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IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, lik

IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. The actual animations and (sometimes) beautiful interfaces were not the problem. People generally loved that. Generally there's no need for a new product in this space because CSS does everything Flash once did, but adheres to web conventions. There probably is an opportunity, though. I'm not a motion graphics person - does Adobe Animate fit the bill at all? What do you think is missing today that we once had with Flash?

dncornholio 3y ago
Meanwhile we didn't have a replacement, and any replacement lacks of all the features you list, text selection, etc. It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's the reason.
- malauxyeux 3y ago
  > It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's how it happened in my orbit anyway. Steve Jobs published an open letter entitled "Thoughts on Flash", in which he said that iOS would never support Flash. We had a discussion at the web shop I was working for; we decided to stop making new things in Flash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
  - dugmartin 3y ago
    Fun story: Apple demoed the iPad to Hollywood execs a couple weeks before the release. The Hollywood folks saw all their web properties rendering almost no UI and their video content not available. I worked for a boutique consulting firm at that time and Warner Bros/Telepictures was our big client. We immediately got calls from a lot of execs and I had a week long firedrill of converting MANY Telepictures properties from Flash (mostly for the video content rendering with timecoded UI updates). They also had a video delivery company that was co-located with AOL fly out to Burbank and fly back with tons of hard drives full of episodes of Ellen, the Tyra Banks show, etc to recode from Flash video to video that could be served with the <video> content tag on iPads. It somehow all got done by the iPad release and Apple published a top 10 "sites that work great on iPad" page on their site and we had done 4 out of 10 of them. All we had to test on was desktop Safari resized to the screen size they told us it needed to work on.
- yreg 3y ago
  The replacement is CSS + JS. Thank God Apple helped kill Flash.
  - GenerocUsername 3y ago
    And 10 years later I just don't see the level of amateur uptake that flash had. For 10 years flash minted thousands of young animators and content creators. Since flashes death there are far fewer upstarts and communities despite Internet adoption being magnitudes higher
    - BizarroLand 3y ago
      Yep. The tech may be more mature and less prone to breakage, but the fun of creating, the joy of stupid games went with it for a lot of folks.
    - beAbU 3y ago
      The heyday of Newgrounds was truly a golden age for stupid amateur cartoons and games.
    - yreg 3y ago
      I would bet there are many more young amateur animators and content creators now than there have been 10 years ago. Their work is just more diverse than the "signature Flash animation look".
    - gs17 3y ago
      I really think the all-in-one-ness of Flash is what made it so easy to use. Not only that you can make almost everything for a game/cartoon in one interface (IIRC audio wasn't included), but also that the output was a single file you could share easily. The rampant piracy of old Flash versions probably helped a lot too.
- Aerroon 3y ago
  I remember that a lot of people were sure that we were going to get an even better replacement. "HTML5 is going to be the replacement." So much for that. Goodbye web games.
  - gs17 3y ago
    There are still a lot of "web games", but it's nothing like it used to be.
ktzar 3y ago
There's a correlation between the death of Flash and the rise of mobile devices browsing. Flash was pixel-based and the whole paradigm doesn't really work for responsiveness.
- verticalscaler 3y ago
  Flash was vector based.
- beAbU 3y ago
  Flash was just as responsive as HTML+CSS: As much as the developer makes it responsive. Also, flash was most certainly not pixel based. It was vector based and a common workflow was to create your graphics in the more powerful Adobe Illustrator, then import into flash for animation.
swatcoder 3y ago
No. Generally, the missing features you mention were inconsequential to decision-makers (outside of some ideological devs) and many of them were being gradually addressed by Macromedia/Adobe anyway. Flash died because Microsoft was agressingly nipping at Adobe on the commercial side with Silverlight, because standard bodies were finally chipping away at its feature advantages with long-needed improvements to HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and most impactfully of of all: because Steve Jobs decreed it. The death knell for Flash sounded exactly when the market-revolutionizing iPhone refused to support altogether. But all of that's just about the runtime platform. The posted app calls back to the Flash editor itself, which was extremely mature and powerul but had too much inertia to successfully pivot to targeting HTML or apps before Adobe would give up on it. Later apps have come, but inevitably start far behind the features that Flash offered designers, animators, and developers at its peak.
