What’s “back then” to you? Flash grew up in the time of dial up when you could still get AOL install discs with 100 free hours in your typical grocery store PC magazine. I don’t recall people hating Flash a lot until later when it wasn’t a technical necessity anymore.
The first computer I remember using was a Compaq Portable with a green screen and DOS that my dad was allowed to bring home on weekends. I vividly remember going to Circuit City as a family to buy our first windows 3.1 machine.
Flash was very cool, at first, then it got used for WAY too much stuff that had no graceful degradation so you were stuck waiting a few minutes for an animation to load so you could see the content stuck behind flash.
Enjoying a game, video, or music is different than enjoying the underlying means of delivery.
Do people love Javascript and HTML5, or do they like streaming entertainment?
Do gamers love Unity, or do they love playing fun games, some of which are made with Unity?
I played games on every Windows from 3.1 and up (and MS-DOS before that), but I'm not pining for the days of Windows ME despite how much fun I had on that machine.
People used Internet Explorer to run all their Flash entertainment, but nobody is arguing that IE was loved even though it was part of the flash stack for a huge majority of users.
Notably, Flash is dead, and no one is arguing that we bring it back.
If I never have to sit through a flash loading bar gating an HTML website with a completely unnecessary splash page, you won't find me mourning. (yung'uns: this was a thing. If you wanted to go see a website sometimes you had to sit for a while so a dumb flash animation would show and you could click through to the actual HTML content. Jobs did you a favour)
Doesn’t pass the smell test. “Billions” is >2 billion. There weren’t that many people online when iPhone came out with its famous flash ban. https://ourworldindata.org/internet
The average person didnt really care what tech was involved, they dont romanticize software in the same way as tech inclined people do.
People hated it when apps were glitchy, when it wanted "constant" updates, or how they couldnt share a page because the entire site was some bloody flash applet.
> You're in the 0.001%. Your asks are arcane and orthogonal to most users of software, who just want their PC to do something neat and useful.
Right up until enshittification kicks in and suddenly everyone cares and there are shouts of destroying the evil techbros who are poisoning the minds of our youth to buy a new yacht.
Can you imagine the situation if Jobs hadn't killed Flash? Most of the commercial websites required a Flash blob to deliver full functionality even back then in the early 2000's. Adobe never even vaguely pretended to be the good guys, they would have enshittified as soon as they possibly could, as hard as they possibly could (as they have done with the rest of their software). The entire web would be held to ransom at this point.
> Most of the commercial websites required a Flash blob to deliver full functionality
Being a binary blob is not a strong argument all by itself. chrome.exe, firefox.exe, etc. are also binary blobs. I have no love for Adobe, but that specific criticism is weak.
I was an average-joe high school student back then.
People hated flash. Even non techies.
What’s “back then” to you? Flash grew up in the time of dial up when you could still get AOL install discs with 100 free hours in your typical grocery store PC magazine. I don’t recall people hating Flash a lot until later when it wasn’t a technical necessity anymore.
The first computer I remember using was a Compaq Portable with a green screen and DOS that my dad was allowed to bring home on weekends. I vividly remember going to Circuit City as a family to buy our first windows 3.1 machine.
Flash was very cool, at first, then it got used for WAY too much stuff that had no graceful degradation so you were stuck waiting a few minutes for an animation to load so you could see the content stuck behind flash.
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> People hated flash. Even non techies.
Billions of people enjoyed using Flash for games, video, music, and animated entertainment.
Enjoying a game, video, or music is different than enjoying the underlying means of delivery.
Do people love Javascript and HTML5, or do they like streaming entertainment?
Do gamers love Unity, or do they love playing fun games, some of which are made with Unity?
I played games on every Windows from 3.1 and up (and MS-DOS before that), but I'm not pining for the days of Windows ME despite how much fun I had on that machine.
People used Internet Explorer to run all their Flash entertainment, but nobody is arguing that IE was loved even though it was part of the flash stack for a huge majority of users.
Notably, Flash is dead, and no one is arguing that we bring it back.
If I never have to sit through a flash loading bar gating an HTML website with a completely unnecessary splash page, you won't find me mourning. (yung'uns: this was a thing. If you wanted to go see a website sometimes you had to sit for a while so a dumb flash animation would show and you could click through to the actual HTML content. Jobs did you a favour)
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or they enjoyed the games despite flash.
Doesn’t pass the smell test. “Billions” is >2 billion. There weren’t that many people online when iPhone came out with its famous flash ban. https://ourworldindata.org/internet
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People loved flash games.
what? no? people generally loved, especially with the likes of frog in a blender...
for the younguns https://archive.org/details/joe-cartoon-frog-blender#
The average person didnt really care what tech was involved, they dont romanticize software in the same way as tech inclined people do.
People hated it when apps were glitchy, when it wanted "constant" updates, or how they couldnt share a page because the entire site was some bloody flash applet.
> You're in the 0.001%. Your asks are arcane and orthogonal to most users of software, who just want their PC to do something neat and useful.
Right up until enshittification kicks in and suddenly everyone cares and there are shouts of destroying the evil techbros who are poisoning the minds of our youth to buy a new yacht.
Can you imagine the situation if Jobs hadn't killed Flash? Most of the commercial websites required a Flash blob to deliver full functionality even back then in the early 2000's. Adobe never even vaguely pretended to be the good guys, they would have enshittified as soon as they possibly could, as hard as they possibly could (as they have done with the rest of their software). The entire web would be held to ransom at this point.
> Most of the commercial websites required a Flash blob to deliver full functionality
Being a binary blob is not a strong argument all by itself. chrome.exe, firefox.exe, etc. are also binary blobs. I have no love for Adobe, but that specific criticism is weak.
Sure, but Adobe was never going to solve them.