6 ms·

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..

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..