- newsclues 3y ago
  Yes, people forgot that websites for big companies were often flash based trash until the iPhone and the web changed to be mobile friendly as iPhones sales continued to skyrocket.
- xer0x 3y ago
  Thanks for this. People forget the creator experience in Flash. It was really amazing, albeit a little quirky.
- tempoponet 3y ago
  I'm surprised you bothered to mention SilverLight. It was Microsoft's intent, sure, but did it ever have any uptake? It's more of a curiosity or footnote than a relevant factor.
  - swatcoder 3y ago
    I think Silverlight was making deep inroads in the enterprise market for rich internet apps and that this was a growing customer retention issue for Adobe with Flash. That's part of why they invested so much in Flex and AIR as a more engineering-centric alternative to the Flash app's designer-centric timeline interface. They wanted to shore up what they were losing to Microsoft. The consumer usage of Flash was most visible (games, cartoons, brochure sites, video streaming) and Apple's evisceration of that market was what ultimately killed Flash, but things were already looking grim on several fronts before that happened.
pimlottc 3y ago
I think the GP is talking more about the authoring tools for Flash. You could do everything - graphics, animation, audio, video, scripting - in a single package that was relatively easy to use.
sam0x17 3y ago
It's crazy to me they didn't see the value in porting actionscript to something that compiles to JS/HTML5, though adobe couldn't be trusted to see this potential obviously. If they had something like that ready in ~2011 it could have completely replaced HTML 5 canvas adoption
- gs17 3y ago
  I blame Adobe for Flash dying much more than Apple. There's a lot of features that would have been hard to port (maybe Flash Player could have evolved into providing support for those and being optional for simpler content), but an HTML5 output that worked for 90% of 2D games and animations would have kept it relevant. Or at least funding Shumway while it was around if no one at Adobe was able to do it. Instead they made a converter where you lost audio, video, scripting, effects, etc. It should have at least been able to convert a Homestar Runner cartoon.
treflop 3y ago
Mobile apps are even worse than Flash and those reasons haven't hampered their adoption. Flash died because both Apple and Microsoft wanted it dead. Possibly justifiably.
karaterobot 3y ago
I always thought Flash died because Apple didn't want people to be able to write and execute arbitrary code in an app on their phones. That it posed a security risk, a stability risk, and potentially a business risk (as it could allow people to circumvent the limitations they'd imposed on, say, distribution and payments). Is that wrong?
- foooorsyth 3y ago
  In addition to all of those things, it also burned your battery like crazy. Jobs was very public about his annoyance with Flash’s battery drain.
- hirako2000 3y ago
  Yes, it is wrong. Mostly. Or just some minor reason. It was largely a fallacy perpetuated by Apple. The same fallacy used to more recently justify the app store exclusivity, aimed at preserving their enclosed ecosystem under the guise of protecting users from potential malware threats. While it's true that Flash posed security risks, not just on mobile but across platforms. Acrobat pdf readers continue to grapple with high-severity CVEs. Another argument against Flash support on the iPhone was its purported battery drain. It's worth considering the technological landscape of that era: Arm processors were less power-efficient, and early iPhones struggled with battery longevity. Remember, even basic color screen phones could last several days on a single charge—illustrated by the enduring appeal of the Nokia 3210, which could comfortably endure a week without needing to be plugged in. Yes flash early implementation for mobile was very inefficient. Yes Apple had valid reasons for resisting Flash support. However, at the heart of the matter was Adobe's lion stance on royalties, a proposition deemed cocky by Jobs. Plus jobs was in the money Business. So the moot negociation red eventually led to a declaration war on Adobe. Despite Adobe's towering market cap, and arguable more influential in the tech spheres, they underestimated Apple's strategic timing and their ability to a big push for new web