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The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based durin

The tweet mentions that you could 'just' send an SWF file to someone and it played. Well, if anybody had to fix a computer, or hosted anything Flash-based during that era, then they would know that's bullshit. Sure maybe with the standalone Flash player it worked allright, but that's not how people really used Flash. Even in my experience, a single SWF running locally didn't always work across all versions of Flash player. Flash on the web only worked if you had Flash player plugin installed. Both browser and Flash updates themselves would break the Flash plugin constantly. That was across all browsers and platforms. Keeping plugins updated and reliable was a mess, for a long time there weren't even auto updates. Flash was a mess the whole time. Let's not pretend that it ever really "just worked" because it didn't.

larsiusprime 6y ago
My experience was to upload to Newgrounds and Kongregate and send it to my mom on an ancient computer and she'd run it just fine. I am sorry for oversimplifying but I do think many people had the same experience as I did.
- danShumway 6y ago
  But your mom was on Windows, right? And probably running a pretty mainstream browser that was updated regularly. If your only requirement is that you should be able to put your code on a website and your mom should be able to visit a link and run it, then the web is already significantly ahead of where Flash was. Of course, the accessibility of creation is a problem, but if you send someone a link to a canvas-based animation, they are more likely to be able to play it today than they ever were in the days of Flash. They can even play it on mobile. Unless you're doing something very experimental, they'll likely be able to play it even if their computer/browser is out of date. I mean, if we're simplifying this down to the common experience, the way people consume HTML games and Flash games is literally the same -- they visit a link. I have self-hosted remote playtests of the current game I'm working on by putting the game on a static page, and that is just as accessible to playtesters as anything that I was ever doing when I was building Flash games. More accessible, because now I don't have to send people to a wiki to get the game playing on Linux.
  - larsiusprime 6y ago
    My mom was on windows, using an old version of IE. Never had any problems. Flash player compat wasn't perfect but it was more than enough to create vibrant scenes like Kongregate, Newgrounds, and ArmorGames. Anecdotal sure, but it was good enough for the scene to exist. The main thing about the single-file thing is that it afforded the flash portal ecosystem. It was really easy to share your work as a creator without a lot of technical experience. > but if you send someone a link to a canvas-based animation, they are more likely to be able to play it today than they ever were in the days of Flash. They can even play it on mobile. Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons. Nowadays everybody bakes out their animations to 100x the size with compression artifacts and stick them on Youtube with LESS features than flash had, a direct consequence of the decline of Flash and HTML5's inability as a platform stack to fill the gap. I love Linux and the open web, I'm glad they exist and I want things to work on them. I just wish HTML5 as a platform had actually delivered on its promises by not missing the forest for the trees.
    - danShumway 6y ago
      > Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons. I think we might be arguing past each other. I fully, 100% agree with this point. I just don't think it has anything to do with the web. When people brought up replacing the Flash runtime with the web, there were two things being claimed: A) that the platform itself could handle all of the technical requirements of Flash and B) that tools would exist that replaced Flash. I believe that the first claim mostly came true, that the web today is about as powerful as Flash was. The second claim never even came close to happening. A lot of platforms exist that export to the web, but even the really popular ones like Unity just don't feel the same. Unity is, unfortunately, not an adequate substitute for Flash. And I think that's a real tragedy, but I feel like we're at a point where the web should be left out of the conversation. There are game-related APIs that I want on the web, but for the most part there is nothing that browser makers can do to solve your problem. Someone has to make a development environment. It's a separate problem. The web today is capable of doing the stuff you want it to do, but there is no development environment that replaces Flash. And that's kind of revealing because it's not just that there isn't a web-compatible alternative to Flash, or there isn't an Open Source alternative. Proprietary game engines that aren't even targeting the web are not as good as Flash was for rapid content prototyping. Why can't anyone, commercial or Open Source, build a Flash replacement for any platform/runtime? That's the conversation we need to be having, not whether or not the web is mature enough as a runtime.
- QuantumYeti 6y ago
  I definitely remember downloading SWFs and running them from my desktop. I don't recall having problems getting them to run. Just wanted to add that my experiences match up with what you're describing.
jimbob45 6y ago
Came to say this. Versioning was a nightmare and still is if you want to run any legacy SWFs. I guess that you could levy the same criticism against HTML with infinite NPM libraries though.
danShumway 6y ago
Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do. Flash was really important for its time, and I agree there are things I still miss about it that the web hasn't been able to replicate. But my goodness, as someone who uses Linux today, I can't express how glad I am that the websites that never worked on my Linux machines now do work on my Linux machines. Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored because Flash was a proprietary blob of insecure DRM-riddled code and Adobe couldn't be bothered to give anyone any attention unless they were big enough that they were impossible to ignore. Yes, I'm incredibly disappointed that the web hasn't captured everything Flash did, but it is good that we have gotten rid of Flash because mobile and Linux users deserve to have a version of the web that works on their machines. These people who are lauding Flash as a universal environment either just have rose-tinted glasses or they lived in an even smaller programming bubble than the one they accuse HTML advocates of inhabiting.
- larsiusprime 6y ago
