7 ms·

Flash became popular because of 2 things: 1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier

Flash became popular because of 2 things: 1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier 2/ it's API that provided things that were not possible when browsers had none of these API (video streaming, socket programming...). At some point you could even write 2D shaders or inject C/C++ code with something called Alchemy. Point 2 is now largely covered by browser web API, although one might argue that the performances might not be always as good as they were in flash, especially when it comes to vector graphics or realtime audio processing. But 3D and webgl are more performant than flash in the browser. Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent, and even Adobe Animate isn't really doing exactly what flash did when it comes to authoring content for browsers. So there is still a potential market here. I'd like to see something node based when it comes to coding. Artists love their nodes. The real problem is obviously running old flash content like games. Some of these games were really good. I remember playing one which was a hotel management simulator and it was really really fun. But it's a bit like a these jar games in the 2000' one cannot run on modern mobile phones anymore. Without an effort to preserve these, they will all be lost.

pier25 6y ago
> Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent The other day I was researching how to add simple procedural animations to some web-based interactive content for a museum. This would have been a breeze with Flash. You just passed the .fla to the animator/illustrator and they would create the item in the library for you. Then you could simply animate that display object in your code and the artist would be able to modify it without breaking anything. I came up with this solution using DragonBones[1] so that the artists could work on their own. And then I could render those animations with Pixi[3]. I agree an all-in-one solution would be much nicer but not sure there is a market for it. [1] http://dragonbones.com/en/index.html http://dragonbones.com/en/index.html [2] https://pixijs.io/examples/#/plugin-dragonbones/eyetracking.js https://pixijs.io/examples/#/plugin-dragonbones/eyetracking....
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Wouldn't something like this work in a game engine that can export to Webassembly, like Godot? Though in either case, you lose the web platform, with its accessibility (aria, screen readers) and forward compatibility (like the one we had with the move to smartphones, etc).
  - Mirioron 6y ago
    I'm unsure whether this applies to Godot, but usually game engines come with a lot of unnecessary baggage. I think UE4 at its smallest was still something like 20 MB despite you not needing almost any of it. A 2D engine or renderer like PIXI.js makes more sense in these cases.
    - pier25 6y ago
      Yes, exactly. For simple games or single animations Pixi is plenty. In fact Phaser.js is built on top of Pixi.
      - darkwinx 6y ago
        Phaser is not using Pixi since Phaser 3
        pier25 6y ago
        Woops thanks for pointing that out.
    - MayeulC 6y ago
      Good point, thanks for reminding me of these :) I haven't really benchmarked the size, but there are a few demos floating around. Not entirely sure how to measure it, but that one seems to come down to less than 10kB? https://obersprengmeister.frozenfractal.com/ https://obersprengmeister.frozenfractal.com/
- throwawaywindev 6y ago
selimthegrim 6y ago
What was the hotel sim called?
dublin 6y ago
Yeah, there are a few really good things that will soon be lost forever, for instance the classic National Lampoon "Rigging of a Ship" Flash movie. Also, I'm not sure, but I think the absolute Scott Adams classic story of how he passed as a-hole mission statement consultant "Ray Mebert" was posted in Flash at the San Jose Mercury News' site years ago. (This is literally live-action Dilbert trolling of teh Logitech exec tean that all think this guy is an idiot, but are afraid to say so because he was brought in by the CEO...) If exists on the net at all anymore, it's probably only at Archive.org.
samcrawford 6y ago
On point 2: socket programming hasn't caught up to the same level of performance as Flash had. Try sending or receiving gigabits per second with WebSockets. In my own tests last year on reasonably modern hardware with a 10Gbps Intel NIC, Chrome was the worst performer (around 3Gbps before the CPU was completely saturated), and Edge was the best at around 5.5Gbps. I didn't compare with Flash last year to be fair, but historically it was much better. A native app on the same hardware was generating 10Gbps over the network at <20% CPU usage.
- Mirioron 6y ago
  This is the kind of stuff I find baffling. We killed off Flash, celebrated, and said that xyz will do the same thing as Flash did. Several years later xyz does not do what Flash did. We don't even have all the pieces to put the puzzle together, let alone have them come in one package.
- fenesiistvan 6y ago
  That should be some implentation issue as websocket is just a very thin layer above TCP and it should add only a small overhead.
  - mjevans 6y ago
    I find it more likely to be a security or battery performance related tweak. Most things just aren't going to generate peek bandwidth from within a web browser. Network testing tools (including bandwidth/latency testing) belong as native apps, probably precisely for the low level, high bandwidth access.
- Teknoman117 6y ago
  I really hate that I can't do UDP properly in the browser. I've seen so many examples of people effectively sending protobufs over webrtc data channels. It's kinda hilarious.
seanalltogether 6y ago
1. If Macromedia was still the author of Flash/Dreamweaver/Fireworks through the html5 transition days, I imagine all of those products would still be providing big benefits to web content creators. I genuinely believe that Adobe never understood the value of these products and the communities that formed around them. Adobe as a company didn't know how to foster and grow this half developer / half designer user base.
- SXX 6y ago
  Adobe failed exactly same way as tons of other proprietary software developers. Instead of embracing open source and leading the industry standard they wanted to keep tight control over everything: standard, runtime and toolset. They was so over controlling so there was whole game development industry where literally every company used Flash for UI for decade, but with 3rd-party proprietary runtime simply because Adobe ignored that market completely. If they only moved Flash into open source when it was on peak of it's popularity they would probably still sell their proprietary tools to so much larger audience.
