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Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capa

by pippy 7y ago

Removing Flash from the web was done with good intentions. It was a propitiatory system plagued with security holes. Instead of replacing it with similarly capable open standards, we've got a propitiatory Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), flaky HTML5 calls that differ between browsers, and webassembly. It's a shame that HTML5 never really reached the ability of flash. And it's also a shame that Adobe didn't simply release the swf spec.

The_rationalist 7y ago
What can flash do that modern browsers can't?
- Eric_WVGG 7y ago
  IMO, nothing. What HTML 5 (and more specifically, canvas+js) are lacking is a complete timeframe-based IDE. I personally find that mode of development distasteful, and I don’t share the author’s affection for this particular breed of "creativity," but anyway it was there and some folks liked it and there’s a real opportunity for someone who wants to reimagine it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - simion314 7y ago
    I do not have experience with pure Flash but with Flex4 that is a powerful GUI for applications. I can share here what I miss from those days: - you had types, performance was important so you had generic types like Vector , the code was compiled and it was really fast - there were built-in efficient GUI widgets, you could have a list or table connected to a data provider with tousends of items but the components were smart and only created enough UI widgets as needed to render, where in HTML you either have to create a LI element for all your 10000 elements, create pagination(is not built in), create infinite scrolling(not built-in) - it was super easy to customize or extend the provided things if you needed , as an example in HTML look at the <select> it is not customizable, everyone has to implement it's own using divs, css and js , but everyone gets it wrong in the corner case(you have issues where the dropdown pops outside the screen, missing events, hell even youtube search box sometimes breaks and the dropdown popup remains stuck open, so even Google engineerscan't create a working dropdown component - performance, remember when a blinking cursor was causing an electron editor to use a lot of resources , the issue with web is that was designed in rush for showing documents. - layouting components was super easy , theming was easy - with css in large old projects there are so many issues( I know people use less but this is not standard ) I have some solutions too, browsers need to provide more powerful components, if we want to do RIAs or desktop apps then we need the same components that desktop toolkits offer with the same customization. Other issue I seen was in a project where the devs ahd to import a third party library because the scrollbars can't be themed in all browsers , I am not refering to the right side of the browser ones(I know sme people hate if you change those) but scrollbars on a list or dropdown component. So you have projects where you import 1 lib for scrollbars, 1 lib for modals, 1 for fancy buttons and inputs, 1 for drag and drop, 1 for calendar widgets, 1 for dropdown that allows you to have icon + text, and of course a framework like angular or react . Browsers should check what developers need the most and add that as standard( ex better dropdowns) you would still have the ability to make your own shit and use your preferred framework
- winrid 7y ago
  Flash was very good at animation interpolation. Basically using math to compress animations while hiding it from the developer.
- Retric 7y ago
  Low barrier to entry, cross browser compatible, multimedia websites. Someone with artistic talent could quickly learn flash and get something bizarre working very quickly. Drop the minimally skilled into a modern development environment and novelty is much harder. 95% of the time that’s probably a good thing, but it sucked a lot of the fun out of the internet.
- willis936 7y ago
  When flash was dominant there was an abundance of vector animations. There isn’t a technical reason this couldn’t still be the case, however we’re in the graphics dark ages right now. Everything is a raster. Everything that isn’t is static or on a very light fixed loop that takes an absurd amount of resources to animate.
- LaGrange 7y ago
  Tooling. I don't think anything fully replaced it. OTOH, while not web things per se, I think Twine, Unity and RPG Maker scratch similar itches for many (but definitely not all) people potentially interested.
- theobeers 7y ago
  Nothing, of course. Anything that could be done with Flash in its heyday can be done better (in several senses) with modern tools. But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We can ask what’s actually being done in web design these days… and who’s doing it. If you’re old enough to remember the period from the late ’90s to the mid aughts, think about your friends who were putting all kinds of wacky, creative pages on the web. Picture that personality type. What place does it have in the universe of websites that we visit today? The answer, as far as I’ve seen: user. We spend time on a smaller number of sites/platforms. The design of those sites tends to be (at its best) streamlined and optimized. And people who want to share their creativity are given little frames within that structure. Even personal websites are usually built through WordPress, Squarespace, or similar. Something has been lost. I’m not going to say things are worse nowadays. That would be too sweeping a judgment, even if I substantially agreed with it, and I think I don’t. But I get this weird feeling when I spend time online, like it’s a tree that died some time ago, but it’s being reinforced, made to stand straighter than ever, given artificial leaves that never turn, etc.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    The people who brought us television were threatened by the internet, and so they are turning it into television.
  - newsgremlin 7y ago