  > no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. C'mon I never emailed people SWF's, seriously. We uploaded them to flash portals and sent links to our friends. The single-file aspect was important because it made it easy to share (for both you and the flash portal). Also crucially it made it easy for competing flash portals to "steal" your game and spread it even further. > as someone who uses Linux today I get what you're saying and I love Linux and go out of my way to support it, but I don't think the Linux audience in 1999-2008 was exactly who most of us were targeting, nor did it have particularly much market share among desktop computers then or now.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > but I don't think the Linux audience in 1999-2008 was exactly who most of us were targeting Well, but... yeah. I know people weren't targeting Linux in the early 2000's, that was the problem. That's what I'm saying. One of the biggest advantages of dumping Flash was that it got replaced with a runtime that worked on every OS even if people weren't deliberately targeting it. I'm saying that's a big enough advantage that it's worth the tradeoff. The Linux market share on desktop computers was tiny back then, but it was big enough that the community deserved to have a web in its entirety that worked for them. Not just a couple websites, they deserved to have full access to the platform that claimed to be a democratizing environment, and they were never going to be a part of that platform as long as Flash existed. I disagree that Linux compatibility back then was a non-issue. It was not. It was a serious problem that held Linux back as a platform and as a daily driver and we all hated it, and it feels very dismissive to say that it was just a tiny side effect or that it's irrelevant to the broader point. Flash was never cross-platform and it held back the entire web from being a universally accessible platform. And it only got fixed because developers were forced to use a runtime that supported Linux. That is the only reason that Linux browsers are usable today. ---- I am kind of skeptical that distributing SWFs is actually that much easier than distributing zip files. Even downloading/stealing and re-hosting JS code is not that hard. This is coming from someone who agrees with many of your points about the overall accessibility that Flash brought. But I do not believe it's harder to distribute content on the web today than it was back then. I uploaded SWF files to those portals, I put them on flash drives. My process today for distribution is pretty much the same. And once this stuff is on the web, the web is vastly better at distribution than the Flash Player plugin was.
the8472 6y ago
> but that's not how people really used Flash 4chan's /f/ would disagree, they're posting stand-alone flash games and animations just fine and those also worked locally.
- naikrovek 6y ago
  Yeah I remember clicking on .swf files in directory listings over FTP almost 20 years ago and seeing the animation or game load up in the browser like no big deal. It was a great way to share and discover weird as hell flash animations.
hackmiester 6y ago
I don't really have any way to refute what you are saying, but I don't recall the difficulties you are describing. I supported Windows desktops for many years during the heyday of the Flash Player.
recursive 6y ago
That point is very curious, since you actually can email someone an .html file, and it will "just work".
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  When was the last time you saw a web app that was a single html file and nothing else?
  - recursive 6y ago
    Around the same time I saw a web app that was a single SWF file that you could email. I do see tech demos in that form factor though. Or at least they could easily be.
- dsego 6y ago
  Not if it has local dependencies, like js or css, then you would need to bundle those as well, in an archive perhaps.
  - krapp 6y ago
    You can include js and css in the same html file, between <script> and <style> tags.
    - dsego 6y ago
      Duh, that's if I build the page myself and I know how to code html. Even then it's not trivial in the sense that it will "just work".
      - recursive 6y ago
        What could possibly cause it not to work?
        dsego 6y ago
8organicbits 6y ago
In terms of sending a single SWF file to someone: The HTML equivalent would be to inline your CSS and Javascript, and use data URLs to inline images/assets. Now you have a single, self contained HTML file you can send around and it will "play" when you double click it. I suppose the point may be that no one has written a tool to package a HTML5 app up like that? Seems possible to build under certain constraints.
- stupidcar 6y ago
  They have. It’s called Webpack. There are also various similar tools. EDIT: I got downvoted for telling the truth? The website is here if you don't believe me: https://webpack.js.org/ https://webpack.js.org/ It literally does what the post I replied to asked for.
  - claytongulick 6y ago
    I've noticed an increase in upvote/downvotes based on whether or not a person agrees, rather than whether the comment was on-topic and contributed to the conversation. I try to make a point of upvoting comments I disagree with, but that are clearly made in good faith in order to counteract this trend. I suppose this problem is a normal low entropy state in community moderated systems. It takes a lot more mental energy to moderate based on the value of the conversation rather than whether you personally agree.
- mook 6y ago
  The older HTML equivalent would be to package it in a *.mhtml where the various parts are mime-encoded, like a multipart email would. It's only been around for decades. Creating it was saving a webpage in IE. Mozilla/Firefox never supported it, though, even though they already had the necessary code for doing email… possibly because they had inherited the Netscape mail codebase which was a bit difficult to reuse.
ineedasername 6y ago
In practice it wasn't too uncommon for a single web page to also be a constellation different interdependent swf files. One for each menu, button, forms, etc. The author's points hold true at least somewhat if you're talking about a single cohesive Flash application, but much less so if you're talking about a website built with flash.
- taf2 6y ago
  <object>it</object><object>was</object><object>a</object><object>thing</object><object>of</object><object>beauty.</object>
- larsiusprime 6y ago
  Yes, flash websites were a bit of an anti-pattern even then (brilliant jewels like Homestarrunner.com aside) Point I didn't mention clearly enough was that single-file-as-default was REALLY good for flash portal distribution. Made it easy for creators to share and easy for portals to ingest files, AND to "steal" them from eachother, which was something us developers actively encouraged, it's how you got your game or cartoon played/watched by millions of people.
shams93 6y ago
It was always hell to get hired to edit a swf file where the client didn't know you need the original fla to edit the thing the swf was not enough.
- artificial 6y ago
  This brings back memories of flash decompiling and trying to sift through the output to do the deed.
nanodeath 6y ago
IIRC one of Chrome's various selling points when it launched was that Flash was bundled in, so 1. you always had Flash and 2. the plugin was more likely to be properly compatible with the browser, and 3. because Chrome updated constantly, that means you got updated Flash, too. So they definitely were trying to address that glaring pain point you brought up.