standards, which ultimately led to the widespread adoption of HTML. Adobe's defeat to maintain their spotlight animation authoring tool for the web. Cousin comment touches on its disrespect for existing web standards, it never evolved to embrace the browser, it kept running as its own thing with limited to no interfacing with the browser API even. This conflict not only signed the future death certificates of Flash but also spelled the end for other authoring tools which came from the Macromedia umbrella, and those had already begun to lose relevance post-Adobe acquisition. Adobe's numerous acquisitions, it's easier to enumerate the surviving applications since the launch of the iPhone than to list those consigned to oblivion. Not exhaustive, but here is the gist: Adobe applications that have ceased to exist since 2006: Adobe mainstream products that have ceased to exist since 2006: - Flash - Fireworks - Dreamweaver (on life support) - GoLive - Muse - Encore - Contribute - SpeedGrade - Story - Edge Animate - Edge Reflow Adobe mainstream products that remain plus those created or aquired since 2006: - Photoshop - Illustrator - InDesign - Premiere Pro - After Effects - Acrobat - XD - Audition - Figma
beAbU 3y ago
> CSS does everything Flash once did Tell me you never used Flash by not telling me you've never used flash. Flash's USP and core value proposition was the (IMO) fantastic IDE that you used to create flash apps and animations. It was exactly as technical as you needed it to be. As you upskilled you could do more things, but more importantly do the same things more elegantly. In stead of a manual animation you could script it out in AS3. I loved it and I'm really sad that I only entered the professional workforce as Flash was on it's way out.
- Varriount 3y ago
  I still mourn the disappearance of the game development and distribution scene that Flash made possible. It seems like all we have these days are walled-garden app stores filled with pay-to-win, ad-filled games.
  - jaysonelliot 3y ago
    From a gaming perspective, I agree that Flash was excellent. The current era of ad-filled pay to win games does suck.
    - jamesdwilson 3y ago
      ..hence the reason apple killed it ;)
- jaysonelliot 3y ago
  I was developing Flash since before it was called Flash, back when it was called FutureSplash Animator. I'm not talking about the IDE, I'm talking about the user experience that could be created with Flash. As a UX professional, the death of Flash was one of the most satisfying moments of my career. It's hard to overstate how much better the web is today than it was when it was overrun by sealed-off Flash sites.
leptons 3y ago
Apple killed flash by not allowing it to run on their mobile devices. It's really as simple as that. I think Apple claimed that Flash was too power hungry to run on a mobile device. I was hired back in the day to convert a flash based app to a "Dynamic HTML" app. The flash developers all quit because they didn't want to work with HTML and Javascript. And this was all because the company wanted to support iPhones and iPads. And there were a lot of companies doing the same exact thing back then - abandoning Flash for HTML/Javascript/CSS.
pmontra 3y ago
Add to the list that when we resized the window or went fullscreen the typical Flash app would keep its original size. A Flash app born for 800x600 screens wouldn't look well in a 1366x768 screen or 1080p ones. It became tiny as resolution increased and diagonals more or less didn't. Then Steve Jobs and battery life or removing a competing ecosystem.
- gs17 3y ago
  Not my experience outside of aspect ratio mis-matches. Flash content used a lot of vector art which scales fantastically. It not resizing is the developer's fault, not the technology's (which is common with Flash, it got blamed a lot for its misuse).
  - pmontra 3y ago
    I know. I even built a Windows screensaver in Flash around 2000 but I don't remember the details. Anyway the web was littered by tiny and more tiny Flash apps that never filled the page beyond their originally assigned size. I guess that the customer never paid for the necessary updates or the dev was not available anymore. Customers eventually switched to HTML and JS.
pests 3y ago
They did solve the search issue before it's demise. "Google and Yahoo to Search Inside Flash Files" (2008) https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4006938800025747900165DE9.html?ref=technology https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4...
soperj 3y ago
> IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. Don't SPAs do exactly this?
ajkjk 3y ago
There is a ton that flash did that CSS does not do, but it is more about the toolchain / dev environment for flash apps than the actual technical capabilities. It is very strange to me that no one has built "Flash but on Html5" yet.

