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Edit: sorry I made you angry. I didn't know that people are still sore about Flash. My memories of it were that it was buggy, made my computer overheat and cras

Edit: sorry I made you angry. I didn't know that people are still sore about Flash. My memories of it were that it was buggy, made my computer overheat and crash.

Causality1 6y ago
It's not Flash's fault that it was misused. Flash was a great tool for creating and sharing resolution-agnostic high quality multimedia content using incredibly small amounts of bandwidth. You weren't supposed to build entire websites with it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- marcodave 6y ago
  I guess the same could be said for HTML+Javascript
  - achairapart 6y ago
    Exactly, aren't SPAs the new Flash?[0] [0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C270SViXAAAzTLh?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C270SViXAAAzTLh?format=jpg&name=...
- robertoandred 6y ago
  Adobe’s app for creating that content hasn’t gone anywhere.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
echelon 6y ago
> I am glad that Flash is gone. Here is Steve Jobs's "Thoughts on Flash" letter from 2010 that brought it down: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple... And now we have giant js bundles composed of thousands of little libraries, ad hoc animation, subpar media playback. The web stack wasn't prepared to match the ease of authorship and distribution of Flash. It still isn't up to the same par, and it's been 15 years. If Adobe had open sourced the entire standard and the player itself early on, they'd still have the best authorship tool and would have done amazing things. I don't know what they were thinking. They had an awesome tool, but their strategy was so wrong. Flash was like PHP. Admittedly not the prettiest, but people did amazing things with it. It was a tool that worked for a lot of people. Teenagers were using Flash and getting really good. Steve didn't want Flash eating his batteries, so he killed it on Apple. He also left us with the fucking robber barron App Store and the concept that we can't run stuff or upgrade our own devices. Seems like Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you can or can't run on their platform - that's monopoly power. They killed Flash. Steve was worse than Flash and stole from us.
- oblio 6y ago
  Jobs was also a hypocrite, like Apple is for most (every?) business decision they present as a win for the consumer (https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/ https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/). There are good reasons to hate Flash, but that decision was an obvious strategy credit: they were going to kill Flash anyway because they wanted to prevent cross platform runtimes and toolkits on iOS, in order to fully control the platform and not be commoditized. Same reason why they banned JIT, in order to prevent Java/C# being used (it took a long time for these platforms to adapt and even today they are not widely used, maybe except for Xamarin, but even that is marginal compared to Objective-C/Swift).
  - trm42 6y ago
    Yes, Jobs and Apple are kind of sharks but on the other hand did you witness Flash running on Android phones? They were so slow that you didn't want to enable it even if you could :D
    - oblio 6y ago
      True, but that's also because phone hardware was crap at the time. I imagine current phone hardware is 20x faster than what we had at the time, probably more. Javascript was also slow back then, Chrome/V8 were only launched in 2008 and reached phones only years later, yet JavaScript based websites were used on smartphones. I'd be curious to see a comparison of site performance now, Flash vs a bog-standard HTML + JS + animations site. I think they would be quite similar.
    - thanksforthe42 6y ago
      Depends on the program. Also computing power increases with time, so this is a silly reason to kill off a feature.
  - robertoandred 6y ago
    How is Flash more cross-platform than HTML/CSS/JavaScript?

Edit: sorry I made you angry. I didn't know that people are still sore about Flash. My memories of it were that it was buggy, made my computer overheat and crash.

Causality1 6y ago

It's not Flash's fault that it was misused. Flash was a great tool for creating and sharing resolution-agnostic high quality multimedia content using incredibly small amounts of bandwidth. You weren't supposed to build entire websites with it.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
marcodave 6y ago
I guess the same could be said for HTML+Javascript
- achairapart 6y ago
  Exactly, aren't SPAs the new Flash?[0] [0]: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C270SViXAAAzTLh?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C270SViXAAAzTLh?format=jpg&name=...
robertoandred 6y ago
Adobe’s app for creating that content hasn’t gone anywhere.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

echelon 6y ago

> I am glad that Flash is gone. Here is Steve Jobs's "Thoughts on Flash" letter from 2010 that brought it down: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple... And now we have giant js bundles composed of thousands of little libraries, ad hoc animation, subpar media playback. The web stack wasn't prepared to match the ease of authorship and distribution of Flash. It still isn't up to the same par, and it's been 15 years. If Adobe had open sourced the entire standard and the player itself early on, they'd still have the best authorship tool and would have done amazing things. I don't know what they were thinking. They had an awesome tool, but their strategy was so wrong. Flash was like PHP. Admittedly not the prettiest, but people did amazing things with it. It was a tool that worked for a lot of people. Teenagers were using Flash and getting really good. Steve didn't want Flash eating his batteries, so he killed it on Apple. He also left us with the fucking robber barron App Store and the concept that we can't run stuff or upgrade our own devices. Seems like Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you can or can't run on their platform - that's monopoly power. They killed Flash. Steve was worse than Flash and stole from us.

oblio 6y ago
Jobs was also a hypocrite, like Apple is for most (every?) business decision they present as a win for the consumer (https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/ https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/). There are good reasons to hate Flash, but that decision was an obvious strategy credit: they were going to kill Flash anyway because they wanted to prevent cross platform runtimes and toolkits on iOS, in order to fully control the platform and not be commoditized. Same reason why they banned JIT, in order to prevent Java/C# being used (it took a long time for these platforms to adapt and even today they are not widely used, maybe except for Xamarin, but even that is marginal compared to Objective-C/Swift).
- trm42 6y ago
  Yes, Jobs and Apple are kind of sharks but on the other hand did you witness Flash running on Android phones? They were so slow that you didn't want to enable it even if you could :D
  - oblio 6y ago
    True, but that's also because phone hardware was crap at the time. I imagine current phone hardware is 20x faster than what we had at the time, probably more. Javascript was also slow back then, Chrome/V8 were only launched in 2008 and reached phones only years later, yet JavaScript based websites were used on smartphones. I'd be curious to see a comparison of site performance now, Flash vs a bog-standard HTML + JS + animations site. I think they would be quite similar.
  - thanksforthe42 6y ago
    Depends on the program. Also computing power increases with time, so this is a silly reason to kill off a feature.
- robertoandred 6y ago
  How is Flash more cross-platform than HTML/CSS/JavaScript?