- nl 6y ago
  This is very true, and often forgotten. Initially it was a strategy to reduce security incidents caused by out-of-date Flash plugins.
- mkl 6y ago
  Plus Chrome's multiprocess model and sandboxing meant when Flash crashed you'd lose a tab or two instead of the whole browser. Before that I used to have browser profiles (and sometimes a whole browser) just dedicated to the fragile buggy Flash plugin, which wasn't installed on my primary browser.
its_simple 6y ago
You're missing his point. If you wanted to share what you made, all you needed to do was export the .swf file. If I want to share my html5 game with you, there's a shit ton of files I have to upload somewhere.
dimmke 6y ago
The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on. Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had its own proprietary scripting language called ActionScript and you definitely needed to have some coding skill to do most things in Flash beyond basic animations.
- SimianLogic2 6y ago
  Actually Flash was fantastic (for games). AS3 is one of my favorite programming languages I've ever worked with, but Flash wasn't just a programming language. The display tree (put simply: game engine) was baked into the runtime, which made it very very easy to make games. The tight coupling between art (movieclips created in Flash the program) and code (AS3 written in FlashDevelop or notepad) made for very fast iteration compared to today's highly siloed environments (make art in W. animate in X. export with Y. hand off to developers working in Z). The amount of hoops you have to jump through to run something interactive in Unity is mind-boggling by comparison (without even talking about sharing that thing with another human on another computer). Processing was also pretty good at the first bit, but it wasn't as tuned to games and sharing your stuff was pretty awful (java applets). Just because I <3 Flash doesn't mean it didn't have security problems, though. I wish someone had bought the tech off of Adobe and turned it into a gaming platform a-la Steam with proper input support.
  - claytongulick 6y ago
    AS3 was a great language. It struck a perfect balance between static and dynamic typing, had all the OOP you wanted, but FP too. Also, e4x and data binding in Flex was magical.
  - dimmke 6y ago
    It might have been fun/easy to use for some people and encouraged game development that would have otherwise been too complex/too high of a learning curve. But browser games is a niche thing and really only a part of Flash's legacy. Flash also got used for a lot of other things and in a lot of cases it was basically to add in functionality that wasn't supported by native web standards yet. This was why entire websites were built in flash. Because it gave you the freedom to do things that you just couldn't do with regular HTML/JS. If the point the author wants to make is that creating games in HTML/JS is more cumbersome because there isn't one authoring tool that is used by everybody and has a comprehensive toolset, maybe that's true I don't know. But I definitely prefer this reality to a reality where Flash is still being used in 2020. When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now. And because HTML/JS are open and not proprietary, the people whining about it are free to take a shot at creating their own authoring software for games without having to worry about getting anybody's permission or getting sued by a company that owns the rights to JavaScript. I will say, I think the niche of browser games played by kids is now taken up by phone games from a consumer perspective. I'm not sure even if an easy way to create them existed that they'd be nearly as popular.
easton 6y ago
>there weren’t even auto updates I remember a point where just about every time anyone logged into a XP machine, the Flash player would start begging to be updated. There seemed to be multiple updates a week sometimes to fix stuff. When Chrome started embedding Flash it was just about revolutionary since you didn’t have to keep as much of an eye on whatever CVE popped up that day.
- emn13 6y ago
  Also, the whole auto-update story is a bit of a tangent anyhow - nothing updated reliably back then. People were lazy, or didn't trust updates; but it was common for people to delay updates sometimes indefinitely, even if in the long-term that was unwise. That may have been one of chromes big selling points; that meant that you knew what you were targeting back when FF and especially, especially IE always required coding for 5 or so major versions - you'd have IE compat mode (~5.5), 6,7,8, and sometimes IE9 or mac-IE, which all had pretty significant feature and bug differences, and it took years to obsolete a version. And ironically, IE's fractured nature kept the web alive; because it meant that you needed to invest in the kinds of processes, habits, and webdesign that catered to multiple rendering engines. IE's dominance appears huge only if you add all those versions together; but from a webdevs perspective, you needed to do many of the things cross-browser support requires anyhow - unlike today, when you can get pretty far by simply testing on chrome only, and likely iOS (though even that is ignorable for some quite influential market segments, e.g. india, and it risks obsoletion in china and africa too).
heavyset_go 6y ago
In the early days, people would share Flash projects as .EXE files, and those would "just work".
- thewebcount 6y ago
  ... On Windows. They never worked for me on the Mac.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Flash projects could be exported as .EXE files on Windows, or Mac HQX files.
fny 6y ago
So Flash and HTML/JS are how I got into programming at the age of 8, and I completely disagree with your comment. All I needed to do was export the flash document as an exe and boom: it worked. The portability was amazing. I would just cut a release, put it on floppies, and take them to school. I never had anyone complain once about having an issue. Oh, and no one gave a damn about Linux outside of server admins back then, so yes an .exe was "universally" portable across whatever windows version people had running. There was also a fairly easy process for creating versions for Macs then too, but I don't remember how I did it. Also, Flash was very good about having backwards compatible exports, so for as long as you weren't using the latest features you could reliably export to older versions of Flash. Flash was a blessing in the late 90s and early aughts too precisely because it was the only reliable runtime when the internet was a flaming trash heap of incompatibility during the browser wars. Nothing worked everywhere /except/ Flash. The only other app platform available at the time were Java applets, and those were a nightmare. There's a reason why you used to be able to buy entire websites that were Flash based: it just worked. Yes, Flash only worked if you had Flash installed, but honestly, who didn't? Was this really any different than making sure you had whatever God forsaken Windows service pack installed on your computer? And yes, I know Flash didn't work on Linux, but almost /everyone/ ran Windows back in the day. I loved every product Macromedia created and owe a lot to them for having made it so easy to make engaging dynamic content. It's how I got hooked on developing software as a kid in elementary school. It's a shame that there's nothing as simple anymore. I died a little inside when Adobe bought them, and I feel like the next generation is missing out on what was a really fun, flexible, and simple tool... Making a ball change shades and move in Flash was a few intuitive clicks on a timeline. Now we have a only have a canvas API with relatively low level primitives. If you want things to be simpler, you have to go find some other package, oh wait now you need node, npm, we pack and 20 other dependencies to build the damn package, did you download the proper CSS file too, oh wait you need to import the script at the bottom of the page not the head, blah, blah, blah. I miss Flash. Yes, the internet is better without it, but I feel like kids of today don't know what they're missing.