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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. Tha

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.
  - larsiusprime 6y ago
    I understand your point better now. I think we were talking past each other.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    The same audience still doesn't matter today, because most just use GPUs with drivers that get black listed by browsers, making WebGL useless.
- selfhoster11 6y ago
  I did just that, emailed SWFs mostly to myself, and a couple of times to my more savvy classmates who knew how to use them. I also recall having a stash of standalone SWF gamęs on my shared network drive at school, because all EXEs were restricted and SWF files could be opened by drag-and-drop on the Internet Explorer window.
- marcus_holmes 6y ago
  this is a vicious spiral, though - because the type of people who are interested in Flash can't use it on Linux, they don't run Linux and therefore there's no people who are into Flash and run Linux and so there's no need to support Linux. The same is still true of a lot of other "niche" application areas.
mgkimsal 6y ago
> Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows "Cross platform" to many meant Windows 98, XP, 2000 and NT5. You could work across that, you had the 'enterprise' market apps people using 2000 and NT which could then also be used by employees at home using Win XP. What more could you want? I'm guess I'm being only half-sarcastic here.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Reminds me of a conversation with a coworker in around 1999: Me: “I wish [our product] was cross platform. It would be more enjoyable to develop.” Him (without a shred of sarcasm): “It IS cross platform! It runs on NT and 95!”
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > It would be more enjoyable to develop In my experience, cross-platform is less enjoyable to develop. Yes, it might be more valuable to users for a program to be cross-platform, but it is definitely more enjoyable to develop something that just has to run on a single platform. For cross-platform work, you have to use languages, runtimes, and libraries that are supported across multiple platforms. When you are doing single platform work, you can use all the cross-platform languages and libraries and tools, plus all the other languages, libraries and tools that are on the single platform. I suspect the difference was even more stark in 1999 because Windows was even more dominant than it is now.
    - mgkimsal 6y ago
      It might be 'more enjoyable' to develop, but certainly not to test, which... for many people, seems to be something wholly separate from 'development'.
- mkr-hn 6y ago
  That was how Microsoft put it, too.
naikrovek 6y ago
> Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed What? Literally everyone who downloaded the flash plugin and ran the installer got a standalone player installed as well. It was right there in the start menu for anyone to find.
- zapzupnz 6y ago
  That very much depended on how they installed Flash. If they downloaded the plugin via the Adobe website, it depended on whether you got the ActiveX control version or the Netscape version. For computers in more recent memory, you didn’t need either: just a copy of Chrome set as your default browser.
bitwize 6y ago
> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Flash only ever worked properly if you were running it in Internet Explorer for Mac OS 9. Any other browser/OS combination and you were looking at low framerates, audio/video desync, or both. Linux was worst of all.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  that is such a weird OS + browser combination I have to take your comment as sarcasm, but the rest of the comment seems sincere enough.
  - bfung 6y ago
    That’s not sarcasm. As computer lab support back in college, iMac G3’s were the rage and the internet was new. The only working browser back in the day on those macs were IE. Good luck getting Netscape Navigator running on them (Phoenix/Firefox not created yet, Safari wasn’t even a thing yet). Flash was the worst thing to support in those labs - some windows machines, some macs, some Solaris... gl trying to tell non-CS majors to move to a different computer... I’ll admit, the authoring tools were great, everything else about flash was terrible.
  - bitwize 6y ago
    No, not sarcasm at all. I tried Flash on a variety of different operating systems and browsers at the time -- and IE5 on Mac OS 9 was the only one that consistently delivered good results. It seems weird, but when you consider the context at the time, it makes sense. Back in the late 90s -- when Flash was on the rise and being rapidly developed -- IE5 was the browser to have on Mac just as it was on Windows. The reasons had to do with the infusion of cash from Microsoft into Apple to keep the latter company afloat while Jobs restructured it and pivoted it to Mac OS X. At the time, companies such as Adobe and Macromedia -- which hadn't been acquired by Adobe yet -- developed and tested on Mac first and most extensively, because they catered to the design crowd. As for browsers -- Safari wasn't around yet, Netscape was boomer tech by that time, Mozilla was broken, and Firefox wouldn't come