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>Memory and CPU usage I don't understand why people keep repeating this. This is simply not true, Flash wasn't slow at all. It took HTML5+js+canvas years to ca

>Memory and CPU usage I don't understand why people keep repeating this. This is simply not true, Flash wasn't slow at all. It took HTML5+js+canvas years to catch up with Flash performance-wise. Even after the introduction of GPU acceleration in browsers such as IE9 and Firefox 4, on typical machines of that period HTML5 was still far too slow for browser games, while Flash was usable even on Pentium III-era computers.

viraptor 7y ago
> I don't understand why people keep repeating this. IMO, it's because flash was not great with resources, but good enough to try advanced/creative things. Sure, canvas wasn't even a common thing at the time, when flash supported many video/graphics use cases. But that meant people thought a few effects on the website was worth including a flash animation which pegged your CPU at 100% for a while. Or auto played some FLV which killed performance for the entire website. The performance was also very platform dependent. "Linux can support 128 cores, but can't play YouTube without stuttering." was a meme, but also the truth for many users for a long time. Then Adobe pretty much abandoned the plugin support on Linux. So sure, the tech was great, and many people implemented it - maybe too many and too early.
sjwright 7y ago
I remember working at a major online publisher in 2006 and having to spend an entire week going through bureaucratic layer after bureaucratic layer because one of our advertisers' SWF files had a simple horizontal scrolling animation that was pegging the CPUs of our gutsy dev boxes at 100%. Obviously it was possible to code competent stuff with Flash; that kind of competence tended to be limited to few expert publishers.
- danShumway 7y ago
  There are two sides to this: Flash was performant in the sense that it allowed you to run decent graphical games at an acceptable framerate. Flash was unperformant in the sense that it stole all of your computer resources to do it, and didn't play well with other elements on the page that needed those resources. But GP is right that when canvas started getting pushed as an alternative to Flash, you just couldn't do as much with it. I remember seeing people online talk about how Flash could finally die, and then I'd load up the demo projects that they linked to, and they'd chug at 15 fps on my computer -- a computer that was more than capable of running a 30-60fps bullet hell flash game. You have to remember that the game developer community's experience with Flash was, "you go to a page, full-screen my thing, and then play it." They weren't worried about how Flash interacted with the rest of the web, they just wanted good framerates and audio controls. The web developer community's experience with Flash was, "you go to my page, and suddenly everything slows down because Greg in marketing wanted to make a funny ball bounce around the side bar." They didn't care about whether canvas was hitting 60fps with hundreds of sprites, they just didn't want their webpages to freeze.

viraptor 7y ago

> I don't understand why people keep repeating this. IMO, it's because flash was not great with resources, but good enough to try advanced/creative things. Sure, canvas wasn't even a common thing at the time, when flash supported many video/graphics use cases. But that meant people thought a few effects on the website was worth including a flash animation which pegged your CPU at 100% for a while. Or auto played some FLV which killed performance for the entire website. The performance was also very platform dependent. "Linux can support 128 cores, but can't play YouTube without stuttering." was a meme, but also the truth for many users for a long time. Then Adobe pretty much abandoned the plugin support on Linux. So sure, the tech was great, and many people implemented it - maybe too many and too early.

sjwright 7y ago

I remember working at a major online publisher in 2006 and having to spend an entire week going through bureaucratic layer after bureaucratic layer because one of our advertisers' SWF files had a simple horizontal scrolling animation that was pegging the CPUs of our gutsy dev boxes at 100%. Obviously it was possible to code competent stuff with Flash; that kind of competence tended to be limited to few expert publishers.

danShumway 7y ago
There are two sides to this: Flash was performant in the sense that it allowed you to run decent graphical games at an acceptable framerate. Flash was unperformant in the sense that it stole all of your computer resources to do it, and didn't play well with other elements on the page that needed those resources. But GP is right that when canvas started getting pushed as an alternative to Flash, you just couldn't do as much with it. I remember seeing people online talk about how Flash could finally die, and then I'd load up the demo projects that they linked to, and they'd chug at 15 fps on my computer -- a computer that was more than capable of running a 30-60fps bullet hell flash game. You have to remember that the game developer community's experience with Flash was, "you go to a page, full-screen my thing, and then play it." They weren't worried about how Flash interacted with the rest of the web, they just wanted good framerates and audio controls. The web developer community's experience with Flash was, "you go to my page, and suddenly everything slows down because Greg in marketing wanted to make a funny ball bounce around the side bar." They didn't care about whether canvas was hitting 60fps with hundreds of sprites, they just didn't want their webpages to freeze.