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While I agree that it might be time for Flash (the proprietary plugin) to be retired, I'm totally against dancing on it's grave, as is the tone of this article.

While I agree that it might be time for Flash (the proprietary plugin) to be retired, I'm totally against dancing on it's grave, as is the tone of this article. We have to respect it for what it brought to the world. Flash has enabled many technologies and companies, like online video (youtube?), music playback (....) , games, cartoons and so on. I remember how amazed I was by the perfection of the first flash website that I've seen. You could interact with spheres, it made high quality sounds and had cool animations and transitions. That was in Netscape Navigator 4. This was absolutely impossible with HTML back then. It's still pretty difficult to achieve the same results with HTML5 today. Flash enabled artists. Nearly all my artist friends have started or played around with flash. Some became animators, some game designers, some UX designers, etc. I know programmers who were artists playing around with flash and then they got interested in ActionScript and are now full time programmers. It was their digital classroom. So let's not forget all this good stuff when talking about the old man. Let him live his final years of retirement in peace. And who knows, maybe if Adobe open sources it, it might even rejuvenate and have a spectacular come back ?

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
> Flash has enabled many technologies and companies, like online video (youtube?), music playback (....) , games, cartoons and so on. We had online video and online music before Flash. The <embed> tag. > I remember how amazed I was by the perfection of the first flash website that I've seen. You could interact with spheres, it made high quality sounds and had cool animations and transitions. That was in Netscape Navigator 4. > This was absolutely impossible with HTML back then. It's still pretty difficult to achieve the same results with HTML5 today. It wasn't impossible with HTML back then. Both Microsoft and Netscape had (incompatible) DHTML implementations you could use to do this stuff. Heck, Windows 98's desktop linked to a showcase of this stuff. It was amazing. No Flash required. Now, this isn't to say Flash wasn't useful for doing these things more easily, but it never was the only way to do these things, just the most convenient.
- fenomas 11y ago
  > The <embed> tag When it worked, which was rarely. ;) Flash's contribution was to solve the codec problem, which realistically is what made content services like youtube possible. > DHTML It existed, sure, but on top of IE and NS having completely unrelated solutions, even within each browser the behavior varied randomly by OS and version, and defied graceful degradation. In those days if displaying correctly for a meaningful subset of both mac and PC users was important, you used Flash.
- exodust 11y ago
  DHTML was a horrible buggy inaccessible mess for anything more than extremely basic stuff. No design tools, and they didn't perform nearly as well as Flash. And sound? I highly doubt that in 1998 there was any capability for syncing sound files to animations outside of browser plugins like Flash, or shockwave or other lesser known plugins.
cousin_it 11y ago
Yeah. Say what you will about the the bad old times of Dreamweaver and Flash, but back then, visual artists could actually contribute to the Web without going through "web programmer" gatekeepers. Unfortunately programmers have recaptured the power since then, declared the old technologies broken in ways that only programmers can understand, and brought nothing in return. IMO that's not an accident. Many programmers would also love to kill off Excel, because it's messy and not a "proper database" or something. And if the rumors are true, HyperCard was killed because "you could do everything in Cocoa and ProjectBuilder instead". User-empowering tech always feels messy and unprincipled to programmers.
- exodust 11y ago
  Dreamweaver was a different kettle of fish.. not the same, it was worse because it messed with HTML code, injecting its own horrible mess of stuff including nasty javascript. Early Dreamweaver at least. Flash doesn't mess with HTML, it actually forms a fairly good connection with javascript on the page with pretty seamless data exchange between the page and the SWF, back and forth.
- kitsunesoba 11y ago
  I don't think developers have problems with user-enabling technologies (at least I don't). What we do have problems with, however, are technologies that suck away our battery life and CPU time with little or no return, all while bringing a steady stream of exploitable security holes. If Adobe had actually made a serious effort to make Flash a lean, secure machine it'd still be around. Instead, they decided to just keep tacking on new features rather than spending several releases doing heavy optimization and only reactively dealt with security, so here we are. The bottom line is that nobody but Adobe is to blame for the death of Flash.
  - BatFastard 11y ago
    If you want to blame anyone for stealing your battery life, blame it on the programmers. They were the using who took and easy to use (therefore easy to abuse) tech and misused it. Does Flash have more security holes then other techs? Maybe, but I do know that since it has a billion users, it is a prime target for every hacker. However I will agree that Adobe has drank the cool aid when it comes to the broken model which is HTML5, CSS, and WebGL
k__ 11y ago
Flash and Internet Explorer stole us probably 10 years of technological advancement. The state of the open web slowed down because of them. And I see this happening again with native mobile apps.
- deskamess 11y ago
  Perhaps... but they did stuff that the tools of the "open web" could not... those technologies "got stuff done". And if they stole 10 years, then the competition (open web) was not yet up to par for about 7-8 years.
- fenomas 11y ago
  This is insanely far off base. When Flash was ascendant there was no open web, not on the horizon, not even as a glimmer in the milkman's eye. HTML/web development was a nasty brutish mess with each browser extending each "standard" however they wanted, while the w3c specified stuff none of the vendors were even considering implementing. Then Flash came along with a single API, a single consistent model for interactivity, actual graceful degradation, video and audio that worked, etc. And content worked the same way across browsers and platforms. And it was much, much better than HTML/JS, so web development justifiably got its ass kicked for a few years. THEN, gradually, the standards committees and the browser started standardizing and implementing everything Flash had validated. That lead to the open web.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
moneypenny 11y ago
Hear, hear. Flash was the most wonderful laboratory. Also: The Flash Virtual Machine is the real problem. It's bloody awful and buggy and slow. The tooling was fabulous, though. ActionScript (3) was (IMHO) excellent, well-documented and easy to use for developer-hackers. MTASC and then the Flex incremental compiler were great too, and I'm sorry they're out of use.