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    In Adobe's defense, they kinda did try that: AS3 was supposed to become JS2/ES4 and they also released a bunch of somewhat-useful documentation on the SWF file format. They even released AVM2 as free software (called "Tamarin") with the idea that Firefox would replace SpiderMonkey with it. The web community stuck it's nose up at ES4 and the SWF documentation was kind of half-assed. Adobe's idea at the time of the HTML5 transition was that they were going to completely replace Flash with the Edge Suite, while Flash Player became an expensive-to-license compilation target for Unity. Hence, the whole "premium licensing" debacle that smacked of "we don't know who our customers are, but some of them aren't using Creative Suite, so let's try and charge them lots of money for things the web can already do".
    - SXX 6y ago
      That's really good points on their open source activity. How they failed with Alchemy and Unity / Unreal integration is another good story. In my opinion it all was just too little too late. They should been investing heavily into open source as soon as Google started their crusade on web with Chrome. By the time WebGL and other APIs became mature everything was over for Flash.
bsder 6y ago
> 1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier Why is it that with all our computer power, we somehow can't create authoring tools as good as we had in the past? HyperCard, DreamWeaver, Visual Basic 6, etc. all seem to be dramatically better for common people (read: not career programmers) than any modern equivalent we have.
- SXX 6y ago
  Your common people back then were far more computer-literate than most of career programmers today. Requirements for the entry into profession is so much lower from any point of view: time, difficulty and cost. Another side is that programming and web is no longer novelty so common people prefer to just pay for someone else for their time rather than learn anything on their own. Most people prefer to pay their auto mechanic, plumber or electrician even though most of people are capable of fixing many of their problems just by following simple tutorial and common sense. Programming is no different here: it's just easier or more time efficient to pay to someone else.
  - bsder 6y ago
    > Your common people back then were far more computer-literate than most of career programmers today. I absolutely don't buy this. My father, a high school English teacher, could barely run a spreadsheet that I set up for his grades--something that basically everyone can do today without blinking. And even he could use Hypercard. It's the tools, not the people.
    - y2kenny 6y ago
      I second this. Flash, HyperCard, Dreamweaver, VisualBasic 6 are all the tools I (along with my classmates) played with during high school before any official cs/engineering training.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    Plus life is so much easier when you don’t have to worry about i18n, encryption of any kind, HiDPI displays, Unicode of any sort, really any of dozens of things that modern users expect to just work.
kripy 6y ago
Let's not forget that Flash was the backbone of the ad industry back in the day as it was leveraged to produce rich media in the form of banners and interactive ads.
- jachee 6y ago
  And pop-ups, flashing distractions, ads with sound, and zero user control of tracking.
  - fiblye 6y ago
    And now seemingly every site out there has dozens of popovers, subscribe to a mailing list (amazed those still exist and are somehow pushed more than ever), cookie permission requests, "Like and retweet us!" banners that slowly scroll from the side, "It looks like you could use some help" clippy style bullshit that choppily moves on screen, autoplaying videos that seem to autoplay no matter how many times you try to disable it and no matter how many times browser developers say "Okay, we finally blocked autoplaying videos for real this time!", 15 megabyte gifs littered throughout random articles just to catch your eye or to be hip and radical and show the writer is the bee's knees and knows what the kids like, scroll hijacking that only serves to make it choppy and physically painful to scroll, back button hijacking that involves filling your past 100 pages with the current page and sometimes getting caught in a refresh loop so it's impossible to move, endlessly loading bullshit content whenever you think you've scrolled to the bottom... I can go on. Dealing with the modern web is like reading an infinite run-on sentence because it absolutely overwhelms you with shit and it doesn't let up. It's not hard to go to any random site and find 75% of the above all at once. Flash was bad. Somehow web developers took its demise as a challenge to make the web worse.
    - encom 6y ago
      Everything you said is correct. I also find it remarkable that the web has always performed like total dogshit, no matter how fast my computer has gotten. 20+ years ago it was in large part due to bandwidth constraints. Then 10-15 years ago that was essentially solved, but they continued piling more and more crap into the browser, and now it's a fucking app platform, and instead of clean efficient native software, we're now shoehorning every goddamn thing into the browser through layers and layers of frameworks, abstrations and "transpiling" or whatever. I detest the modern web, and I find myself using it less and less.
xg15 6y ago
So now that we'll soon be moving back to opaque binary blobs with WASM, what exactly have we gained? I know browsers have appeared to make enormous technical progress with all the new features - until you read stuff like this and realize most of it was already possible 20 years ago via Flash (Type-safe javascript as well, btw) - and partially in better quality and with less programming knowledge required than now. So did we eventually come full circle?
- jachee 6y ago
  Everything old is new again, and the more things change, the more they stay the same. That said, the Flash client was closed-source, buggy, security-challenged, intrusive, and a memory/battery hog. All that contributed to its demise. It also helped that it was denied access to what would become the world's largest consumer compute marketplace: the Apple App Store.
Yhippa 6y ago
Went down the rabbit hole because of point 2 and ended up at some Chrome experiments. There is some amazing stuff like that out there. I can't believe there aren't more browser-based 3D games.
cmrdsprklpny 6y ago
Regarding point 1, I’m not super familiar with the flash IDE, but I would guess that the closest thing we have today are fantasy consoles like PICO-8 or TIC-80. Thinking about it, Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) also kind of fulfills the niche. Flash was obviously way more powerful, though. If anyone knows anything current similar to the flash IDE, I’d be curious to hear about it.
winrid 6y ago
3. Compression. Since it's largely vector math it compressed pretty well, but that's also why it was CPU intensive.