dncornholio 3y ago

Meanwhile we didn't have a replacement, and any replacement lacks of all the features you list, text selection, etc. It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's the reason.

malauxyeux 3y ago
> It got killed because Apple stopped supporting it. That's how it happened in my orbit anyway. Steve Jobs published an open letter entitled "Thoughts on Flash", in which he said that iOS would never support Flash. We had a discussion at the web shop I was working for; we decided to stop making new things in Flash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
- dugmartin 3y ago
  Fun story: Apple demoed the iPad to Hollywood execs a couple weeks before the release. The Hollywood folks saw all their web properties rendering almost no UI and their video content not available. I worked for a boutique consulting firm at that time and Warner Bros/Telepictures was our big client. We immediately got calls from a lot of execs and I had a week long firedrill of converting MANY Telepictures properties from Flash (mostly for the video content rendering with timecoded UI updates). They also had a video delivery company that was co-located with AOL fly out to Burbank and fly back with tons of hard drives full of episodes of Ellen, the Tyra Banks show, etc to recode from Flash video to video that could be served with the <video> content tag on iPads. It somehow all got done by the iPad release and Apple published a top 10 "sites that work great on iPad" page on their site and we had done 4 out of 10 of them. All we had to test on was desktop Safari resized to the screen size they told us it needed to work on.
yreg 3y ago
The replacement is CSS + JS. Thank God Apple helped kill Flash.
- GenerocUsername 3y ago
  And 10 years later I just don't see the level of amateur uptake that flash had. For 10 years flash minted thousands of young animators and content creators. Since flashes death there are far fewer upstarts and communities despite Internet adoption being magnitudes higher
  - BizarroLand 3y ago
    Yep. The tech may be more mature and less prone to breakage, but the fun of creating, the joy of stupid games went with it for a lot of folks.
  - beAbU 3y ago
    The heyday of Newgrounds was truly a golden age for stupid amateur cartoons and games.
  - yreg 3y ago
    I would bet there are many more young amateur animators and content creators now than there have been 10 years ago. Their work is just more diverse than the "signature Flash animation look".
  - gs17 3y ago
    I really think the all-in-one-ness of Flash is what made it so easy to use. Not only that you can make almost everything for a game/cartoon in one interface (IIRC audio wasn't included), but also that the output was a single file you could share easily. The rampant piracy of old Flash versions probably helped a lot too.
Aerroon 3y ago
I remember that a lot of people were sure that we were going to get an even better replacement. "HTML5 is going to be the replacement." So much for that. Goodbye web games.
- gs17 3y ago
  There are still a lot of "web games", but it's nothing like it used to be.

ktzar 3y ago

There's a correlation between the death of Flash and the rise of mobile devices browsing. Flash was pixel-based and the whole paradigm doesn't really work for responsiveness.

verticalscaler 3y ago
Flash was vector based.
beAbU 3y ago
Flash was just as responsive as HTML+CSS: As much as the developer makes it responsive. Also, flash was most certainly not pixel based. It was vector based and a common workflow was to create your graphics in the more powerful Adobe Illustrator, then import into flash for animation.

swatcoder 3y ago

No. Generally, the missing features you mention were inconsequential to decision-makers (outside of some ideological devs) and many of them were being gradually addressed by Macromedia/Adobe anyway. Flash died because Microsoft was agressingly nipping at Adobe on the commercial side with Silverlight, because standard bodies were finally chipping away at its feature advantages with long-needed improvements to HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and most impactfully of of all: because Steve Jobs decreed it. The death knell for Flash sounded exactly when the market-revolutionizing iPhone refused to support altogether. But all of that's just about the runtime platform. The posted app calls back to the Flash editor itself, which was extremely mature and powerul but had too much inertia to successfully pivot to targeting HTML or apps before Adobe would give up on it. Later apps have come, but inevitably start far behind the features that Flash offered designers, animators, and developers at its peak.

