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As an AS3-focused developer in the years around 2010, this is too heavy-handed. The Apple announcement followed a youtube announcement in Jan 2010 of an experim
by liquidise 6y ago
As an AS3-focused developer in the years around 2010, this is too heavy-handed. The Apple announcement followed a youtube announcement in Jan 2010 of an experimental HTML5 video player. It took years for that player to become the standard. Apple may well have seen the writing on the wall, but to say "everyone hated or was avoiding flash" is objectively false.
- pmiller2 6y agoThis comports well with my memory of the time. I remember there being a lot of "Flash sucks" sentiment online, but no decent alternatives. The days of entire UIs done in Flash was largely over by 2010, IIRC, but there were still things like video playback that couldn't be handled easily without Flash. I remember explicitly installing Flash on Linux, simply so I could watch Youtube with relatively little friction. In my mind, by that time, that was the main purpose of having Flash around at all. I am really glad HTML 5 has matured to the point that it has. Not having to have an entirely separate runtime environment running in the browser window makes things so much more stable than before. Now, if only we could figure out a way to make having lots of tabs not be painful, and maybe get a bit of a handle on memory usage, I think I might very well be out of things to complain about in terms of basic browser usability. ;)
- anthk 6y agoYou had the video plugin, x-mplayerplug-in, with either mplayer, vlc or mozplugger.
- bdcravens 6y agoI don't think anyone hated it, but it definitely wasn't in the "loved" category either - more of a "tolerated it as a necessary evil"
- elicash 6y agoI think the way to settle this -- and I'm not taking sides here -- is to look at the original Hacker News reception to this letter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304310
- bdcravens 6y agoGoing back to the original comment, "Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point", I think you have to look at as being a broader concern than HN, a subculture that doesn't reflect "everyone".
- elicash 6y agoI don't think by "everyone" they meant people who weren't aware of what flash was and users. Just the people who could conceivably be trying to avoid it -- creative types and developers.
- Izkata 6y agoEven people who weren't aware. I distinctly remember a general dislike by people who didn't know the name of the technology, because parts of my highschool's homepage were implemented in Flash, and it didn't load right. In 2005-2006. They recognized it primarily because it was slow and messed with the right-click context menu.
- thedonkeycometh 6y agoLOL at the python devs in the thread, such hope.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoHey, this thread is great, thanks for the link!
- sixstringtheory 6y agoInteresting that we now find ourselves in a battle over Native vs Electron/ReactNative, when that was essentially SJ's answer to Flash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304329 The problem is that both web applications and native applications are "applications." The rest are either implementation details or politics of the platform owners (Apple) and 3rd party app developers. I say this as someone who enjoys writing Swift.
- xtracto 6y agoYup, in 2012 I was writing web video players and ad-serving platforms for a video streaming company. It was all Flash, because there were no real alternatives. HTML5 was just kind of starting but HTML5+Video+JS did not allow to develop logic as complex as what AS3 provided.
- JiNCMG 6y agoIf you were a laptop used then you hated flash. Except for a few times where the heat in the building was down and playing a flash video will transform your laptop to a desk space heater.