    Talking about this to certain devs is like talking to them about sports. They just don't get the learning curve was the most accessable for the average user, not just those who know how to program. We know there are better technologies security wise and performance wise. It's not always about what is 'technically' better rather than something that people enjoyed using and opened the door to creative personalities for the web. There is a time and a place for both and I think there has been neglect for the other side of the brain.
    - robertoandred 7y ago
      Except the Flash development tools still exist https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
- meheleventyone 7y ago
  The important bits of Flash were not so much the capabilities of the player but the tooling to be creative. Flash found so many niches from animation, games, applications, being embedded for UI rendering and on because it provided an agnostic tool to make all these things in, really easily. In terms of capabilities though there was much less worry about compatibility.
- est31 7y ago
  animated vector graphics? Browsers only have data-intensive pixel graphics codecs. Also, the vector graphics support that they do have is pretty limited and slow. Anyways, I'm glad that flash is dead, because it was proprietary software and constant source for security bugs.
- est 7y ago
  Make vector animations with simple clicks and works on every browser. And make it streamable. No, your fancy JSON over Websocket is not exactly streamable.
- jcelerier 7y ago
  > What can flash do that modern browsers can't? ensuring that the user sees the exact same thing on any browser / operating system combination ? Just the font rendering differences between windows / mac make it impossible to create text that is supposed to fit perfectly in a given box because hinting differences may mean that you are a few pixels longer which can change the layout of a paragraph, etc... with flash, there is only one single way things look across all platforms.
  - shaunofthedev 7y ago
    (Former Flash dev) A consistent display was a nice thing to count on when making little games, applets and ads. However for general web layout it made accessibility features difficult to impossible to implement. I'd also add that behaviour wasn't always consistent. There would still be OS/environment specific bugs that would crop up from time to time. (Though granted, these would rarely be related to rendering or layout)
    - jcelerier 7y ago
      > However for general web layout well, that was not the point of flash, was it ?
- asjw 7y ago
  Transparent Jpegs
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  Flash made a lot of things related to vector graphics more accessible. The vector engine was quite powerful, although lacking proper hardware support, it was quite CPU hungry. Still, I don't think we have an adequate replacement, even it would be technically possible, I don't know about similar tools for vector animations..
wavefunction 7y ago
I feel like you can do pretty much everything with HTML5 and JavaScript that you could with Flash and ActionScript. The IDE for Flash had some nice UI abstractions but there's no reason that couldn't happen in a web IDE in 2019. Distributing your website like a flash file/app as a binary is one missing feature I suppose?
- excessive 7y ago
  As consumers, most people probably only care about what modern browsers can do. As a developer, the mechanisms become front and center. Modern web development is a Rube Goldberg kluge of things glued together with duct tape. Flash was much more coherent and imposed less cognitive burden of tying it altogether.
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    Are you intending to reply to me? I agree with you to a certain extent regarding NPM madness.
    - kizer 7y ago
      Not just NPM - the "web" is a diverse set of APIs with various peculiarities. It's not inviting to an artist with little to no programming experience (and even with the potential to learn). That was the advantage/disadvantage of flash - closed system, one (major) IDE, one language/standard library.
- Filligree 7y ago
  You can just about do it, but it takes far more CPU time. What happened to efficiency?
  - wavefunction 7y ago
    I'd need to see some performance metrics to come to that conclusion. "Bloated Flash site loading with a progress indicator for a few seconds" was pretty common and a huge complaint about Flash and its use on the web.
TomGullen 7y ago
I wasn’t a big Flash user back in the day but I think our product Construct 3 (https://www.construct.net https://www.construct.net) can do just about everything Flash did, especially with the addition of the Timeline editor and scripting we’ve just added. I’m a little hesitant to overtly market Construct as the “next flash” as that I think would receive a mixed reception depending on your experiences with it! Tom Fulp from Newgrounds has nice things to say about Construct, and we’re getting very positive numbers from other portals and platforms (some very big) that a lot of volume of games and good quality ones at that are being published with them using Construct 3. I’d like to hear from more experienced Flash users if there’s anything Construct 3 can’t do that Flash could as it would likely be an important feature we’d be keen to add!
- hackerc 7y ago
  Is it a good platform to make animated movies? Can output be distributed as a single shareable file, like .swf?
  - TomGullen 7y ago
    With the timelines editor theoretically yes, although there's no good easy way to export in a single shareable file (some technical hurdles). Definitely something it's lacking right now.
- kizer 7y ago
  It needs to be able to name a platform, media type, IDE, all at once. E.g., "I'm going to use Flash", "It's a Flash game", "Hold on, let me animate it in Flash". The name should be able to go in domain names; e.g., "superfunflashgames.com". Basically, it has to have a name amiable to becoming an umbrella term. That gave Flash such a "universal" connotation. I hope this makes sense - trying to convey the _peculiarities_ of "Flash" which made it (as I see it) successfull and distinct in character.
  - zanny 7y ago