newsclues 3y ago
Yes, people forgot that websites for big companies were often flash based trash until the iPhone and the web changed to be mobile friendly as iPhones sales continued to skyrocket.
xer0x 3y ago
Thanks for this. People forget the creator experience in Flash. It was really amazing, albeit a little quirky.
tempoponet 3y ago
I'm surprised you bothered to mention SilverLight. It was Microsoft's intent, sure, but did it ever have any uptake? It's more of a curiosity or footnote than a relevant factor.
- swatcoder 3y ago
  I think Silverlight was making deep inroads in the enterprise market for rich internet apps and that this was a growing customer retention issue for Adobe with Flash. That's part of why they invested so much in Flex and AIR as a more engineering-centric alternative to the Flash app's designer-centric timeline interface. They wanted to shore up what they were losing to Microsoft. The consumer usage of Flash was most visible (games, cartoons, brochure sites, video streaming) and Apple's evisceration of that market was what ultimately killed Flash, but things were already looking grim on several fronts before that happened.

pimlottc 3y ago

I think the GP is talking more about the authoring tools for Flash. You could do everything - graphics, animation, audio, video, scripting - in a single package that was relatively easy to use.

sam0x17 3y ago

It's crazy to me they didn't see the value in porting actionscript to something that compiles to JS/HTML5, though adobe couldn't be trusted to see this potential obviously. If they had something like that ready in ~2011 it could have completely replaced HTML 5 canvas adoption

gs17 3y ago
I blame Adobe for Flash dying much more than Apple. There's a lot of features that would have been hard to port (maybe Flash Player could have evolved into providing support for those and being optional for simpler content), but an HTML5 output that worked for 90% of 2D games and animations would have kept it relevant. Or at least funding Shumway while it was around if no one at Adobe was able to do it. Instead they made a converter where you lost audio, video, scripting, effects, etc. It should have at least been able to convert a Homestar Runner cartoon.

treflop 3y ago

Mobile apps are even worse than Flash and those reasons haven't hampered their adoption. Flash died because both Apple and Microsoft wanted it dead. Possibly justifiably.

karaterobot 3y ago

I always thought Flash died because Apple didn't want people to be able to write and execute arbitrary code in an app on their phones. That it posed a security risk, a stability risk, and potentially a business risk (as it could allow people to circumvent the limitations they'd imposed on, say, distribution and payments). Is that wrong?

foooorsyth 3y ago
In addition to all of those things, it also burned your battery like crazy. Jobs was very public about his annoyance with Flash’s battery drain.
hirako2000 3y ago
Yes, it is wrong. Mostly. Or just some minor reason. It was largely a fallacy perpetuated by Apple. The same fallacy used to more recently justify the app store exclusivity, aimed at preserving their enclosed ecosystem under the guise of protecting users from potential malware threats. While it's true that Flash posed security risks, not just on mobile but across platforms. Acrobat pdf readers continue to grapple with high-severity CVEs. Another argument against Flash support on the iPhone was its purported battery drain. It's worth considering the technological landscape of that era: Arm processors were less power-efficient, and early iPhones struggled with battery longevity. Remember, even basic color screen phones could last several days on a single charge—illustrated by the enduring appeal of the Nokia 3210, which could comfortably endure a week without needing to be plugged in. Yes flash early implementation for mobile was very inefficient. Yes Apple had valid reasons for resisting Flash support. However, at the heart of the matter was Adobe's lion stance on royalties, a proposition deemed cocky by Jobs. Plus jobs was in the money Business. So the moot negociation red eventually led to a declaration war on Adobe. Despite Adobe's towering market cap, and arguable more influential in the tech spheres, they underestimated Apple's strategic timing and their ability to a big push for new web standards, which ultimately led to the widespread adoption of HTML. Adobe's defeat to maintain their spotlight animation authoring tool for the web. Cousin comment touches on its disrespect for existing web standards, it never evolved to embrace the browser, it kept running as its own thing with limited to no interfacing with the browser API even. This conflict not only signed the future death certificates of Flash but also spelled the end for other authoring tools which came from the Macromedia umbrella, and those had already begun to lose relevance post-Adobe acquisition. Adobe's numerous acquisitions, it's easier to enumerate the surviving applications since the launch of the iPhone than to list those consigned to oblivion. Not exhaustive, but here is the gist: Adobe applications that have ceased to exist since 2006: Adobe mainstream products that have ceased to exist since 2006: - Flash - Fireworks - Dreamweaver (on life support) - GoLive - Muse - Encore - Contribute - SpeedGrade - Story - Edge Animate - Edge Reflow Adobe mainstream products that remain plus those created or aquired since 2006: - Photoshop - Illustrator - InDesign - Premiere Pro - After Effects - Acrobat - XD - Audition - Figma

