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There a lot a PR crap and marketing here, catering to adobe. > Over the years, Flash has helped bring the Web to greatness with innovations in media and animat

There a lot a PR crap and marketing here, catering to adobe. > Over the years, Flash has helped bring the Web to greatness with innovations in media and animation. In reality, it was actually the opposite. Flash made the web lose a couple late before much needed features emerged by occupying space with a proprietary plugin which is among the top cause of security issues due to constant vulnerabilities. It's sad that mozilla would take such a stance and pretend flash made the web great, or maybe they truly believe this which would explain a lot. Thing is by 2020 it's possible firefox would have ceased to exist, when we see the speed at which it become irrelevant and how mozilla pushes for this outcome. Or maybe by 2020 firefox would have rebounded and turned around to put the user first. We'll see.

jamesgeck0 9y ago
> Flash made the web lose a couple late before much needed features emerged by occupying space with a proprietary plugin Aren't HTML animation authoring tools are still catching up to what Flash had? I don't know that it held the web back so much as it provided a bar to clear. On a content level, Flash was definitely a boon. A lot of stuff like Homestar Runner and Kongregate could not have existed with pure web technology at the time. There was a Hanselminutes podcast where it was mentioned that all the hostility towards Flash before HTML animation was ready for prime time drove a lot of animators away from the web completely, and that we're still recovering from their departure.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  IIRC the timeline was something like this: macromedia bought flash from another company and changed its name to flash and released it around 1997. At the time it was merely capable of doing vector animations (no chance to spawn kongregate out of it, if spawning kongregate can be considered a good thing or not is another debate). Work on an open standard for vector graphics and animation started in 1998 (svg and smil) and due to the nature of the process took time. By the time the specification was mature in 2001 and 1999 flash had gone through a few major versions and had just started including the first version of scripting (still no kongregate possible at this point). Flash got another major release introducing actionscript 2 in 2004 and after being bought by adobe got its 9th major version with actionscript 3 in 2007 (and there we have kongregate). 4 years later support for the first version of the open standard equivalent was still incomplete in browsers, 10 years after the specification was mature. Could it be that it was not a priority for them as there was flash filling this market ? In the mean time flash had added support for video, of which the open standard equivalent specification took a while then took another while before browsers implemented it (once again, could it be related to fact that flash already filled this market ?) The other point to note is that flash from version 1 came with a GUI animation editor with a slight learning curve, while the open standard required to code, something most graphic designers do not care to learn. This also played a part in flash popularity despite being proprietary, being a resource hog, a major security issue and a serious privacy concern. IMHO had flash not existed, the open standard would have been given a higher priority and better authoring tools may have seen the light of the day. So as we saw, kongregate could not have existed with flash either at the time, and by the time kongregate launched, flash has had 10 years of existence and the better half of dominating the market preventing the emergence of the web technology that would have made a non-flash kongregate possible. And as we see now in 2017, the closed and proprietary flash is once again on the way out and with it about 20 years of web history are gonna disappear and kongregate is now switching to pure web technology, though it could have been done a few years back it only happened now that flash has been officially deprecated on all platforms. Nothing that we weren't repeatedly warned about for maybe 15 years now.
EpicEng 9y ago
Nonsense. Flash certainly has technical issues, but it provided a platform by which people could build things that they had no other way to build otherwise. Hell, there _still_ isn't a platform which makes this stuff as easy as flash does.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  I don't know why you would say it's nonsense, just compare to how mozilla talked of flash back in 2008[1], instead of "bringing greatness and innovation to the web" it was all "dangers of the proprietary web", "They're not here for the glory; they're here for the money", " Adobe's long-standing refusal to provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users" , "If you consider proprietary technologies, think hard; are you really trading convenience in the short term with independence in the long term?" and "proprietary solutions running on top of the web are trying to take over". But the guy who championed this stance has since left mozilla in 2015 after 17 years to pursue his objective of changing the world with Open Source and Free Software and the Web. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20081227145942/http://news.zdnet.com/2424-3515_22-199508.html https://web.archive.org/web/20081227145942/http://news.zdnet...
  - EpicEng 9y ago
    Again, you're talking about one side of things here. I'm sure I don't disagree with you on most if not all of the technical issues. You can't just look at this from that angle alone though, you have to also appreciate what it enabled for people who weren't overly technical and had zero usable tools with which to build things. You also have to appreciate that things changed a bit after Adobe bought Macromedia. As far as them being int it "for the money"... whatever, I have no problem with that. If there were better, more open tools available no one would have used Flash. There weren't, and I don't expect companies to always be altruistic in their endeavors.
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      I disagree with you and reality tends to confirm that having open tools available does not prevent closed tools usage. And there are a few reasons: as you mentioned non technical people may not care about open/closed or at least do not have this high on their priorities, then open tools often are worse than closed equivalent. I don't mind companies being in it for making a profit, what I mind is the building of a closed web vs an open web. The closed version is doomed to fail and takes away power from the people while the open one is empowering people and gives us a chance at democracy and freedom. Sadly this is a fight that we lost and I tend to agree with Peter Sunde, now it is a matter of damage control.