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Adobe moved right on to supporting HTML5 in their Adobe Animate tool: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-html5-canvas-document.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht... The support for using simple tools to make HTML5 animations and interactive content has been there for years (since at least 2013, when CreateJS was released: https://www.createjs.com/ https://www.createjs.com/ )) Adobe Animate: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html
gorgoiler 6y ago
In the context of the tweet thread’s list the author meant that (1) Flash web deploys were a single file and (3) distribution was with a single URL, which could be emailed.
reaktivo 6y ago
For what it's worth, distributing SWFs bundled with the player as an executable was something that was popular and trivial to do. It used to be called a Projector
jonplackett 6y ago
I think what they mean is that it when it worked, it worked the same everywhere. Barely any testing was required because flash always played the same in every browser on every computer. Which was nice.
velcro 6y ago
My experience with Flash is completely opposite to yours - I'd say we're for the most part pretending that by letting Flash die we're better off today. My fans spinning up every time I open a random website definitely disagree with you. Wasn't that the #1 argument for getting rid of Flash? I started developing Flash websites in Flash 3 in school, transitioned into Actionscript 2/3 and did some complex projects over the years. Can't vouch for Linux but on my Mac and on Windows it was definitely great, it DID just work and it was cross-platform. People have short memories - but cross-platform back then was also mostly referring to huge JS/website inconsistencies between different browsers. I mean - when you say cross-platform, what are you even comparing it to? I had a huge offline collection of different SWF files/websites for inspiration and that I could just start up from the filesystem and they also just worked (if it was a single-file project of course). I'd wager that 95+% of the people also had the full Flash Player installed. Today I do some complex JS/React/webGL stuff - and let me tell you it takes like 10x as much (money, time, knowledge, effort) to develop stuff that's comparable to what I did 10 years ago in Flash. And this comes with more or just as many cross-browser and performance problems. Blaming Flash for "fixing your computer" or saying it somehow had "hosting issues" I can't really understand at all. The "mobile era" just started when Flash started transitioning into smartphones/apps - first results were not ideal but promising. Were Adobe allowed to have 10 years of iterations on those - I do firmly believe it would have been a #1 app development environment today. There would have been no need for Unity or even cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, etc... But it is what it is - sorry, but anyone who thinks Flash dying was not primarily about Apple or even Google not wanting to keep their walled gardens for themselves is delusional. Adobe definitely has a good part of the blame for not recognising the potential and fighting for it some more.
- koonsolo 6y ago
  I can't upvote this enough. Anyone who developed in that ecosystem loved it, including myself. When you read negative comments, it's always someone who didn't really use it. It worked for developers, it worked for gamers. My guess is that the haters are just very loud in their hate.
  - btilly 6y ago
cblconfederate 6y ago
they say "distribute", not send. The truth is, you just put it on a web server with some rudimentary js, if required, and it works
AshleysBrain 6y ago
Honest question: why does it matter if it's one file or not? For example if you're deploying to a web server, it doesn't seem a big deal if you're uploading one file or several... so why the issue?
- j45 6y ago
  One file allows it to work offline, from anywhere which was more common.
- DharmaPolice 6y ago
  It depends on how you're deploying. If you're uploading (or downloading) via a web front end (like someone else has mentioned) then obviously one file is easier. I don't recall emailing too many swf files like the twitter poster said but if you were, emailing one file is clearly easier than emailing a set of files. Also as soon as you have more than one file you can run into path issues.
- fmxexpress 6y ago
  I ran one of the large flash game portals. We had 100,000 Flash games. It matters because of distribution. One distribution mechanism was through MochiMedia and MochiAds. You'd upload an SWF to MochiMedia's site and they would aggregate it out to thousands of other sites. Without a playable package format you would have had millions and millions of files. Game creators liked the "copy protection" that the SWF package provided and game sites liked the "sandboxed" game files. If a browser could host a ZIP file and load all the assets out of it as if it was a sandboxed local directory that would be the equivalent.
- Olreich 6y ago
  Another reason for single-file distribution is the ease of installation and running. If you can run from a single executable with all resources embedded in it, then users have a very easy time of things, they just download the program, then run it. Apple's ".app" distribution format works just like that, while allowing the developer to have a directory structure for their convenience. App stores solve the problem in other ways, but there is no good app store for the web.
deno 6y ago
Macromedia Flash allowed you to export to an .exe and it just worked (on Windows). The executables weren’t big either, I remember taking my Flash presentations to school on floppy disks.
tpoacher 6y ago
As a user, I remember it exactly as the author of this article does. "Standalone player" (let alone on 'linux') is a bit of a strawman. For me it was always as easy as just opening it in my browser and it worked out of the box. And even if this had problems as you rightly suggest, for its time the alternatives were worse. Comparing via the benefit of hindsight in 2020 isn't really relevant to the point of the article.

