4 ms·

> My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed pla

by nickjj 7y ago

> My contrary opinion is that the actually important feature of the web is the URL, and the important feature of the browser is that it provides a sandboxed platform for running untrusted code without a builtin "walled garden moral police". Flash tried to do this 15-20 years ago. Flash was basically "here's a canvas, do whatever you want within reason". It had its use cases back then but the general web vastly preferred good old HTML and eventually CSS and JS. There's a lot of value in having constraints, especially when those constraints (HTML) are specifically designed for displaying documents.

lmm 7y ago
The general web loved Flash for cases where you needed an application rather than a document. It wasn't appropriate for everything, and it was unfortunately very difficult to mix Flash with general HTML, but in many ways it was better than today's web for both creators and end users.
- ktpsns 7y ago
  Second that. For the user, flash applets where super easy to block in general and to whitelist on pages where you wanted to use that particular flash application. Basically the same was true with Java. And for a certain extend JavaScript -- until the ugly DHTML menus arised and websites stopped to be usable without JavaScript. Nowadays there are only two options: Either you block JavaScript --- and percieve a 1995's web view, in general --- or you let it run on your browser, having tons of programs running which you probably don't want (ads, tracking, that particular application that replaces flash).
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    The 1995 view is superior. It loads fast, doesn't hog CPU, never does anything unexpected, and has limited tracking capacity. I cringe whenever I browse without NoScript. If your pages can't render in my sandbox I just go somewhere more sensible.
    - Qwertystop 7y ago
      It's superior only until you want to do something that does actually need JS - sometimes "go somewhere more sensible" isn't an option when you actually need to do something specific (e.g. buy an Amtrak ticket).
flohofwoe 7y ago
Flash had several problems that should have been addressed differently. Among others: - it was owned and controlled by a single company and thus a target for other companies instead of other companies helping to improve it - that single company was unable or unwilling to fix security holes in the sandbox and browser makers eventually got fed up with that - while there were some ways to interact with the underlying browser environment, ultimately a Flash instance lived in its own little bubble, creating usability problems Putting the HTML+CSS layout engine into a separate module doesn't mean that it wouldn't remain the standard way of doing document-layouts on the web, it would just mean that higher-level solutions wouldn't need to use hacks and workarounds to map their concepts to HTML+CSS (same way as Javascript had to be used as a less-than-perfect compile target before WASM because it was the only option to run code in a browser).
- nickjj 7y ago
  Those were all problems but none of them had any real bearing on the general population avoiding it for general sites. The thing is, most people don't want a blank canvas to go nuts with for the general use case. It's too complicated. Suddenly you need to learn entire SDKs and pull in many dependencies just to render text on the screen. The reason HTML and the web was so well accepted back in the day was all you had to learn were a few HTML tags, a couple of properties and then drop it onto a Geocities site and you were good to go. It was something you can do and see real progress on in 10 minutes with very little background knowledge. Compare that to now where if you wanted to be a "trendy front-end dev" you would probably reach for Vue / React + Webpack* and go SPA style for all of the sites you make because you learned something and now you want to apply it everywhere. Meanwhile to serve a document such as a blog post, you just went from having 15 HTML tags in a single HTML file and some CSS to pulling megabytes of Javascript sprawled across hundreds of dependencies and now you have build tools, an entire runtime environment (Node) and are using APIs that don't exactly match up with HTML exactly, and then your entire site isn't even crawlable by search engines unless you introduce even more complexity to do server side rendering and before you know it, you're dealing with something that's even more complicated than Flash was back in the day. * I personally use Webpack to handle my assets too, but I don't write SPAs for sites that are document based (which tbh are most sites).
dsr_ 7y ago
The case against Flash was, I think, not so much about what it was, but everything around it. - It wasn't visually scalable. (Today we say "responsive", mostly, but that's too easy to confuse.) - It didn't integrate with HTML and CSS in any interesting way other than sitting there in the middle. - Performance was mediocre to terrible. - A rent-seeking company was in charge of it. As you say, eventually JS supplanted it.
- meerita 7y ago
  JS didn't suplanted it from day to night. It was Steve Jobs who killed Flash, not letting Adobe from conquer their new iOS platform. They tried it so hard, even on Android back then, but they failed to deliver something solid. Eventually, both Google and Apple released their SDKs to develop apps, way more solid and faster than running a Adobe Flash player layer on top of the OS. This article shows the jump on technologies, from the CSS perspective http://minid.net/2019/04/07/the-css-utilitarian-methodology/ http://minid.net/2019/04/07/the-css-utilitarian-methodology/
  - mosdl 7y ago
    Flash was already mostly dead by the time the iphone came. Adobe was not investing much into it and it was mainly being used to show videos.
    - meerita 7y ago
      I don't think so. Flash was strong in three scenarios: corporate websites, games and advertising. The agency I worked for made 95% of its revenue from Flash work, and most of the agencies in Barcelona, Madrid did the same.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- masswerk 7y ago
  The case against Flash was (apart from the horrible security issues) mostly about stacked libraries, including Adobe's own UI library. You could code applications with remarkable performance and small footprint using the pure Flash Player target (neither Flash nor Flex, but pure AS3). Regarding integration, some text elements featured basic HTML capabilities. Nothing terrific, but you could extend on this. (And, of course, XML parsing, but this is another story.) Also, later Flash Player applications (Air) featured a full-fledged WebKit element for rendering web views. That said, it was good thing that Flash had eventually to go, and, at times, the state of the web today is pretty reminding of this.

