of the open alternatives into a better position overall.
Flash was better back when it was called VideoWorks. ;)
Notably, there was also a MusicWorks. Both Mac-only. But like EARLY Mac-only.
/dates me
> heisenbugs
gold
A well-established term of art dating to 1983:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug>.
Gold, but not new gold: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html
I also learned this term pretty recently, loved it. Another fav tech term is automagically :-)
I'm guessing you are very young!
Fnord gold
23 skidoo.
Fnord Knox
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Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium.
JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse.
I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and Adobe for being such awful stewards of one of the most amazing web technologies.
Kids growing up today have no idea how magical Flash was. It was like Roblox or Minecraft for web.
Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease.
Magical? Those are some rose tinted glasses. Having to install a binary blob from a free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask. Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns and virtually non-existent Linux support.
I remember the time of browser plug-ins (not “extensions”). Everyone happily installed Flash, and the Crescendo midi plugin, and multiple other in-retrospect-ill-advised plugins to enable fun stuff to work in their browser.
The “everyone hates Flash” stuff came later. It served a purpose for quite a while and people loved it. Newgrounds was a place of magic.
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> Having to install a binary blob from a free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask.
The entire browser ecosystem started out closed source. Even JavaScript was written to interact with closed source Java Applets.
> Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns
Browsers still are the goto target for contests like Pwn2own. It is almost like inviting the entire world to run untrusted code on your computer is not a great idea, no matter how many security buzzwords browser makers like to throw arround.
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Yeah but we were kids, we didn't give a shit about any of that. Kind of still don't give a shit about any of it tbh. There's security holes in everything anyway.
The overwhelming majority of computer users simply DO NOT CARE about things like "install a binary blob" or "free-software hostile vendor" or "non-existent Linux support". They installed the plugin and got a way better experience.
> Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns
I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of Flash versus Javascript (or other browser technology) vulns over their respective lifespans.
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> Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power.
Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?
> What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today
Show me the JavaScript framework (or tool that exports JS) that you can give it to a middle schooler and have them make a cartoon with audio and moving images that they can draw themselves, while responding to user input. Have the exported artifact be consistent across all major operating systems and browsers.
Yeah, Flash was never replaced
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Flash had its problems but as a user, it looked sharper and smoother than even current websites. And its editor gave non-tech users ability to create amazing animations, interfaces, and even games.
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what’s he is referring is the editor and the easy way of drawing things, still agree we can do things today but a easy to draw editor like that is missing. I was a fan of flash and fireworks.
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What was possible in Flash in 2005 in IE6 on a Duron processor with 32MB RAM is possible today in a gargantuan bloatware browser that eats all your hardware.
There was more unique content/UI in the Flash era.
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You'll get hammered for this on HN, but the web was magical and weird with Flash around, and now it feels quite vanilla and boring. I long for the days of weird experimental art and goofy animations and bonkers UIs.
It was a fun and experimental time for sure. Way more stuff was weird in a good way. Standards hadn’t settled. All kinds of fun stuff was created in Flash that could not have been built with the standardized web tech of the day. I don’t really miss Flash but I do miss the early internet sometimes and Flash was part of that. (Remember when it was FutureSplash?)
I would be remiss if I didn’t post the most early-Internet-type thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Dungeon Soup.
https://m.youtube.com/@DungeonSoup
Once upon a time this would have been my favorite Flash cartoon series.
“Season one” playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSq76P-lbX8Ws6vgAAC2WhwSu...
I would rather say, that now the web feels like being handed turds at every turn, and needing to wear a hazmat suit, if one wants to stay clean. Not what I would call boring. More like infuriating.
Yeah but the execution still mattered. I'm a Flash / Shockwave fan as well but there's no point pretending that package was sufficient for the job it was pitched to do. Macromedia seemed to be on a really good track with Shockwave and Flash, but either didn't set up the technology for internet success, or really just sold out the goods with the Adobe acquisition.
In any case, take heart though. If we did it once, we can do it again.
But we won't because this isn't something that can be done by consensus or by an ad company.
What I never understand is why we never got a Flash-level authoring tool that exported to modern JavaScript/Canvas. Ruffle shows it can be done.