pier25 6y ago

> Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent The other day I was researching how to add simple procedural animations to some web-based interactive content for a museum. This would have been a breeze with Flash. You just passed the .fla to the animator/illustrator and they would create the item in the library for you. Then you could simply animate that display object in your code and the artist would be able to modify it without breaking anything. I came up with this solution using DragonBones[1] so that the artists could work on their own. And then I could render those animations with Pixi[3]. I agree an all-in-one solution would be much nicer but not sure there is a market for it. [1] http://dragonbones.com/en/index.html http://dragonbones.com/en/index.html [2] https://pixijs.io/examples/#/plugin-dragonbones/eyetracking.js https://pixijs.io/examples/#/plugin-dragonbones/eyetracking....

MayeulC 6y ago
Wouldn't something like this work in a game engine that can export to Webassembly, like Godot? Though in either case, you lose the web platform, with its accessibility (aria, screen readers) and forward compatibility (like the one we had with the move to smartphones, etc).
- Mirioron 6y ago
  I'm unsure whether this applies to Godot, but usually game engines come with a lot of unnecessary baggage. I think UE4 at its smallest was still something like 20 MB despite you not needing almost any of it. A 2D engine or renderer like PIXI.js makes more sense in these cases.
  - pier25 6y ago
    Yes, exactly. For simple games or single animations Pixi is plenty. In fact Phaser.js is built on top of Pixi.
    - darkwinx 6y ago
      Phaser is not using Pixi since Phaser 3
      - pier25 6y ago
        Woops thanks for pointing that out.
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    Good point, thanks for reminding me of these :) I haven't really benchmarked the size, but there are a few demos floating around. Not entirely sure how to measure it, but that one seems to come down to less than 10kB? https://obersprengmeister.frozenfractal.com/ https://obersprengmeister.frozenfractal.com/
throwawaywindev 6y ago

selimthegrim 6y ago

What was the hotel sim called?