    Flash was fundamentally just a file format. You made the format using the program in the same way you make a Photoshop file in Photoshop. It was a noun and a verb because you make thing and both the part that makes and the part made are called the same. Due to the nature of present browser APIs you cannot name your editor WebGL or something that produces WebGL. But if you made an editor called Sparkle or something that produced .sparkle files that had native browser support you would have the same nomenclature going on. But native browser integration and containerized file formats with external editors aren't a well made match.
jbay808 7y ago
> propitiatory You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/propitiatory https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/propitia...
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Name a single EME implementation which isn't proprietary (and useful!).
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Note they are nitpicking spelling (propitiatory vs proprietary) not discussing the topic. It took me a second to realize as well but to be fair you should have noticed if you read their link before responding.
zamadatix 7y ago
Is there really a way to do DRM that doesn't involve proprietary pieces somewhere along the way? I think the modern browser is technologically superior to what and how Flash did things (with the exception of native sockets, which is probably for the better). It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction. It took a long time for the browser technologies to catch up but I wonder if in the end it integrates as one system better than bolting on an open flash spec would have been.
- grawprog 7y ago
  >It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction. I really feel like flash's heyday was before adobe bought it up. Most of the best flash sites, newgrounds and stuff were more active and had tons of content while Macromedia still owned flash.
- MayeulC 7y ago
  Do you think we really need DRM, though? I've been using the web without it for a while, and I just boycott sites or services that require it. More to the point, I think that the current DRM scheme is inherently and completely broken. I could use it and let websites pretend it's useful, but it's not worth the increased quantity of proprietary code to me.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    I don't like DRM myself but there are a very large number of users that like to use services which wouldn't stream content otherwise. Just like any protection mechanism it doesn't have to be perfectly impossible to break to provide value to someone. The nice thing about the way EME was implemented is if you aren't one of those users you can simply disable Widevine or (if you prefer to not even have proprietary code on your computer) use a build that doesn't include it.
    - WatchDog 7y ago
      Is there actually any widevine distributed content that isn't available otherwise at the same or better quality?
ehsankia 7y ago
This comment is pretty misleading. The parts you complain about have little to do with what made Flash a creative sandbox. The parts that do matter have long been replaced with Canvas/WebGL. But the web as a whole has changed. Just like we don't have as many fun quirky geocities-like websites. The issue isn't the lack of Flash, it's that the web as a whole has grown up and changed.
- robbrown451 7y ago
  Canvas/WebGL may replace Flash to end users. I'm not aware of creator tools that allow people to put things together as easily as they could using Flash.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Adobe Animate is literally Flash, except it uses standard web technologies like Canvas, JS and WebGL. What's not to like?
    - PBnFlash 7y ago
      Literally everything about animate. It is hugely bloated and awful to use and crash prone. It takes upwards of 30 seconds to save a file. It has two different kinds of tween to support backwards compatibility. And the "HTML" export is a garbage fire. Flash used a form of vector graphics that were incompatible with svgs. Adobe has been trying to maintain backwards compatibility with flash (because most studios were still using the last version macromedia put out over 10 years ago) So adobe animate was always doomed to try and please everyone and end up pissing everyone off.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    It's also nowhere near as easy to distribute these games compared to Flash. All you needed with Flash was the swf and as long as you had a flash player then it would work.
djsumdog 7y ago
Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.
- soup10 7y ago
  "Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.
  - fastball 7y ago
    Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.
    - redisman 7y ago
      That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.
      - fastball 7y ago
        HTML5 video had significantly better performance in terms of CPU from the beginning, and I'm fairly certain the Flash video players weren't written by amateur programmers with bad programming practices.
    - 7y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
To the modern dev end users are cattle, they aren't supposed to make things!
mesh 7y ago
You can find the SWF spec at: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf.html https://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf.html Macromedia / Adobe released it quite a bit ago (while Flash was still popular).
nojvek 7y ago
Adobe did open the swf spec in later versions. Swf was compressed bytecode. Still a lot more efficient than the way we send js. https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-file-format-spec.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil... There were a number of tools that compiled to swf. It sucks that Adobe never opened the Flash Player. That was it’s death nail. They had little to gain from it. It was free. The money maker was Flash Studio and other Macromedia tools. If Adobe had opened Flash and had a sane security Sandbox it would have survived iOS. Adobe was like the old Microsoft though. They just didn’t get the power of Open Source.
- gmiller123456 7y ago
  My bet would be the real money maker was all the spyware included with the Flash installer.