Adobe could have retuned Animate to do it, but instead let it languish as a niche animation tool for some animation studios to use before trying to kill it.
this seems like a huge gap in the market
Those downvoting you have no idea of what you are talking about. Flash was what truly brought multimedia to the internet. You could make complex vector animations so easily in it, and it would only take a few minutes to load on a dialup or ISDN because of its small size (10's or 100's of KB). At one point, it used to power the whole of Youtube (and many other video sites). "Web applications" in this era actually meant something built with Flash. And it did all this on ancient hardware. Flash used to run on 90+ % of internet connected PCs at one point if I remember right. And because of that, you could count on Flash player more than the browsers they ran in. Adobe 100% screwed it up.
I have less rosy memories of self-indulgent Flash loading pages which took forever over dialup and contributed nothing. And a lot of weird-for-the-sake-of-it UI experiments.
There were also fun sites and games and generally silliness, but there was a lot of Flash slop.
Was it a more interesting web? It was more experimental and colourful. The Flash/Kai's Power Tools/Fireworks maximalist period was more inventive, but the UX wasn't necessarily friendlier.
It was a great time to be running a design agency, but not always a great time to be an ordinary user.
What actually killed Flash? Social media. That took the user interest, siloed it, and cut off the oxygen of individual attention.
Which is why even if someone reinvented a simple animation -> js etc tool it wouldn't make a difference. The attention isn't there to support a culture where creative sites become memes in their own right and search engines make them easy to find.
I would think:
1) macromedia ->
2) adobe ->
3) steve jobs
I think 2 was the root cause, not #1 or #3.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...
That said, I wonder how easy it is to publish on apple? I think of xcode in sort of the same way sj complaining about adobe being cross-platform and slow.
You know you can use Ruffle if you really want Flash right?
https://ruffle.rs
But the only standard you need is WASM. All browsers support it. Use whatever you want to make it. In fact, Ruffle is just a WASM app.
The problem is that, while there's no theoretical barrier to an authoring tool with a Director-like user experience that exports to Wasm, no one has actually written one, and it's not a small amount of work.
(I agree that we're better off without Flash, but this particular problem is real and unsolved.)
Or you can just use PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org/ ) and install the original Flash player plug-in in it.
Ruffle is not complete or comprehensive. In my test of a dozen swf ruffle could successfully display about half. Compare to the actual flash plugin Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202 (11.2.202.643) in my retro machine browser which displayed them all perfectly.
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this is unfortunately, the most revisionist take I can imagine. I don’t mean this in a personal way, mind you but while it may have been magical to publish interactive websites, using flash, that magic is utterly outweighed by the mundane vulnerabilities that flash was riddled with.
It’s safe to say we all miss sites like Homestar runner, and I had a co- worker who generated many meme – worthy flash presentations of his coworkers, which were hysterical. however, flash generated security vulnerabilities on the daily, and unfortunately, these vulnerabilities were very conveniently cross platform. These vulnerabilities, which Adobe couldn’t, or wouldn’t, resolve resulted in many many lost hours fixing virus – and Trojan horse – infested PCs, Macs, and cell phones. Adobe never managed to sandbox flash at all.
I miss a lot of old flash content, and I’m sure many people miss the ease with which you could create interactive content for websites. The fault here lies squarely on Adobe, who wouldn’t fix the situation.
Compared to the best that someone can vibe code? Not to show my age, but we were kids when flash came out. That copy of macro media? I don't know about you. We spent hours and hours and hours with that spend hours and hours and hours with vibecoding and tell me that you really can't accomplish similar shit. Then you just to deploy it you and I might be to smart to just paste your Vercel API key in ChatGPT, but pretend you're 16 right now.
I can tell you how much tsc sucks off the top of my head but what I can't do is tell you to hit ctrl+enter in Claude desktop to play movie.
What kids know today is how magical Claude desktop and ChatGPT are. The deploy story is trivial. just give the AI the key. We can judge someone for being dumb enough to do that, but unless you're selling consulting services, it's not nice to laugh. if you are selling consulting services then let's talk sales channels lol
Yes compared to vibe coded stuff too. And it costed less money.
> "Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease."
Somewhat mirrors my experience with all those rubbish non-PDF formats for digital document publishing, e. g. ePub: Often terminally ugly and utterly useless on top of it (not properly citeable, et cetera).
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I wonder which one's more "Evil" Oracle or Adobe, it's surprising they didn't eat each other alive.
Oracle, no question. They were so much better at executing competently.
btw the account you're replying to is an LLM bot
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