larsiusprime 6y ago

My experience was to upload to Newgrounds and Kongregate and send it to my mom on an ancient computer and she'd run it just fine. I am sorry for oversimplifying but I do think many people had the same experience as I did.

danShumway 6y ago
But your mom was on Windows, right? And probably running a pretty mainstream browser that was updated regularly. If your only requirement is that you should be able to put your code on a website and your mom should be able to visit a link and run it, then the web is already significantly ahead of where Flash was. Of course, the accessibility of creation is a problem, but if you send someone a link to a canvas-based animation, they are more likely to be able to play it today than they ever were in the days of Flash. They can even play it on mobile. Unless you're doing something very experimental, they'll likely be able to play it even if their computer/browser is out of date. I mean, if we're simplifying this down to the common experience, the way people consume HTML games and Flash games is literally the same -- they visit a link. I have self-hosted remote playtests of the current game I'm working on by putting the game on a static page, and that is just as accessible to playtesters as anything that I was ever doing when I was building Flash games. More accessible, because now I don't have to send people to a wiki to get the game playing on Linux.
- larsiusprime 6y ago
  My mom was on windows, using an old version of IE. Never had any problems. Flash player compat wasn't perfect but it was more than enough to create vibrant scenes like Kongregate, Newgrounds, and ArmorGames. Anecdotal sure, but it was good enough for the scene to exist. The main thing about the single-file thing is that it afforded the flash portal ecosystem. It was really easy to share your work as a creator without a lot of technical experience. > but if you send someone a link to a canvas-based animation, they are more likely to be able to play it today than they ever were in the days of Flash. They can even play it on mobile. Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons. Nowadays everybody bakes out their animations to 100x the size with compression artifacts and stick them on Youtube with LESS features than flash had, a direct consequence of the decline of Flash and HTML5's inability as a platform stack to fill the gap. I love Linux and the open web, I'm glad they exist and I want things to work on them. I just wish HTML5 as a platform had actually delivered on its promises by not missing the forest for the trees.
  - danShumway 6y ago
    > Yeah but the problem is creating that canvas-based animation is insane, so there aren't any canvas-based animations, compared to the output of flash cartoons. I think we might be arguing past each other. I fully, 100% agree with this point. I just don't think it has anything to do with the web. When people brought up replacing the Flash runtime with the web, there were two things being claimed: A) that the platform itself could handle all of the technical requirements of Flash and B) that tools would exist that replaced Flash. I believe that the first claim mostly came true, that the web today is about as powerful as Flash was. The second claim never even came close to happening. A lot of platforms exist that export to the web, but even the really popular ones like Unity just don't feel the same. Unity is, unfortunately, not an adequate substitute for Flash. And I think that's a real tragedy, but I feel like we're at a point where the web should be left out of the conversation. There are game-related APIs that I want on the web, but for the most part there is nothing that browser makers can do to solve your problem. Someone has to make a development environment. It's a separate problem. The web today is capable of doing the stuff you want it to do, but there is no development environment that replaces Flash. And that's kind of revealing because it's not just that there isn't a web-compatible alternative to Flash, or there isn't an Open Source alternative. Proprietary game engines that aren't even targeting the web are not as good as Flash was for rapid content prototyping. Why can't anyone, commercial or Open Source, build a Flash replacement for any platform/runtime? That's the conversation we need to be having, not whether or not the web is mature enough as a runtime.
QuantumYeti 6y ago
I definitely remember downloading SWFs and running them from my desktop. I don't recall having problems getting them to run. Just wanted to add that my experiences match up with what you're describing.

jimbob45 6y ago

Came to say this. Versioning was a nightmare and still is if you want to run any legacy SWFs. I guess that you could levy the same criticism against HTML with infinite NPM libraries though.

danShumway 6y ago

Agreed. As someone who learned games programming in Flash, and loved Flash, and benefited quite a bit from it -- no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed that wasn't in a browser, and when I moved to newer versions of Flash, I would regularly run into problems where someone would have a Flash player that didn't support the stuff I was trying to do. Flash was really important for its time, and I agree there are things I still miss about it that the web hasn't been able to replicate. But my goodness, as someone who uses Linux today, I can't express how glad I am that the websites that never worked on my Linux machines now do work on my Linux machines. Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored because Flash was a proprietary blob of insecure DRM-riddled code and Adobe couldn't be bothered to give anyone any attention unless they were big enough that they were impossible to ignore. Yes, I'm incredibly disappointed that the web hasn't captured everything Flash did, but it is good that we have gotten rid of Flash because mobile and Linux users deserve to have a version of the web that works on their machines. These people who are lauding Flash as a universal environment either just have rose-tinted glasses or they lived in an even smaller programming bubble than the one they accuse HTML advocates of inhabiting.