by pippy 7y ago

The_rationalist 7y ago

What can flash do that modern browsers can't?

Eric_WVGG 7y ago
IMO, nothing. What HTML 5 (and more specifically, canvas+js) are lacking is a complete timeframe-based IDE. I personally find that mode of development distasteful, and I don’t share the author’s affection for this particular breed of "creativity," but anyway it was there and some folks liked it and there’s a real opportunity for someone who wants to reimagine it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- simion314 7y ago
  I do not have experience with pure Flash but with Flex4 that is a powerful GUI for applications. I can share here what I miss from those days: - you had types, performance was important so you had generic types like Vector , the code was compiled and it was really fast - there were built-in efficient GUI widgets, you could have a list or table connected to a data provider with tousends of items but the components were smart and only created enough UI widgets as needed to render, where in HTML you either have to create a LI element for all your 10000 elements, create pagination(is not built in), create infinite scrolling(not built-in) - it was super easy to customize or extend the provided things if you needed , as an example in HTML look at the <select> it is not customizable, everyone has to implement it's own using divs, css and js , but everyone gets it wrong in the corner case(you have issues where the dropdown pops outside the screen, missing events, hell even youtube search box sometimes breaks and the dropdown popup remains stuck open, so even Google engineerscan't create a working dropdown component - performance, remember when a blinking cursor was causing an electron editor to use a lot of resources , the issue with web is that was designed in rush for showing documents. - layouting components was super easy , theming was easy - with css in large old projects there are so many issues( I know people use less but this is not standard ) I have some solutions too, browsers need to provide more powerful components, if we want to do RIAs or desktop apps then we need the same components that desktop toolkits offer with the same customization. Other issue I seen was in a project where the devs ahd to import a third party library because the scrollbars can't be themed in all browsers , I am not refering to the right side of the browser ones(I know sme people hate if you change those) but scrollbars on a list or dropdown component. So you have projects where you import 1 lib for scrollbars, 1 lib for modals, 1 for fancy buttons and inputs, 1 for drag and drop, 1 for calendar widgets, 1 for dropdown that allows you to have icon + text, and of course a framework like angular or react . Browsers should check what developers need the most and add that as standard( ex better dropdowns) you would still have the ability to make your own shit and use your preferred framework
winrid 7y ago
Flash was very good at animation interpolation. Basically using math to compress animations while hiding it from the developer.
Retric 7y ago
Low barrier to entry, cross browser compatible, multimedia websites. Someone with artistic talent could quickly learn flash and get something bizarre working very quickly. Drop the minimally skilled into a modern development environment and novelty is much harder. 95% of the time that’s probably a good thing, but it sucked a lot of the fun out of the internet.
willis936 7y ago
When flash was dominant there was an abundance of vector animations. There isn’t a technical reason this couldn’t still be the case, however we’re in the graphics dark ages right now. Everything is a raster. Everything that isn’t is static or on a very light fixed loop that takes an absurd amount of resources to animate.
LaGrange 7y ago
Tooling. I don't think anything fully replaced it. OTOH, while not web things per se, I think Twine, Unity and RPG Maker scratch similar itches for many (but definitely not all) people potentially interested.
theobeers 7y ago