dublin 6y ago

Yeah, there are a few really good things that will soon be lost forever, for instance the classic National Lampoon "Rigging of a Ship" Flash movie. Also, I'm not sure, but I think the absolute Scott Adams classic story of how he passed as a-hole mission statement consultant "Ray Mebert" was posted in Flash at the San Jose Mercury News' site years ago. (This is literally live-action Dilbert trolling of teh Logitech exec tean that all think this guy is an idiot, but are afraid to say so because he was brought in by the CEO...) If exists on the net at all anymore, it's probably only at Archive.org.

samcrawford 6y ago

On point 2: socket programming hasn't caught up to the same level of performance as Flash had. Try sending or receiving gigabits per second with WebSockets. In my own tests last year on reasonably modern hardware with a 10Gbps Intel NIC, Chrome was the worst performer (around 3Gbps before the CPU was completely saturated), and Edge was the best at around 5.5Gbps. I didn't compare with Flash last year to be fair, but historically it was much better. A native app on the same hardware was generating 10Gbps over the network at <20% CPU usage.

Mirioron 6y ago
This is the kind of stuff I find baffling. We killed off Flash, celebrated, and said that xyz will do the same thing as Flash did. Several years later xyz does not do what Flash did. We don't even have all the pieces to put the puzzle together, let alone have them come in one package.
fenesiistvan 6y ago
That should be some implentation issue as websocket is just a very thin layer above TCP and it should add only a small overhead.
- mjevans 6y ago
  I find it more likely to be a security or battery performance related tweak. Most things just aren't going to generate peek bandwidth from within a web browser. Network testing tools (including bandwidth/latency testing) belong as native apps, probably precisely for the low level, high bandwidth access.
Teknoman117 6y ago
I really hate that I can't do UDP properly in the browser. I've seen so many examples of people effectively sending protobufs over webrtc data channels. It's kinda hilarious.

seanalltogether 6y ago

1. If Macromedia was still the author of Flash/Dreamweaver/Fireworks through the html5 transition days, I imagine all of those products would still be providing big benefits to web content creators. I genuinely believe that Adobe never understood the value of these products and the communities that formed around them. Adobe as a company didn't know how to foster and grow this half developer / half designer user base.

SXX 6y ago
Adobe failed exactly same way as tons of other proprietary software developers. Instead of embracing open source and leading the industry standard they wanted to keep tight control over everything: standard, runtime and toolset. They was so over controlling so there was whole game development industry where literally every company used Flash for UI for decade, but with 3rd-party proprietary runtime simply because Adobe ignored that market completely. If they only moved Flash into open source when it was on peak of it's popularity they would probably still sell their proprietary tools to so much larger audience.
- kmeisthax 6y ago
  In Adobe's defense, they kinda did try that: AS3 was supposed to become JS2/ES4 and they also released a bunch of somewhat-useful documentation on the SWF file format. They even released AVM2 as free software (called "Tamarin") with the idea that Firefox would replace SpiderMonkey with it. The web community stuck it's nose up at ES4 and the SWF documentation was kind of half-assed. Adobe's idea at the time of the HTML5 transition was that they were going to completely replace Flash with the Edge Suite, while Flash Player became an expensive-to-license compilation target for Unity. Hence, the whole "premium licensing" debacle that smacked of "we don't know who our customers are, but some of them aren't using Creative Suite, so let's try and charge them lots of money for things the web can already do".
  - SXX 6y ago
    That's really good points on their open source activity. How they failed with Alchemy and Unity / Unreal integration is another good story. In my opinion it all was just too little too late. They should been investing heavily into open source as soon as Google started their crusade on web with Chrome. By the time WebGL and other APIs became mature everything was over for Flash.

bsder 6y ago

> 1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier Why is it that with all our computer power, we somehow can't create authoring tools as good as we had in the past? HyperCard, DreamWeaver, Visual Basic 6, etc. all seem to be dramatically better for common people (read: not career programmers) than any modern equivalent we have.