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

> Flash has enabled many technologies and companies, like online video (youtube?), music playback (....) , games, cartoons and so on. We had online video and online music before Flash. The <embed> tag. > I remember how amazed I was by the perfection of the first flash website that I've seen. You could interact with spheres, it made high quality sounds and had cool animations and transitions. That was in Netscape Navigator 4. > This was absolutely impossible with HTML back then. It's still pretty difficult to achieve the same results with HTML5 today. It wasn't impossible with HTML back then. Both Microsoft and Netscape had (incompatible) DHTML implementations you could use to do this stuff. Heck, Windows 98's desktop linked to a showcase of this stuff. It was amazing. No Flash required. Now, this isn't to say Flash wasn't useful for doing these things more easily, but it never was the only way to do these things, just the most convenient.

fenomas 11y ago
> The <embed> tag When it worked, which was rarely. ;) Flash's contribution was to solve the codec problem, which realistically is what made content services like youtube possible. > DHTML It existed, sure, but on top of IE and NS having completely unrelated solutions, even within each browser the behavior varied randomly by OS and version, and defied graceful degradation. In those days if displaying correctly for a meaningful subset of both mac and PC users was important, you used Flash.
exodust 11y ago
DHTML was a horrible buggy inaccessible mess for anything more than extremely basic stuff. No design tools, and they didn't perform nearly as well as Flash. And sound? I highly doubt that in 1998 there was any capability for syncing sound files to animations outside of browser plugins like Flash, or shockwave or other lesser known plugins.

cousin_it 11y ago

Yeah. Say what you will about the the bad old times of Dreamweaver and Flash, but back then, visual artists could actually contribute to the Web without going through "web programmer" gatekeepers. Unfortunately programmers have recaptured the power since then, declared the old technologies broken in ways that only programmers can understand, and brought nothing in return. IMO that's not an accident. Many programmers would also love to kill off Excel, because it's messy and not a "proper database" or something. And if the rumors are true, HyperCard was killed because "you could do everything in Cocoa and ProjectBuilder instead". User-empowering tech always feels messy and unprincipled to programmers.

exodust 11y ago
Dreamweaver was a different kettle of fish.. not the same, it was worse because it messed with HTML code, injecting its own horrible mess of stuff including nasty javascript. Early Dreamweaver at least. Flash doesn't mess with HTML, it actually forms a fairly good connection with javascript on the page with pretty seamless data exchange between the page and the SWF, back and forth.
kitsunesoba 11y ago
I don't think developers have problems with user-enabling technologies (at least I don't). What we do have problems with, however, are technologies that suck away our battery life and CPU time with little or no return, all while bringing a steady stream of exploitable security holes. If Adobe had actually made a serious effort to make Flash a lean, secure machine it'd still be around. Instead, they decided to just keep tacking on new features rather than spending several releases doing heavy optimization and only reactively dealt with security, so here we are. The bottom line is that nobody but Adobe is to blame for the death of Flash.
- BatFastard 11y ago
  If you want to blame anyone for stealing your battery life, blame it on the programmers. They were the using who took and easy to use (therefore easy to abuse) tech and misused it. Does Flash have more security holes then other techs? Maybe, but I do know that since it has a billion users, it is a prime target for every hacker. However I will agree that Adobe has drank the cool aid when it comes to the broken model which is HTML5, CSS, and WebGL

k__ 11y ago

Flash and Internet Explorer stole us probably 10 years of technological advancement. The state of the open web slowed down because of them. And I see this happening again with native mobile apps.

deskamess 11y ago
Perhaps... but they did stuff that the tools of the "open web" could not... those technologies "got stuff done". And if they stole 10 years, then the competition (open web) was not yet up to par for about 7-8 years.
fenomas 11y ago
This is insanely far off base. When Flash was ascendant there was no open web, not on the horizon, not even as a glimmer in the milkman's eye. HTML/web development was a nasty brutish mess with each browser extending each "standard" however they wanted, while the w3c specified stuff none of the vendors were even considering implementing. Then Flash came along with a single API, a single consistent model for interactivity, actual graceful degradation, video and audio that worked, etc. And content worked the same way across browsers and platforms. And it was much, much better than HTML/JS, so web development justifiably got its ass kicked for a few years. THEN, gradually, the standards committees and the browser started standardizing and implementing everything Flash had validated. That lead to the open web.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

moneypenny 11y ago

Hear, hear. Flash was the most wonderful laboratory. Also: The Flash Virtual Machine is the real problem. It's bloody awful and buggy and slow. The tooling was fabulous, though. ActionScript (3) was (IMHO) excellent, well-documented and easy to use for developer-hackers. MTASC and then the Flex incremental compiler were great too, and I'm sorry they're out of use.