larsiusprime 6y ago
> no, you couldn't just email someone an SWF. That never worked. C'mon I never emailed people SWF's, seriously. We uploaded them to flash portals and sent links to our friends. The single-file aspect was important because it made it easy to share (for both you and the flash portal). Also crucially it made it easy for competing flash portals to "steal" your game and spread it even further. > as someone who uses Linux today I get what you're saying and I love Linux and go out of my way to support it, but I don't think the Linux audience in 1999-2008 was exactly who most of us were targeting, nor did it have particularly much market share among desktop computers then or now.
- danShumway 6y ago
  > but I don't think the Linux audience in 1999-2008 was exactly who most of us were targeting Well, but... yeah. I know people weren't targeting Linux in the early 2000's, that was the problem. That's what I'm saying. One of the biggest advantages of dumping Flash was that it got replaced with a runtime that worked on every OS even if people weren't deliberately targeting it. I'm saying that's a big enough advantage that it's worth the tradeoff. The Linux market share on desktop computers was tiny back then, but it was big enough that the community deserved to have a web in its entirety that worked for them. Not just a couple websites, they deserved to have full access to the platform that claimed to be a democratizing environment, and they were never going to be a part of that platform as long as Flash existed. I disagree that Linux compatibility back then was a non-issue. It was not. It was a serious problem that held Linux back as a platform and as a daily driver and we all hated it, and it feels very dismissive to say that it was just a tiny side effect or that it's irrelevant to the broader point. Flash was never cross-platform and it held back the entire web from being a universally accessible platform. And it only got fixed because developers were forced to use a runtime that supported Linux. That is the only reason that Linux browsers are usable today. ---- I am kind of skeptical that distributing SWFs is actually that much easier than distributing zip files. Even downloading/stealing and re-hosting JS code is not that hard. This is coming from someone who agrees with many of your points about the overall accessibility that Flash brought. But I do not believe it's harder to distribute content on the web today than it was back then. I uploaded SWF files to those portals, I put them on flash drives. My process today for distribution is pretty much the same. And once this stuff is on the web, the web is vastly better at distribution than the Flash Player plugin was.

the8472 6y ago

> but that's not how people really used Flash 4chan's /f/ would disagree, they're posting stand-alone flash games and animations just fine and those also worked locally.

naikrovek 6y ago
Yeah I remember clicking on .swf files in directory listings over FTP almost 20 years ago and seeing the animation or game load up in the browser like no big deal. It was a great way to share and discover weird as hell flash animations.

hackmiester 6y ago

I don't really have any way to refute what you are saying, but I don't recall the difficulties you are describing. I supported Windows desktops for many years during the heyday of the Flash Player.

recursive 6y ago

That point is very curious, since you actually can email someone an .html file, and it will "just work".

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
When was the last time you saw a web app that was a single html file and nothing else?
- recursive 6y ago
  Around the same time I saw a web app that was a single SWF file that you could email. I do see tech demos in that form factor though. Or at least they could easily be.
dsego 6y ago
Not if it has local dependencies, like js or css, then you would need to bundle those as well, in an archive perhaps.
- krapp 6y ago
  You can include js and css in the same html file, between <script> and <style> tags.
  - dsego 6y ago
    Duh, that's if I build the page myself and I know how to code html. Even then it's not trivial in the sense that it will "just work".
    - recursive 6y ago
      What could possibly cause it not to work?
      - dsego 6y ago

8organicbits 6y ago

In terms of sending a single SWF file to someone: The HTML equivalent would be to inline your CSS and Javascript, and use data URLs to inline images/assets. Now you have a single, self contained HTML file you can send around and it will "play" when you double click it. I suppose the point may be that no one has written a tool to package a HTML5 app up like that? Seems possible to build under certain constraints.

stupidcar 6y ago
They have. It’s called Webpack. There are also various similar tools. EDIT: I got downvoted for telling the truth? The website is here if you don't believe me: https://webpack.js.org/ https://webpack.js.org/ It literally does what the post I replied to asked for.
- claytongulick 6y ago
  I've noticed an increase in upvote/downvotes based on whether or not a person agrees, rather than whether the comment was on-topic and contributed to the conversation. I try to make a point of upvoting comments I disagree with, but that are clearly made in good faith in order to counteract this trend. I suppose this problem is a normal low entropy state in community moderated systems. It takes a lot more mental energy to moderate based on the value of the conversation rather than whether you personally agree.
mook 6y ago
The older HTML equivalent would be to package it in a *.mhtml where the various parts are mime-encoded, like a multipart email would. It's only been around for decades. Creating it was saving a webpage in IE. Mozilla/Firefox never supported it, though, even though they already had the necessary code for doing email… possibly because they had inherited the Netscape mail codebase which was a bit difficult to reuse.

ineedasername 6y ago

In practice it wasn't too uncommon for a single web page to also be a constellation different interdependent swf files. One for each menu, button, forms, etc. The author's points hold true at least somewhat if you're talking about a single cohesive Flash application, but much less so if you're talking about a website built with flash.

taf2 6y ago
<object>it</object><object>was</object><object>a</object><object>thing</object><object>of</object><object>beauty.</object>
larsiusprime 6y ago
Yes, flash websites were a bit of an anti-pattern even then (brilliant jewels like Homestarrunner.com aside) Point I didn't mention clearly enough was that single-file-as-default was REALLY good for flash portal distribution. Made it easy for creators to share and easy for portals to ingest files, AND to "steal" them from eachother, which was something us developers actively encouraged, it's how you got your game or cartoon played/watched by millions of people.

shams93 6y ago

It was always hell to get hired to edit a swf file where the client didn't know you need the original fla to edit the thing the swf was not enough.

artificial 6y ago
This brings back memories of flash decompiling and trying to sift through the output to do the deed.

nanodeath 6y ago

IIRC one of Chrome's various selling points when it launched was that Flash was bundled in, so 1. you always had Flash and 2. the plugin was more likely to be properly compatible with the browser, and 3. because Chrome updated constantly, that means you got updated Flash, too. So they definitely were trying to address that glaring pain point you brought up.

nl 6y ago
This is very true, and often forgotten. Initially it was a strategy to reduce security incidents caused by out-of-date Flash plugins.
mkl 6y ago
Plus Chrome's multiprocess model and sandboxing meant when Flash crashed you'd lose a tab or two instead of the whole browser. Before that I used to have browser profiles (and sometimes a whole browser) just dedicated to the fragile buggy Flash plugin, which wasn't installed on my primary browser.

its_simple 6y ago

You're missing his point. If you wanted to share what you made, all you needed to do was export the .swf file. If I want to share my html5 game with you, there's a shit ton of files I have to upload somewhere.

dimmke 6y ago

The weird contrarian "actually Flash was good" takes I've been seeing all over today is absolutely bonkers. It's like these people think we weren't around when Flash was a thing or they just have rose colored nostalgia glasses on. Flash was absolutely horrendous. Also, people keep talking about how easy it was to create stuff in it and how JS/HTML involves too much coding. This is more revisionist history - Flash had its own proprietary scripting language called ActionScript and you definitely needed to have some coding skill to do most things in Flash beyond basic animations.