out for a couple years. That really left only IE and boutique browsers like CyberDog and iCab. So the environment that got the most thorough testing was -- once again -- IE on Mac OS 9. When Mac OS X finally did come out, it would take a number of years for Mac developers to fully embrace it. Remember, to the Mac teams inside Adobe and Macromedia, Inside Macintosh was the fucking Bible. Classic Mac OS was The Right Thing; Mac OS X was something weird and wrong and inherently anti-Mac, as parts of it came from Unix, which was known for having user-hostility baked into its design philosophy. It was also the future, but it was a future they'd take years to reckon with. So, for a while, the native OS X version of Flash chugged no matter which browser you used it in. Meanwhile, IE5 for Mac OS 9 still worked perfectly well provided you launched the Classic environment, so if you wanted top Flash performance it was still available.
arbitrage 6y ago
there wasn't really a mobile market to speak of during the hey-day of flash. it was an awful and wonderful time to experience the constant breakage and delight that was the www.
- j45 6y ago
  I thought the same until I discovered flash lite. It quietly powered the gui on many more devices than I ever imagined in its time. Nokia adopted it and it was quietly embedded in far more devices to provide custom functionality than I realized. Flash lite even appeared to power the internet channel on the Nintendo Wii. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite
selfhoster11 6y ago
> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored This is my view as well. Windows on x86 was the golden child. Linux was the hated bastard at best (anyone remember switching between OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio to eke any sound out of the plugin?). And even that only on x86. ARM? What, you mean that's a processor architecture? That's not even going into the utter dead silence when it came to supporting other Adobe plugins outside of Windows. Adobe Air? Shockwave? I can still easily feel my blood boiling at the absence of these plugins, after so so many years.
- qalmakka 6y ago
  I remember configuring NSPluginWrapper in order to get the 32 bit Flash plugin to work on 64 bit Linux (and FreeBSD). God that was nasty, as soon as YouTube launched the html5 beta I erased Flash player from every device I owned.
  - kzrdude 6y ago
    Heh, I've all but forgotten about that pervasive use of flash. We came out of the dark ages, that feels good.
  - linspace 6y ago
    NSPluginWrapper... Something has awoken inside me. Distant memories behind a fog. Something evil. This is not good, not good.
- toper-centage 6y ago
  I remember fearing for the life of Linux when Adobe Air and Silver light or whatever started appearing. Whole websites started popping up that simply only worked for Windows users. Adobe was totally part of the EEE.
Aardwolf 6y ago
Sending an email with SWF was not the intention, but you could easily host your SWF anywhere and give a URL and they could play your game, most of the time cross platform except those few years where they weren't updating the linux SWF player to the latest version (which got fixed again later). If you can't host it yourself, you could put it on websites like newgrounds.
_the_inflator 6y ago
I only want to add security to the list. This lead to my boycott of flash. Sorry flash websites! Flash was an interesting experiment, as you said, important at the time, however I started distrusting websites, that used it, heavily and avoided them.
HeckFeck 6y ago
As an avid Linux user, I can't help but agree with the core of your argument. Open is always better, especially for posterity. But the aspect of Flash that hasn't been fully replicated by HTML5/JS/whatever is the fully integrated workflow. That took away much of the underlying woes with environments and configurations. All you did was install Flash, make your game or animation, and a SWF was produced. This ease of beginning surely was a springboard for so many creators and animators, like the Newgrounds community. I'm also partial to the idea of not everything being done by the browser, and instead plugins specialising in their respective area. The effect of moving everything into the browser only contributes to the Google-led near monopolisation of rendering engines.
- fendy3002 6y ago
  I have zero experience on both. What's stopping someone / org to develop a workflow framework on HTML5 that's working similar with flash?
  - sofixa 6y ago
    Adobe did. Dreamweaver, Animate kinda try to do the same
roenxi 6y ago
> Flash was really important for its time It'll be a shame to see Flash go, it really was quite a technology. Couldn't click a link without some cutesy little flash something-or-other popping up. My memories may be tainted by time, but I'm hesitant to say that modern web apps have surpassed flash yet. A web browser simply isn't up to the challenge of creating a nice interface for an app and I got the impression Flash's tooling was a long way ahead of the game. But Flash stands as a soon-forgotten internet monument of closed source winning battles and open source winning wars.
sleepy_keita 6y ago
> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows This honestly got a laugh out of me.