by nickjj 7y ago

lmm 7y ago

The general web loved Flash for cases where you needed an application rather than a document. It wasn't appropriate for everything, and it was unfortunately very difficult to mix Flash with general HTML, but in many ways it was better than today's web for both creators and end users.

ktpsns 7y ago
Second that. For the user, flash applets where super easy to block in general and to whitelist on pages where you wanted to use that particular flash application. Basically the same was true with Java. And for a certain extend JavaScript -- until the ugly DHTML menus arised and websites stopped to be usable without JavaScript. Nowadays there are only two options: Either you block JavaScript --- and percieve a 1995's web view, in general --- or you let it run on your browser, having tons of programs running which you probably don't want (ads, tracking, that particular application that replaces flash).
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  The 1995 view is superior. It loads fast, doesn't hog CPU, never does anything unexpected, and has limited tracking capacity. I cringe whenever I browse without NoScript. If your pages can't render in my sandbox I just go somewhere more sensible.
  - Qwertystop 7y ago
    It's superior only until you want to do something that does actually need JS - sometimes "go somewhere more sensible" isn't an option when you actually need to do something specific (e.g. buy an Amtrak ticket).

flohofwoe 7y ago

Flash had several problems that should have been addressed differently. Among others: - it was owned and controlled by a single company and thus a target for other companies instead of other companies helping to improve it - that single company was unable or unwilling to fix security holes in the sandbox and browser makers eventually got fed up with that - while there were some ways to interact with the underlying browser environment, ultimately a Flash instance lived in its own little bubble, creating usability problems Putting the HTML+CSS layout engine into a separate module doesn't mean that it wouldn't remain the standard way of doing document-layouts on the web, it would just mean that higher-level solutions wouldn't need to use hacks and workarounds to map their concepts to HTML+CSS (same way as Javascript had to be used as a less-than-perfect compile target before WASM because it was the only option to run code in a browser).

nickjj 7y ago
Those were all problems but none of them had any real bearing on the general population avoiding it for general sites. The thing is, most people don't want a blank canvas to go nuts with for the general use case. It's too complicated. Suddenly you need to learn entire SDKs and pull in many dependencies just to render text on the screen. The reason HTML and the web was so well accepted back in the day was all you had to learn were a few HTML tags, a couple of properties and then drop it onto a Geocities site and you were good to go. It was something you can do and see real progress on in 10 minutes with very little background knowledge. Compare that to now where if you wanted to be a "trendy front-end dev" you would probably reach for Vue / React + Webpack* and go SPA style for all of the sites you make because you learned something and now you want to apply it everywhere. Meanwhile to serve a document such as a blog post, you just went from having 15 HTML tags in a single HTML file and some CSS to pulling megabytes of Javascript sprawled across hundreds of dependencies and now you have build tools, an entire runtime environment (Node) and are using APIs that don't exactly match up with HTML exactly, and then your entire site isn't even crawlable by search engines unless you introduce even more complexity to do server side rendering and before you know it, you're dealing with something that's even more complicated than Flash was back in the day. * I personally use Webpack to handle my assets too, but I don't write SPAs for sites that are document based (which tbh are most sites).

dsr_ 7y ago

The case against Flash was, I think, not so much about what it was, but everything around it. - It wasn't visually scalable. (Today we say "responsive", mostly, but that's too easy to confuse.) - It didn't integrate with HTML and CSS in any interesting way other than sitting there in the middle. - Performance was mediocre to terrible. - A rent-seeking company was in charge of it. As you say, eventually JS supplanted it.

meerita 7y ago
JS didn't suplanted it from day to night. It was Steve Jobs who killed Flash, not letting Adobe from conquer their new iOS platform. They tried it so hard, even on Android back then, but they failed to deliver something solid. Eventually, both Google and Apple released their SDKs to develop apps, way more solid and faster than running a Adobe Flash player layer on top of the OS. This article shows the jump on technologies, from the CSS perspective http://minid.net/2019/04/07/the-css-utilitarian-methodology/ http://minid.net/2019/04/07/the-css-utilitarian-methodology/
- mosdl 7y ago
  Flash was already mostly dead by the time the iphone came. Adobe was not investing much into it and it was mainly being used to show videos.
  - meerita 7y ago
    I don't think so. Flash was strong in three scenarios: corporate websites, games and advertising. The agency I worked for made 95% of its revenue from Flash work, and most of the agencies in Barcelona, Madrid did the same.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
masswerk 7y ago
The case against Flash was (apart from the horrible security issues) mostly about stacked libraries, including Adobe's own UI library. You could code applications with remarkable performance and small footprint using the pure Flash Player target (neither Flash nor Flex, but pure AS3). Regarding integration, some text elements featured basic HTML capabilities. Nothing terrific, but you could extend on this. (And, of course, XML parsing, but this is another story.) Also, later Flash Player applications (Air) featured a full-fledged WebKit element for rendering web views. That said, it was good thing that Flash had eventually to go, and, at times, the state of the web today is pretty reminding of this.