SimianLogic2 6y ago
Actually Flash was fantastic (for games). AS3 is one of my favorite programming languages I've ever worked with, but Flash wasn't just a programming language. The display tree (put simply: game engine) was baked into the runtime, which made it very very easy to make games. The tight coupling between art (movieclips created in Flash the program) and code (AS3 written in FlashDevelop or notepad) made for very fast iteration compared to today's highly siloed environments (make art in W. animate in X. export with Y. hand off to developers working in Z). The amount of hoops you have to jump through to run something interactive in Unity is mind-boggling by comparison (without even talking about sharing that thing with another human on another computer). Processing was also pretty good at the first bit, but it wasn't as tuned to games and sharing your stuff was pretty awful (java applets). Just because I <3 Flash doesn't mean it didn't have security problems, though. I wish someone had bought the tech off of Adobe and turned it into a gaming platform a-la Steam with proper input support.
- claytongulick 6y ago
  AS3 was a great language. It struck a perfect balance between static and dynamic typing, had all the OOP you wanted, but FP too. Also, e4x and data binding in Flex was magical.
- dimmke 6y ago
  It might have been fun/easy to use for some people and encouraged game development that would have otherwise been too complex/too high of a learning curve. But browser games is a niche thing and really only a part of Flash's legacy. Flash also got used for a lot of other things and in a lot of cases it was basically to add in functionality that wasn't supported by native web standards yet. This was why entire websites were built in flash. Because it gave you the freedom to do things that you just couldn't do with regular HTML/JS. If the point the author wants to make is that creating games in HTML/JS is more cumbersome because there isn't one authoring tool that is used by everybody and has a comprehensive toolset, maybe that's true I don't know. But I definitely prefer this reality to a reality where Flash is still being used in 2020. When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now. And because HTML/JS are open and not proprietary, the people whining about it are free to take a shot at creating their own authoring software for games without having to worry about getting anybody's permission or getting sued by a company that owns the rights to JavaScript. I will say, I think the niche of browser games played by kids is now taken up by phone games from a consumer perspective. I'm not sure even if an easy way to create them existed that they'd be nearly as popular.

easton 6y ago

>there weren’t even auto updates I remember a point where just about every time anyone logged into a XP machine, the Flash player would start begging to be updated. There seemed to be multiple updates a week sometimes to fix stuff. When Chrome started embedding Flash it was just about revolutionary since you didn’t have to keep as much of an eye on whatever CVE popped up that day.

emn13 6y ago
Also, the whole auto-update story is a bit of a tangent anyhow - nothing updated reliably back then. People were lazy, or didn't trust updates; but it was common for people to delay updates sometimes indefinitely, even if in the long-term that was unwise. That may have been one of chromes big selling points; that meant that you knew what you were targeting back when FF and especially, especially IE always required coding for 5 or so major versions - you'd have IE compat mode (~5.5), 6,7,8, and sometimes IE9 or mac-IE, which all had pretty significant feature and bug differences, and it took years to obsolete a version. And ironically, IE's fractured nature kept the web alive; because it meant that you needed to invest in the kinds of processes, habits, and webdesign that catered to multiple rendering engines. IE's dominance appears huge only if you add all those versions together; but from a webdevs perspective, you needed to do many of the things cross-browser support requires anyhow - unlike today, when you can get pretty far by simply testing on chrome only, and likely iOS (though even that is ignorable for some quite influential market segments, e.g. india, and it risks obsoletion in china and africa too).

heavyset_go 6y ago

In the early days, people would share Flash projects as .EXE files, and those would "just work".

thewebcount 6y ago
... On Windows. They never worked for me on the Mac.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Flash projects could be exported as .EXE files on Windows, or Mac HQX files.

fny 6y ago

So Flash and HTML/JS are how I got into programming at the age of 8, and I completely disagree with your comment. All I needed to do was export the flash document as an exe and boom: it worked. The portability was amazing. I would just cut a release, put it on floppies, and take them to school. I never had anyone complain once about having an issue. Oh, and no one gave a damn about Linux outside of server admins back then, so yes an .exe was "universally" portable across whatever windows version people had running. There was also a fairly easy process for creating versions for Macs then too, but I don't remember how I did it. Also, Flash was very good about having backwards compatible exports, so for as long as you weren't using the latest features you could reliably export to older versions of Flash. Flash was a blessing in the late 90s and early aughts too precisely because it was the only reliable runtime when the internet was a flaming trash heap of incompatibility during the browser wars. Nothing worked everywhere /except/ Flash. The only other app platform available at the time were Java applets, and those were a nightmare. There's a reason why you used to be able to buy entire websites that were Flash based: it just worked. Yes, Flash only worked if you had Flash installed, but honestly, who didn't? Was this really any different than making sure you had whatever God forsaken Windows service pack installed on your computer? And yes, I know Flash didn't work on Linux, but almost /everyone/ ran Windows back in the day. I loved every product Macromedia created and owe a lot to them for having made it so easy to make engaging dynamic content. It's how I got hooked on developing software as a kid in elementary school. It's a shame that there's nothing as simple anymore. I died a little inside when Adobe bought them, and I feel like the next generation is missing out on what was a really fun, flexible, and simple tool... Making a ball change shades and move in Flash was a few intuitive clicks on a timeline. Now we have a only have a canvas API with relatively low level primitives. If you want things to be simpler, you have to go find some other package, oh wait now you need node, npm, we pack and 20 other dependencies to build the damn package, did you download the proper CSS file too, oh wait you need to import the script at the bottom of the page not the head, blah, blah, blah. I miss Flash. Yes, the internet is better without it, but I feel like kids of today don't know what they're missing.

