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Right? I’m surprised there isn’t more of this sentiment here. Flash did 15 years ago on a hardware from 15 years ago exactly what the “web platform” does now wi

by lxe 8y ago

Right? I’m surprised there isn’t more of this sentiment here. Flash did 15 years ago on a hardware from 15 years ago exactly what the “web platform” does now with hardware that’s orders of magnitude more powerful in every aspect. It’s embarrassing that Flash was left to die for superficial reasons.

marcus_holmes 8y ago
I dunno if they're so superficial. At the time it seemed a very real prospect that every single website would run on Flash, which is a proprietary and closed-source ecosystem entirely run by a single company with an API protected by copyright law. It wasn't just games. Every damn website had a flash animation that autoplayed and got right in your face. Flash was also used to bypass privacy controls, create un-deletable tracking cookies, and generally do bad things. Remember when we needed to update Flash every couple of weeks because it was so full of security holes? And they were serious holes, used by bad people to do bad things to a lot of innocent victims. And, of course, while we were downloading and updating the Flash player, the web was basically useless because every damn site refused to do anything until it could do it with Flash. No, much as I loved those games, I'm soooo glad we didn't go down that road
- brightball 8y ago
  This. I always looked at Flash as better Java Applets. They filled the gap that Applets were intended to address but Flash was a much easier to work with. Flash, while full of issues, was sort of a prototype of functionality that people wanted built into browsers. It took a while for standards to catch up, because standards move slow. At the same time, people were motivated to make it happen because of all of those terrible things about Flash. We can all thank Steve Jobs for delivering the death blow to Flash to really force the issue.
  - badsectoracula 8y ago
    > I always looked at Flash as better Java Applets. This is kind of funny to see for me after spending a lot of time years ago trying to make some performance intensive games and stumbling on the horrible performance (and API limitations) that Flash - at the time i wished i was able to make applets instead :-P.

by lxe 8y ago

marcus_holmes 8y ago

I dunno if they're so superficial. At the time it seemed a very real prospect that every single website would run on Flash, which is a proprietary and closed-source ecosystem entirely run by a single company with an API protected by copyright law. It wasn't just games. Every damn website had a flash animation that autoplayed and got right in your face. Flash was also used to bypass privacy controls, create un-deletable tracking cookies, and generally do bad things. Remember when we needed to update Flash every couple of weeks because it was so full of security holes? And they were serious holes, used by bad people to do bad things to a lot of innocent victims. And, of course, while we were downloading and updating the Flash player, the web was basically useless because every damn site refused to do anything until it could do it with Flash. No, much as I loved those games, I'm soooo glad we didn't go down that road

brightball 8y ago
This. I always looked at Flash as better Java Applets. They filled the gap that Applets were intended to address but Flash was a much easier to work with. Flash, while full of issues, was sort of a prototype of functionality that people wanted built into browsers. It took a while for standards to catch up, because standards move slow. At the same time, people were motivated to make it happen because of all of those terrible things about Flash. We can all thank Steve Jobs for delivering the death blow to Flash to really force the issue.
- badsectoracula 8y ago
  > I always looked at Flash as better Java Applets. This is kind of funny to see for me after spending a lot of time years ago trying to make some performance intensive games and stumbling on the horrible performance (and API limitations) that Flash - at the time i wished i was able to make applets instead :-P.