beAbU 3y ago

> CSS does everything Flash once did Tell me you never used Flash by not telling me you've never used flash. Flash's USP and core value proposition was the (IMO) fantastic IDE that you used to create flash apps and animations. It was exactly as technical as you needed it to be. As you upskilled you could do more things, but more importantly do the same things more elegantly. In stead of a manual animation you could script it out in AS3. I loved it and I'm really sad that I only entered the professional workforce as Flash was on it's way out.

Varriount 3y ago
I still mourn the disappearance of the game development and distribution scene that Flash made possible. It seems like all we have these days are walled-garden app stores filled with pay-to-win, ad-filled games.
- jaysonelliot 3y ago
  From a gaming perspective, I agree that Flash was excellent. The current era of ad-filled pay to win games does suck.
  - jamesdwilson 3y ago
    ..hence the reason apple killed it ;)
jaysonelliot 3y ago
I was developing Flash since before it was called Flash, back when it was called FutureSplash Animator. I'm not talking about the IDE, I'm talking about the user experience that could be created with Flash. As a UX professional, the death of Flash was one of the most satisfying moments of my career. It's hard to overstate how much better the web is today than it was when it was overrun by sealed-off Flash sites.

leptons 3y ago

Apple killed flash by not allowing it to run on their mobile devices. It's really as simple as that. I think Apple claimed that Flash was too power hungry to run on a mobile device. I was hired back in the day to convert a flash based app to a "Dynamic HTML" app. The flash developers all quit because they didn't want to work with HTML and Javascript. And this was all because the company wanted to support iPhones and iPads. And there were a lot of companies doing the same exact thing back then - abandoning Flash for HTML/Javascript/CSS.

pmontra 3y ago

Add to the list that when we resized the window or went fullscreen the typical Flash app would keep its original size. A Flash app born for 800x600 screens wouldn't look well in a 1366x768 screen or 1080p ones. It became tiny as resolution increased and diagonals more or less didn't. Then Steve Jobs and battery life or removing a competing ecosystem.

gs17 3y ago
Not my experience outside of aspect ratio mis-matches. Flash content used a lot of vector art which scales fantastically. It not resizing is the developer's fault, not the technology's (which is common with Flash, it got blamed a lot for its misuse).
- pmontra 3y ago
  I know. I even built a Windows screensaver in Flash around 2000 but I don't remember the details. Anyway the web was littered by tiny and more tiny Flash apps that never filled the page beyond their originally assigned size. I guess that the customer never paid for the necessary updates or the dev was not available anymore. Customers eventually switched to HTML and JS.

pests 3y ago

They did solve the search issue before it's demise. "Google and Yahoo to Search Inside Flash Files" (2008) https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4006938800025747900165DE9.html?ref=technology https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C4...

soperj 3y ago

> IMO, Flash died because it didn't play nice with the conventions of the web. There were workarounds, but generally it broke all of the things HTML could do, like being searchable & selectable, navigable with a keyboard, built of code you could inspect, addressable with a direct link, even working with the browser's back button. Don't SPAs do exactly this?

ajkjk 3y ago

There is a ton that flash did that CSS does not do, but it is more about the toolchain / dev environment for flash apps than the actual technical capabilities. It is very strange to me that no one has built "Flash but on Html5" yet.