chrisco255 6y ago
Adobe moved right on to supporting HTML5 in their Adobe Animate tool: https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-html5-canvas-document.html https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/using/creating-publishing-ht... The support for using simple tools to make HTML5 animations and interactive content has been there for years (since at least 2013, when CreateJS was released: https://www.createjs.com/ https://www.createjs.com/ )) Adobe Animate: https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html https://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

gorgoiler 6y ago

In the context of the tweet thread’s list the author meant that (1) Flash web deploys were a single file and (3) distribution was with a single URL, which could be emailed.

reaktivo 6y ago

For what it's worth, distributing SWFs bundled with the player as an executable was something that was popular and trivial to do. It used to be called a Projector

jonplackett 6y ago

I think what they mean is that it when it worked, it worked the same everywhere. Barely any testing was required because flash always played the same in every browser on every computer. Which was nice.

velcro 6y ago

My experience with Flash is completely opposite to yours - I'd say we're for the most part pretending that by letting Flash die we're better off today. My fans spinning up every time I open a random website definitely disagree with you. Wasn't that the #1 argument for getting rid of Flash? I started developing Flash websites in Flash 3 in school, transitioned into Actionscript 2/3 and did some complex projects over the years. Can't vouch for Linux but on my Mac and on Windows it was definitely great, it DID just work and it was cross-platform. People have short memories - but cross-platform back then was also mostly referring to huge JS/website inconsistencies between different browsers. I mean - when you say cross-platform, what are you even comparing it to? I had a huge offline collection of different SWF files/websites for inspiration and that I could just start up from the filesystem and they also just worked (if it was a single-file project of course). I'd wager that 95+% of the people also had the full Flash Player installed. Today I do some complex JS/React/webGL stuff - and let me tell you it takes like 10x as much (money, time, knowledge, effort) to develop stuff that's comparable to what I did 10 years ago in Flash. And this comes with more or just as many cross-browser and performance problems. Blaming Flash for "fixing your computer" or saying it somehow had "hosting issues" I can't really understand at all. The "mobile era" just started when Flash started transitioning into smartphones/apps - first results were not ideal but promising. Were Adobe allowed to have 10 years of iterations on those - I do firmly believe it would have been a #1 app development environment today. There would have been no need for Unity or even cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, etc... But it is what it is - sorry, but anyone who thinks Flash dying was not primarily about Apple or even Google not wanting to keep their walled gardens for themselves is delusional. Adobe definitely has a good part of the blame for not recognising the potential and fighting for it some more.

koonsolo 6y ago
I can't upvote this enough. Anyone who developed in that ecosystem loved it, including myself. When you read negative comments, it's always someone who didn't really use it. It worked for developers, it worked for gamers. My guess is that the haters are just very loud in their hate.
- btilly 6y ago

cblconfederate 6y ago

they say "distribute", not send. The truth is, you just put it on a web server with some rudimentary js, if required, and it works

AshleysBrain 6y ago

Honest question: why does it matter if it's one file or not? For example if you're deploying to a web server, it doesn't seem a big deal if you're uploading one file or several... so why the issue?

j45 6y ago
One file allows it to work offline, from anywhere which was more common.
DharmaPolice 6y ago
It depends on how you're deploying. If you're uploading (or downloading) via a web front end (like someone else has mentioned) then obviously one file is easier. I don't recall emailing too many swf files like the twitter poster said but if you were, emailing one file is clearly easier than emailing a set of files. Also as soon as you have more than one file you can run into path issues.
fmxexpress 6y ago
I ran one of the large flash game portals. We had 100,000 Flash games. It matters because of distribution. One distribution mechanism was through MochiMedia and MochiAds. You'd upload an SWF to MochiMedia's site and they would aggregate it out to thousands of other sites. Without a playable package format you would have had millions and millions of files. Game creators liked the "copy protection" that the SWF package provided and game sites liked the "sandboxed" game files. If a browser could host a ZIP file and load all the assets out of it as if it was a sandboxed local directory that would be the equivalent.
Olreich 6y ago
Another reason for single-file distribution is the ease of installation and running. If you can run from a single executable with all resources embedded in it, then users have a very easy time of things, they just download the program, then run it. Apple's ".app" distribution format works just like that, while allowing the developer to have a directory structure for their convenience. App stores solve the problem in other ways, but there is no good app store for the web.

deno 6y ago

Macromedia Flash allowed you to export to an .exe and it just worked (on Windows). The executables weren’t big either, I remember taking my Flash presentations to school on floppy disks.

tpoacher 6y ago

As a user, I remember it exactly as the author of this article does. "Standalone player" (let alone on 'linux') is a bit of a strawman. For me it was always as easy as just opening it in my browser and it worked out of the box. And even if this had problems as you rightly suggest, for its time the alternatives were worse. Comparing via the benefit of hindsight in 2020 isn't really relevant to the point of the article.