Nothing, of course. Anything that could be done with Flash in its heyday can be done better (in several senses) with modern tools. But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it? We can ask what’s actually being done in web design these days… and who’s doing it. If you’re old enough to remember the period from the late ’90s to the mid aughts, think about your friends who were putting all kinds of wacky, creative pages on the web. Picture that personality type. What place does it have in the universe of websites that we visit today? The answer, as far as I’ve seen: user. We spend time on a smaller number of sites/platforms. The design of those sites tends to be (at its best) streamlined and optimized. And people who want to share their creativity are given little frames within that structure. Even personal websites are usually built through WordPress, Squarespace, or similar. Something has been lost. I’m not going to say things are worse nowadays. That would be too sweeping a judgment, even if I substantially agreed with it, and I think I don’t. But I get this weird feeling when I spend time online, like it’s a tree that died some time ago, but it’s being reinforced, made to stand straighter than ever, given artificial leaves that never turn, etc.
- philwelch 7y ago
  The people who brought us television were threatened by the internet, and so they are turning it into television.
- newsgremlin 7y ago
  Talking about this to certain devs is like talking to them about sports. They just don't get the learning curve was the most accessable for the average user, not just those who know how to program. We know there are better technologies security wise and performance wise. It's not always about what is 'technically' better rather than something that people enjoyed using and opened the door to creative personalities for the web. There is a time and a place for both and I think there has been neglect for the other side of the brain.
  - robertoandred 7y ago
    Except the Flash development tools still exist https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
meheleventyone 7y ago
The important bits of Flash were not so much the capabilities of the player but the tooling to be creative. Flash found so many niches from animation, games, applications, being embedded for UI rendering and on because it provided an agnostic tool to make all these things in, really easily. In terms of capabilities though there was much less worry about compatibility.
est31 7y ago
animated vector graphics? Browsers only have data-intensive pixel graphics codecs. Also, the vector graphics support that they do have is pretty limited and slow. Anyways, I'm glad that flash is dead, because it was proprietary software and constant source for security bugs.
est 7y ago
Make vector animations with simple clicks and works on every browser. And make it streamable. No, your fancy JSON over Websocket is not exactly streamable.
jcelerier 7y ago
> What can flash do that modern browsers can't? ensuring that the user sees the exact same thing on any browser / operating system combination ? Just the font rendering differences between windows / mac make it impossible to create text that is supposed to fit perfectly in a given box because hinting differences may mean that you are a few pixels longer which can change the layout of a paragraph, etc... with flash, there is only one single way things look across all platforms.
- shaunofthedev 7y ago
  (Former Flash dev) A consistent display was a nice thing to count on when making little games, applets and ads. However for general web layout it made accessibility features difficult to impossible to implement. I'd also add that behaviour wasn't always consistent. There would still be OS/environment specific bugs that would crop up from time to time. (Though granted, these would rarely be related to rendering or layout)
  - jcelerier 7y ago
    > However for general web layout well, that was not the point of flash, was it ?
asjw 7y ago
Transparent Jpegs
raxxorrax 7y ago
Flash made a lot of things related to vector graphics more accessible. The vector engine was quite powerful, although lacking proper hardware support, it was quite CPU hungry. Still, I don't think we have an adequate replacement, even it would be technically possible, I don't know about similar tools for vector animations..

