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The advantage of Flash was that is was a plugin that ran uniformly across browsers, and integrated directly into whatever hardware it ran on. The trouble with C
by nicetryguy 6y ago
The advantage of Flash was that is was a plugin that ran uniformly across browsers, and integrated directly into whatever hardware it ran on. The trouble with Canvas or even SVG is that you never quite know what you're going to get, and even today, they don't quite have the horsepower of what Flash was able to accomplish with vector graphics 15 years ago.
There are many things that i do not miss about Flash, and i do think it had to go due to becoming a security hole infested bloated mess and running terribly on smartphones; but boy do i miss that development GUI... and i loved Actionscript 2 and even 3, you know, when they worked...
- irrational 6y agoYes, we came for the cross-platform nature of Flash (browsers were even worse at being standards compliant back then so something like Java/jQuery/Flash was essential), but we stayed for the low-bandwidth high-quality vector animations. It's too bad they didn't just stick to the core features and had to continually add features that introduced security holes. I had high hopes that between SVG and Canvas that someone would create a flash replacement, but it hasn't happened yet.
- nicetryguy 6y agoAgreed. Adobe severely mismanaged Macromedia's baby. They kept adding features at a frantic pace while breaking core functionality. I remember AS3 being so broken by the early 2010s i wasn't even sure anymore if my code was wrong or Flash was just broken... It is shocking in retrospect a technology with all but 100% market share went to zero in just a few years with no suitable replacement in many respects. A WASM / Node / Canvas combination with a development GUI similar to Flash that all but bypasses HTML and CSS would be amazing; and if done correctly, possibly revolutionary. It is my dream project for some future time....