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.
- larsiusprime 6y ago
  I understand your point better now. I think we were talking past each other.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  The same audience still doesn't matter today, because most just use GPUs with drivers that get black listed by browsers, making WebGL useless.
selfhoster11 6y ago
I did just that, emailed SWFs mostly to myself, and a couple of times to my more savvy classmates who knew how to use them. I also recall having a stash of standalone SWF gamęs on my shared network drive at school, because all EXEs were restricted and SWF files could be opened by drag-and-drop on the Internet Explorer window.
marcus_holmes 6y ago
this is a vicious spiral, though - because the type of people who are interested in Flash can't use it on Linux, they don't run Linux and therefore there's no people who are into Flash and run Linux and so there's no need to support Linux. The same is still true of a lot of other "niche" application areas.

mgkimsal 6y ago

> Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows "Cross platform" to many meant Windows 98, XP, 2000 and NT5. You could work across that, you had the 'enterprise' market apps people using 2000 and NT which could then also be used by employees at home using Win XP. What more could you want? I'm guess I'm being only half-sarcastic here.

ryandrake 6y ago
Reminds me of a conversation with a coworker in around 1999: Me: “I wish [our product] was cross platform. It would be more enjoyable to develop.” Him (without a shred of sarcasm): “It IS cross platform! It runs on NT and 95!”
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > It would be more enjoyable to develop In my experience, cross-platform is less enjoyable to develop. Yes, it might be more valuable to users for a program to be cross-platform, but it is definitely more enjoyable to develop something that just has to run on a single platform. For cross-platform work, you have to use languages, runtimes, and libraries that are supported across multiple platforms. When you are doing single platform work, you can use all the cross-platform languages and libraries and tools, plus all the other languages, libraries and tools that are on the single platform. I suspect the difference was even more stark in 1999 because Windows was even more dominant than it is now.
  - mgkimsal 6y ago
    It might be 'more enjoyable' to develop, but certainly not to test, which... for many people, seems to be something wholly separate from 'development'.
mkr-hn 6y ago
That was how Microsoft put it, too.

naikrovek 6y ago

> Nobody had a standalone Flash player installed What? Literally everyone who downloaded the flash plugin and ran the installer got a standalone player installed as well. It was right there in the start menu for anyone to find.

zapzupnz 6y ago
That very much depended on how they installed Flash. If they downloaded the plugin via the Adobe website, it depended on whether you got the ActiveX control version or the Netscape version. For computers in more recent memory, you didn’t need either: just a copy of Chrome set as your default browser.

bitwize 6y ago

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Flash only ever worked properly if you were running it in Internet Explorer for Mac OS 9. Any other browser/OS combination and you were looking at low framerates, audio/video desync, or both. Linux was worst of all.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
that is such a weird OS + browser combination I have to take your comment as sarcasm, but the rest of the comment seems sincere enough.
- bfung 6y ago
  That’s not sarcasm. As computer lab support back in college, iMac G3’s were the rage and the internet was new. The only working browser back in the day on those macs were IE. Good luck getting Netscape Navigator running on them (Phoenix/Firefox not created yet, Safari wasn’t even a thing yet). Flash was the worst thing to support in those labs - some windows machines, some macs, some Solaris... gl trying to tell non-CS majors to move to a different computer... I’ll admit, the authoring tools were great, everything else about flash was terrible.
- bitwize 6y ago
  No, not sarcasm at all. I tried Flash on a variety of different operating systems and browsers at the time -- and IE5 on Mac OS 9 was the only one that consistently delivered good results. It seems weird, but when you consider the context at the time, it makes sense. Back in the late 90s -- when Flash was on the rise and being rapidly developed -- IE5 was the browser to have on Mac just as it was on Windows. The reasons had to do with the infusion of cash from Microsoft into Apple to keep the latter company afloat while Jobs restructured it and pivoted it to Mac OS X. At the time, companies such as Adobe and Macromedia -- which hadn't been acquired by Adobe yet -- developed and tested on Mac first and most extensively, because they catered to the design crowd. As for browsers -- Safari wasn't around yet, Netscape was boomer tech by that time, Mozilla was broken, and Firefox wouldn't come out for a couple years. That really left only IE and boutique browsers like CyberDog and iCab. So the environment that got the most thorough testing was -- once again -- IE on Mac OS 9. When Mac OS X finally did come out, it would take a number of years for Mac developers to fully embrace it. Remember, to the Mac teams inside Adobe and Macromedia, Inside Macintosh was the fucking Bible. Classic Mac OS was The Right Thing; Mac OS X was something weird and wrong and inherently anti-Mac, as parts of it came from Unix, which was known for having user-hostility baked into its design philosophy. It was also the future, but it was a future they'd take years to reckon with. So, for a while, the native OS X version of Flash chugged no matter which browser you used it in. Meanwhile, IE5 for Mac OS 9 still worked perfectly well provided you launched the Classic environment, so if you wanted top Flash performance it was still available.