jamesgeck0 9y ago

> Flash made the web lose a couple late before much needed features emerged by occupying space with a proprietary plugin Aren't HTML animation authoring tools are still catching up to what Flash had? I don't know that it held the web back so much as it provided a bar to clear. On a content level, Flash was definitely a boon. A lot of stuff like Homestar Runner and Kongregate could not have existed with pure web technology at the time. There was a Hanselminutes podcast where it was mentioned that all the hostility towards Flash before HTML animation was ready for prime time drove a lot of animators away from the web completely, and that we're still recovering from their departure.

bigbugbag 9y ago
IIRC the timeline was something like this: macromedia bought flash from another company and changed its name to flash and released it around 1997. At the time it was merely capable of doing vector animations (no chance to spawn kongregate out of it, if spawning kongregate can be considered a good thing or not is another debate). Work on an open standard for vector graphics and animation started in 1998 (svg and smil) and due to the nature of the process took time. By the time the specification was mature in 2001 and 1999 flash had gone through a few major versions and had just started including the first version of scripting (still no kongregate possible at this point). Flash got another major release introducing actionscript 2 in 2004 and after being bought by adobe got its 9th major version with actionscript 3 in 2007 (and there we have kongregate). 4 years later support for the first version of the open standard equivalent was still incomplete in browsers, 10 years after the specification was mature. Could it be that it was not a priority for them as there was flash filling this market ? In the mean time flash had added support for video, of which the open standard equivalent specification took a while then took another while before browsers implemented it (once again, could it be related to fact that flash already filled this market ?) The other point to note is that flash from version 1 came with a GUI animation editor with a slight learning curve, while the open standard required to code, something most graphic designers do not care to learn. This also played a part in flash popularity despite being proprietary, being a resource hog, a major security issue and a serious privacy concern. IMHO had flash not existed, the open standard would have been given a higher priority and better authoring tools may have seen the light of the day. So as we saw, kongregate could not have existed with flash either at the time, and by the time kongregate launched, flash has had 10 years of existence and the better half of dominating the market preventing the emergence of the web technology that would have made a non-flash kongregate possible. And as we see now in 2017, the closed and proprietary flash is once again on the way out and with it about 20 years of web history are gonna disappear and kongregate is now switching to pure web technology, though it could have been done a few years back it only happened now that flash has been officially deprecated on all platforms. Nothing that we weren't repeatedly warned about for maybe 15 years now.

EpicEng 9y ago

Nonsense. Flash certainly has technical issues, but it provided a platform by which people could build things that they had no other way to build otherwise. Hell, there _still_ isn't a platform which makes this stuff as easy as flash does.

bigbugbag 9y ago
I don't know why you would say it's nonsense, just compare to how mozilla talked of flash back in 2008[1], instead of "bringing greatness and innovation to the web" it was all "dangers of the proprietary web", "They're not here for the glory; they're here for the money", " Adobe's long-standing refusal to provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users" , "If you consider proprietary technologies, think hard; are you really trading convenience in the short term with independence in the long term?" and "proprietary solutions running on top of the web are trying to take over". But the guy who championed this stance has since left mozilla in 2015 after 17 years to pursue his objective of changing the world with Open Source and Free Software and the Web. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20081227145942/http://news.zdnet.com/2424-3515_22-199508.html https://web.archive.org/web/20081227145942/http://news.zdnet...
- EpicEng 9y ago
  Again, you're talking about one side of things here. I'm sure I don't disagree with you on most if not all of the technical issues. You can't just look at this from that angle alone though, you have to also appreciate what it enabled for people who weren't overly technical and had zero usable tools with which to build things. You also have to appreciate that things changed a bit after Adobe bought Macromedia. As far as them being int it "for the money"... whatever, I have no problem with that. If there were better, more open tools available no one would have used Flash. There weren't, and I don't expect companies to always be altruistic in their endeavors.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    I disagree with you and reality tends to confirm that having open tools available does not prevent closed tools usage. And there are a few reasons: as you mentioned non technical people may not care about open/closed or at least do not have this high on their priorities, then open tools often are worse than closed equivalent. I don't mind companies being in it for making a profit, what I mind is the building of a closed web vs an open web. The closed version is doomed to fail and takes away power from the people while the open one is empowering people and gives us a chance at democracy and freedom. Sadly this is a fight that we lost and I tend to agree with Peter Sunde, now it is a matter of damage control.