3 ms·

Flash has never been this smooth.

girvo 8y ago
Everyone had a bad habit of leaving the FPS at 25 (iirc that was the default. Maybe 24). I wonder how smooth it can be if that was fixed and the same engineering went into it that goes into GSAP? Actually I don’t really wonder; Flash is well dead, but it’s interesting to ponder!
- spiralganglion 8y ago
  The default was 12, then later 24 IIRC. I believe the highest you could set was 30, though maybe that's changed in recent years. I work for a company that does both SVG+JS and Flash media, still. The web-tech media is smoother (because 60fps), but the Flash media has a much higher complexity ceiling — which is why we haven't 100% switched to the web yet (and because our clients still prefer and pay for the Flash stuff, sigh)
est 8y ago
For equal amount of animations Flash is smoother than most HTML5 crap. HTML5 can not even streaming vector animations.
- rchaud 8y ago
  Which is why there are so many braggy blog posts by engineering teams when they manage to build 60fps animations on modern browsers. I remember one article from Flipboard about getting native-like flip animations to work on their mobile site. They made it sound like they'd cracked cold fusion. Despite all of the improvements in browser support for JS/CSS driven animation since the glory days of Flash 10 years ago, the web seems more static and text/image heavy than ever.
  - wolco 8y ago
    More image heavy. Content sites seemed to have disappeared.
aikah 8y ago
> Flash has never been this smooth. Yes it has. You could even create your own shaders/filters with a specialized language. Frankly it's great that things like that can be done with js/html but people did way more impressive things 15 years ago. I'm really not impressed at all, personally.
- mping 8y ago
  True, I remember seeing a site circa 2005 that had a completely crazy flash intro with 3d/360 camera pan thing - running on a regular 2005/6 computer. I think things are more polished now, because of bandwidth we can afford large images, videos, etc but back in the day there was some truly impressive Flash stuff.
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  Well, show me a link then. We can still run it (not for long). I’m talking about hardware acceleration, antialias, no dropped frame and in sync with the monitor’s refresh rate. Even a simple CSS3 animation beats the shit out of Flash in this regard.
  - aikah 8y ago
    > I’m talking about hardware acceleration, antialias, no dropped frame and in sync with the monitor’s refresh rate. All supported by flash, I just told you about the possibility of coding your own shaders with a C like language where do you think these shaders were computed? > Well, show me a link then. We can still run it (not for long). You know damn well that most flash content has been retired from the web.
    - tambourine_man 8y ago
      I was there at the time, making a living out of webdesign and Flash. My jaw dropped when I saw webkit translate(). Not everyone notices but it makes all the difference to some. >You know damn well that most flash content has been retired from the web. I’m sure most of the impressive demos can still be dug out. I understand it was possible to compute on the GPU with AS3, but the end result, rendered inside the plugin box of a browser never felt this fluid.
spiralganglion 8y ago
I work for a company that does both SVG+JS and Flash media, and there are some legit cases where we still choose to use Flash, because SVG can't reach the same performance — anything with lots of animated gradients, deep scene hierarchies, transparencies, masking, filter effects, or high vertex counts. SVG rendering in all browsers not named "Chrome" is crazy slow, and in Chrome SVG rendering is not pretty when you look closely at it. But SVG is the only browser graphics tech with excellent tooling for illustrators (namely, Illustrator). So we've been forced to change both our art style, and our rendering stack, to deal with the death of Flash. That's life in the tech industry, fine. But it's misguided to say that the browser is unequivocally better or worse performing than Flash. It really depends what you're making, and how you make it. It's totally possible to make something on the web that looks and performs better than it would in Flash. But you have to put strict restrictions on what kind of art you use, and what technology you use to render that art, which puts restrictions on your production process, which sucks.

Everyone had a bad habit of leaving the FPS at 25 (iirc that was the default. Maybe 24). I wonder how smooth it can be if that was fixed and the same engineering went into it that goes into GSAP? Actually I don’t really wonder; Flash is well dead, but it’s interesting to ponder!

spiralganglion 8y ago
The default was 12, then later 24 IIRC. I believe the highest you could set was 30, though maybe that's changed in recent years. I work for a company that does both SVG+JS and Flash media, still. The web-tech media is smoother (because 60fps), but the Flash media has a much higher complexity ceiling — which is why we haven't 100% switched to the web yet (and because our clients still prefer and pay for the Flash stuff, sigh)

est 8y ago

For equal amount of animations Flash is smoother than most HTML5 crap. HTML5 can not even streaming vector animations.

rchaud 8y ago
Which is why there are so many braggy blog posts by engineering teams when they manage to build 60fps animations on modern browsers. I remember one article from Flipboard about getting native-like flip animations to work on their mobile site. They made it sound like they'd cracked cold fusion. Despite all of the improvements in browser support for JS/CSS driven animation since the glory days of Flash 10 years ago, the web seems more static and text/image heavy than ever.
- wolco 8y ago
  More image heavy. Content sites seemed to have disappeared.

aikah 8y ago

> Flash has never been this smooth. Yes it has. You could even create your own shaders/filters with a specialized language. Frankly it's great that things like that can be done with js/html but people did way more impressive things 15 years ago. I'm really not impressed at all, personally.

mping 8y ago
True, I remember seeing a site circa 2005 that had a completely crazy flash intro with 3d/360 camera pan thing - running on a regular 2005/6 computer. I think things are more polished now, because of bandwidth we can afford large images, videos, etc but back in the day there was some truly impressive Flash stuff.
tambourine_man 8y ago
Well, show me a link then. We can still run it (not for long). I’m talking about hardware acceleration, antialias, no dropped frame and in sync with the monitor’s refresh rate. Even a simple CSS3 animation beats the shit out of Flash in this regard.
- aikah 8y ago
  > I’m talking about hardware acceleration, antialias, no dropped frame and in sync with the monitor’s refresh rate. All supported by flash, I just told you about the possibility of coding your own shaders with a C like language where do you think these shaders were computed? > Well, show me a link then. We can still run it (not for long). You know damn well that most flash content has been retired from the web.
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
    I was there at the time, making a living out of webdesign and Flash. My jaw dropped when I saw webkit translate(). Not everyone notices but it makes all the difference to some. >You know damn well that most flash content has been retired from the web. I’m sure most of the impressive demos can still be dug out. I understand it was possible to compute on the GPU with AS3, but the end result, rendered inside the plugin box of a browser never felt this fluid.

spiralganglion 8y ago

I work for a company that does both SVG+JS and Flash media, and there are some legit cases where we still choose to use Flash, because SVG can't reach the same performance — anything with lots of animated gradients, deep scene hierarchies, transparencies, masking, filter effects, or high vertex counts. SVG rendering in all browsers not named "Chrome" is crazy slow, and in Chrome SVG rendering is not pretty when you look closely at it. But SVG is the only browser graphics tech with excellent tooling for illustrators (namely, Illustrator). So we've been forced to change both our art style, and our rendering stack, to deal with the death of Flash. That's life in the tech industry, fine. But it's misguided to say that the browser is unequivocally better or worse performing than Flash. It really depends what you're making, and how you make it. It's totally possible to make something on the web that looks and performs better than it would in Flash. But you have to put strict restrictions on what kind of art you use, and what technology you use to render that art, which puts restrictions on your production process, which sucks.