wavefunction 7y ago

I feel like you can do pretty much everything with HTML5 and JavaScript that you could with Flash and ActionScript. The IDE for Flash had some nice UI abstractions but there's no reason that couldn't happen in a web IDE in 2019. Distributing your website like a flash file/app as a binary is one missing feature I suppose?

excessive 7y ago
As consumers, most people probably only care about what modern browsers can do. As a developer, the mechanisms become front and center. Modern web development is a Rube Goldberg kluge of things glued together with duct tape. Flash was much more coherent and imposed less cognitive burden of tying it altogether.
- wavefunction 7y ago
  Are you intending to reply to me? I agree with you to a certain extent regarding NPM madness.
  - kizer 7y ago
    Not just NPM - the "web" is a diverse set of APIs with various peculiarities. It's not inviting to an artist with little to no programming experience (and even with the potential to learn). That was the advantage/disadvantage of flash - closed system, one (major) IDE, one language/standard library.
Filligree 7y ago
You can just about do it, but it takes far more CPU time. What happened to efficiency?
- wavefunction 7y ago
  I'd need to see some performance metrics to come to that conclusion. "Bloated Flash site loading with a progress indicator for a few seconds" was pretty common and a huge complaint about Flash and its use on the web.

TomGullen 7y ago

I wasn’t a big Flash user back in the day but I think our product Construct 3 (https://www.construct.net https://www.construct.net) can do just about everything Flash did, especially with the addition of the Timeline editor and scripting we’ve just added. I’m a little hesitant to overtly market Construct as the “next flash” as that I think would receive a mixed reception depending on your experiences with it! Tom Fulp from Newgrounds has nice things to say about Construct, and we’re getting very positive numbers from other portals and platforms (some very big) that a lot of volume of games and good quality ones at that are being published with them using Construct 3. I’d like to hear from more experienced Flash users if there’s anything Construct 3 can’t do that Flash could as it would likely be an important feature we’d be keen to add!

hackerc 7y ago
Is it a good platform to make animated movies? Can output be distributed as a single shareable file, like .swf?
- TomGullen 7y ago
  With the timelines editor theoretically yes, although there's no good easy way to export in a single shareable file (some technical hurdles). Definitely something it's lacking right now.
kizer 7y ago
It needs to be able to name a platform, media type, IDE, all at once. E.g., "I'm going to use Flash", "It's a Flash game", "Hold on, let me animate it in Flash". The name should be able to go in domain names; e.g., "superfunflashgames.com". Basically, it has to have a name amiable to becoming an umbrella term. That gave Flash such a "universal" connotation. I hope this makes sense - trying to convey the _peculiarities_ of "Flash" which made it (as I see it) successfull and distinct in character.
- zanny 7y ago
  Flash was fundamentally just a file format. You made the format using the program in the same way you make a Photoshop file in Photoshop. It was a noun and a verb because you make thing and both the part that makes and the part made are called the same. Due to the nature of present browser APIs you cannot name your editor WebGL or something that produces WebGL. But if you made an editor called Sparkle or something that produced .sparkle files that had native browser support you would have the same nomenclature going on. But native browser integration and containerized file formats with external editors aren't a well made match.

jbay808 7y ago

> propitiatory You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/propitiatory https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/propitia...

cameronbrown 7y ago
Name a single EME implementation which isn't proprietary (and useful!).
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Note they are nitpicking spelling (propitiatory vs proprietary) not discussing the topic. It took me a second to realize as well but to be fair you should have noticed if you read their link before responding.

zamadatix 7y ago

Is there really a way to do DRM that doesn't involve proprietary pieces somewhere along the way? I think the modern browser is technologically superior to what and how Flash did things (with the exception of native sockets, which is probably for the better). It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction. It took a long time for the browser technologies to catch up but I wonder if in the end it integrates as one system better than bolting on an open flash spec would have been.