SXX 6y ago
Your common people back then were far more computer-literate than most of career programmers today. Requirements for the entry into profession is so much lower from any point of view: time, difficulty and cost. Another side is that programming and web is no longer novelty so common people prefer to just pay for someone else for their time rather than learn anything on their own. Most people prefer to pay their auto mechanic, plumber or electrician even though most of people are capable of fixing many of their problems just by following simple tutorial and common sense. Programming is no different here: it's just easier or more time efficient to pay to someone else.
- bsder 6y ago
  > Your common people back then were far more computer-literate than most of career programmers today. I absolutely don't buy this. My father, a high school English teacher, could barely run a spreadsheet that I set up for his grades--something that basically everyone can do today without blinking. And even he could use Hypercard. It's the tools, not the people.
  - y2kenny 6y ago
    I second this. Flash, HyperCard, Dreamweaver, VisualBasic 6 are all the tools I (along with my classmates) played with during high school before any official cs/engineering training.
- TylerE 6y ago
  Plus life is so much easier when you don’t have to worry about i18n, encryption of any kind, HiDPI displays, Unicode of any sort, really any of dozens of things that modern users expect to just work.

kripy 6y ago

Let's not forget that Flash was the backbone of the ad industry back in the day as it was leveraged to produce rich media in the form of banners and interactive ads.

jachee 6y ago
And pop-ups, flashing distractions, ads with sound, and zero user control of tracking.
- fiblye 6y ago
  And now seemingly every site out there has dozens of popovers, subscribe to a mailing list (amazed those still exist and are somehow pushed more than ever), cookie permission requests, "Like and retweet us!" banners that slowly scroll from the side, "It looks like you could use some help" clippy style bullshit that choppily moves on screen, autoplaying videos that seem to autoplay no matter how many times you try to disable it and no matter how many times browser developers say "Okay, we finally blocked autoplaying videos for real this time!", 15 megabyte gifs littered throughout random articles just to catch your eye or to be hip and radical and show the writer is the bee's knees and knows what the kids like, scroll hijacking that only serves to make it choppy and physically painful to scroll, back button hijacking that involves filling your past 100 pages with the current page and sometimes getting caught in a refresh loop so it's impossible to move, endlessly loading bullshit content whenever you think you've scrolled to the bottom... I can go on. Dealing with the modern web is like reading an infinite run-on sentence because it absolutely overwhelms you with shit and it doesn't let up. It's not hard to go to any random site and find 75% of the above all at once. Flash was bad. Somehow web developers took its demise as a challenge to make the web worse.
  - encom 6y ago
    Everything you said is correct. I also find it remarkable that the web has always performed like total dogshit, no matter how fast my computer has gotten. 20+ years ago it was in large part due to bandwidth constraints. Then 10-15 years ago that was essentially solved, but they continued piling more and more crap into the browser, and now it's a fucking app platform, and instead of clean efficient native software, we're now shoehorning every goddamn thing into the browser through layers and layers of frameworks, abstrations and "transpiling" or whatever. I detest the modern web, and I find myself using it less and less.

xg15 6y ago

So now that we'll soon be moving back to opaque binary blobs with WASM, what exactly have we gained? I know browsers have appeared to make enormous technical progress with all the new features - until you read stuff like this and realize most of it was already possible 20 years ago via Flash (Type-safe javascript as well, btw) - and partially in better quality and with less programming knowledge required than now. So did we eventually come full circle?

jachee 6y ago
Everything old is new again, and the more things change, the more they stay the same. That said, the Flash client was closed-source, buggy, security-challenged, intrusive, and a memory/battery hog. All that contributed to its demise. It also helped that it was denied access to what would become the world's largest consumer compute marketplace: the Apple App Store.

Yhippa 6y ago

Went down the rabbit hole because of point 2 and ended up at some Chrome experiments. There is some amazing stuff like that out there. I can't believe there aren't more browser-based 3D games.

cmrdsprklpny 6y ago

Regarding point 1, I’m not super familiar with the flash IDE, but I would guess that the closest thing we have today are fantasy consoles like PICO-8 or TIC-80. Thinking about it, Scratch (scratch.mit.edu) also kind of fulfills the niche. Flash was obviously way more powerful, though. If anyone knows anything current similar to the flash IDE, I’d be curious to hear about it.

winrid 6y ago

3. Compression. Since it's largely vector math it compressed pretty well, but that's also why it was CPU intensive.