arbitrage 6y ago

there wasn't really a mobile market to speak of during the hey-day of flash. it was an awful and wonderful time to experience the constant breakage and delight that was the www.

j45 6y ago
I thought the same until I discovered flash lite. It quietly powered the gui on many more devices than I ever imagined in its time. Nokia adopted it and it was quietly embedded in far more devices to provide custom functionality than I realized. Flash lite even appeared to power the internet channel on the Nintendo Wii. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Lite

selfhoster11 6y ago

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows, and occasionally on Mac. Everybody else on mobile and Linux got ignored This is my view as well. Windows on x86 was the golden child. Linux was the hated bastard at best (anyone remember switching between OSS, ALSA and PulseAudio to eke any sound out of the plugin?). And even that only on x86. ARM? What, you mean that's a processor architecture? That's not even going into the utter dead silence when it came to supporting other Adobe plugins outside of Windows. Adobe Air? Shockwave? I can still easily feel my blood boiling at the absence of these plugins, after so so many years.

qalmakka 6y ago
I remember configuring NSPluginWrapper in order to get the 32 bit Flash plugin to work on 64 bit Linux (and FreeBSD). God that was nasty, as soon as YouTube launched the html5 beta I erased Flash player from every device I owned.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Heh, I've all but forgotten about that pervasive use of flash. We came out of the dark ages, that feels good.
- linspace 6y ago
  NSPluginWrapper... Something has awoken inside me. Distant memories behind a fog. Something evil. This is not good, not good.
toper-centage 6y ago
I remember fearing for the life of Linux when Adobe Air and Silver light or whatever started appearing. Whole websites started popping up that simply only worked for Windows users. Adobe was totally part of the EEE.

Aardwolf 6y ago

Sending an email with SWF was not the intention, but you could easily host your SWF anywhere and give a URL and they could play your game, most of the time cross platform except those few years where they weren't updating the linux SWF player to the latest version (which got fixed again later). If you can't host it yourself, you could put it on websites like newgrounds.

_the_inflator 6y ago

I only want to add security to the list. This lead to my boycott of flash. Sorry flash websites! Flash was an interesting experiment, as you said, important at the time, however I started distrusting websites, that used it, heavily and avoided them.

HeckFeck 6y ago

As an avid Linux user, I can't help but agree with the core of your argument. Open is always better, especially for posterity. But the aspect of Flash that hasn't been fully replicated by HTML5/JS/whatever is the fully integrated workflow. That took away much of the underlying woes with environments and configurations. All you did was install Flash, make your game or animation, and a SWF was produced. This ease of beginning surely was a springboard for so many creators and animators, like the Newgrounds community. I'm also partial to the idea of not everything being done by the browser, and instead plugins specialising in their respective area. The effect of moving everything into the browser only contributes to the Google-led near monopolisation of rendering engines.

fendy3002 6y ago
I have zero experience on both. What's stopping someone / org to develop a workflow framework on HTML5 that's working similar with flash?
- sofixa 6y ago
  Adobe did. Dreamweaver, Animate kinda try to do the same

roenxi 6y ago

> Flash was really important for its time It'll be a shame to see Flash go, it really was quite a technology. Couldn't click a link without some cutesy little flash something-or-other popping up. My memories may be tainted by time, but I'm hesitant to say that modern web apps have surpassed flash yet. A web browser simply isn't up to the challenge of creating a nice interface for an app and I got the impression Flash's tooling was a long way ahead of the game. But Flash stands as a soon-forgotten internet monument of closed source winning battles and open source winning wars.

sleepy_keita 6y ago

> Cross platform my butt, Flash was only ever "cross platform" on Windows This honestly got a laugh out of me.