grawprog 7y ago
>It's really everyone using Adobe's content creation tools (which were well integrated/designed) that made things so low friction. I really feel like flash's heyday was before adobe bought it up. Most of the best flash sites, newgrounds and stuff were more active and had tons of content while Macromedia still owned flash.
MayeulC 7y ago
Do you think we really need DRM, though? I've been using the web without it for a while, and I just boycott sites or services that require it. More to the point, I think that the current DRM scheme is inherently and completely broken. I could use it and let websites pretend it's useful, but it's not worth the increased quantity of proprietary code to me.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  I don't like DRM myself but there are a very large number of users that like to use services which wouldn't stream content otherwise. Just like any protection mechanism it doesn't have to be perfectly impossible to break to provide value to someone. The nice thing about the way EME was implemented is if you aren't one of those users you can simply disable Widevine or (if you prefer to not even have proprietary code on your computer) use a build that doesn't include it.
  - WatchDog 7y ago
    Is there actually any widevine distributed content that isn't available otherwise at the same or better quality?

ehsankia 7y ago

This comment is pretty misleading. The parts you complain about have little to do with what made Flash a creative sandbox. The parts that do matter have long been replaced with Canvas/WebGL. But the web as a whole has changed. Just like we don't have as many fun quirky geocities-like websites. The issue isn't the lack of Flash, it's that the web as a whole has grown up and changed.

robbrown451 7y ago
Canvas/WebGL may replace Flash to end users. I'm not aware of creator tools that allow people to put things together as easily as they could using Flash.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Adobe Animate is literally Flash, except it uses standard web technologies like Canvas, JS and WebGL. What's not to like?
  - PBnFlash 7y ago
    Literally everything about animate. It is hugely bloated and awful to use and crash prone. It takes upwards of 30 seconds to save a file. It has two different kinds of tween to support backwards compatibility. And the "HTML" export is a garbage fire. Flash used a form of vector graphics that were incompatible with svgs. Adobe has been trying to maintain backwards compatibility with flash (because most studios were still using the last version macromedia put out over 10 years ago) So adobe animate was always doomed to try and please everyone and end up pissing everyone off.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Mirioron 7y ago
  It's also nowhere near as easy to distribute these games compared to Flash. All you needed with Flash was the swf and as long as you had a flash player then it would work.

djsumdog 7y ago

Flash died because of Apple, and before Adboe bought Macromedia, it was an incredibly small runtime; way better than Java at very specific forms of 3D rendering. Old Flash can be upscaled to 4k. A youtube video is pre-rendered and stuck at that resolution forever.

soup10 7y ago
"Flash died with good intentions" is false. Flash died because it was the perfect tool for making mobile content, if not for the fact that it was sluggish on early iphone hardware. If Apple worked with Adobe to optimize flash for mobile, it would still be alive and well today. Instead Jobs decided business wise he could lock devs into developing native apps in the iOS ecosystem, scapegoat performance and security for the ban, and gain a competitive advantage at the same time.
- fastball 7y ago
  Flash performance was always terrible on all platforms. It span up the CPU on my windows computer from the beginning and never stopped until its eventual demise.
  - redisman 7y ago
    That's from bad programming practices. It was very easy to write a terrible inefficient program with it since it was so accessible. There was nothing inherent in Flash that used a lot of CPU. The VM was pretty light weight. It also had only a software renderer for most of its lifetime which would naturally struggle with lots of crazy overlapping effects.
    - fastball 7y ago
      HTML5 video had significantly better performance in terms of CPU from the beginning, and I'm fairly certain the Flash video players weren't written by amateur programmers with bad programming practices.
  - 7y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

To the modern dev end users are cattle, they aren't supposed to make things!

mesh 7y ago

You can find the SWF spec at: https://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf.html https://www.adobe.com/devnet/swf.html Macromedia / Adobe released it quite a bit ago (while Flash was still popular).

nojvek 7y ago

Adobe did open the swf spec in later versions. Swf was compressed bytecode. Still a lot more efficient than the way we send js. https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-file-format-spec.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil... There were a number of tools that compiled to swf. It sucks that Adobe never opened the Flash Player. That was it’s death nail. They had little to gain from it. It was free. The money maker was Flash Studio and other Macromedia tools. If Adobe had opened Flash and had a sane security Sandbox it would have survived iOS. Adobe was like the old Microsoft though. They just didn’t get the power of Open Source.

gmiller123456 7y ago
My bet would be the real money maker was all the spyware included with the Flash installer.