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I don't know. I can write an application in flash and it will run on IE, chrome, Firefox, whatever. A lot of companies still use IE. I can also compile that

I don't know. I can write an application in flash and it will run on IE, chrome, Firefox, whatever. A lot of companies still use IE. I can also compile that down to run on ios, android, or blackberry (not that I'd want to). I can do all that from basically the same codebase with an ecma script language (as3) that I find much better for large scale projects than html5 (by which people actually mean js) Flash is dying I guess, but it will be a long time until it actually dies, and that's good by me because html5/js still has a lot of catching up to do. As an aside, I'm curious how many flash haters out there have actually written flash applications. Its really a good tool for a lot of applications, but the haters never really provide any specifics on what their problem is besides referencing poorly written apps that crash your browser, of which you'll find plenty of those in any language.

abbyroad9191 14y ago
Flash solves the problem of cross-platform development really well vs other platforms. You don't have to worry about making conditional statements for specific operating systems or browsers. I feel the rapid deploying of browsers is just increasing the fragmented world of html + js. There are just way too many different implementations of html to make it enjoyable coding on. And also, the way flash handles making animations and anti-aliasing almost makes my very non-artistic feel somewhat versatile when tackling those things.
- skyhook_mockups 14y ago
  I feel the rapid deploying of browsers is just increasing the fragmented world of html + js Not in my experience. I've recently finished writing a fairly large and reasonably complex HTML5 app and getting it to work across standards compliant browsers Chrome/Firefox/Safari has been absolutely painless. In over 6 months of development I have (without exaggeration) spent no more than 8 hours fixing cross browser issues and this includes cutting edge and vendor prefixed stuff. I think that flash still has its place... it's still way better at doing things like client side image compression/encoding and has very sophisticated binary manipulation capabilities (if you need those). It really is a technology of the gaps, and the number of gaps that it can exclusively fill is rapidly dwindling.
bryans 14y ago
> As an aside, I'm curious how many flash haters out there have actually written flash applications. In my experience, the folks who are most vocally anti-Flash have never written a line of code in their life. I've never seen a reasonable justification for the amount of hate it receives. If anything, Flash deserves high praise for playing such a key role in the evolution of a media rich internet, despite its flaws. I don't think the haters realize how good it actually is compared to the historical alternatives. It makes me physically ill to think of a universe where RealVideo became the dominant format for streaming media.
- rimantas 14y ago
  > I've never seen a reasonable justification for the amount > of hate it receives. More likely you just chose to ignore it. > I don't think the haters realize how good it actually > is compared to the historical alternatives. Oh, they do. At least some. But being better than alternatives does not make it good.
  - dave_sullivan 14y ago
    Could you elaborate? What justification would I be ignoring? Closed source runtime? Bad flash programmers? Plugin hate? Anecdotal "flash always breaks my computer" type stuff? Re: second point, I disagree. Being better than alternatives makes something very good--better than everything else in fact. What you're saying is good is actually some kind of fairy tale perfect that doesn't exist and never will. I mean, hey, use whatever you want, but have you ever written a flash application? And if so, what are the key problems?
    - 2muchcoffeeman 14y ago
      My main reason for supporting the removal of Flash is Adobe's lack of support for Flash on non-Windows platforms especially mobile. It took them ages to come up with a decent Mac OS version. And they already dropped further development and support for mobile. Did they ever get their mobile version working 100% correctly? I think it was clear that Flash was going down years ago, but the fact that they've decided to drop support for the fastest growing computing segment should solidify the fact that everybody needs to move away. HTML5 is pretty sucky in places but has the backing of several big players, it's open and works well on pretty much all platforms and it's being actively worked on. If Google, Mozilla and Apple give up, we just take the software and move on. Is there a downside to this scenario that I am missing?

abbyroad9191 14y ago

Flash solves the problem of cross-platform development really well vs other platforms. You don't have to worry about making conditional statements for specific operating systems or browsers. I feel the rapid deploying of browsers is just increasing the fragmented world of html + js. There are just way too many different implementations of html to make it enjoyable coding on. And also, the way flash handles making animations and anti-aliasing almost makes my very non-artistic feel somewhat versatile when tackling those things.

skyhook_mockups 14y ago
I feel the rapid deploying of browsers is just increasing the fragmented world of html + js Not in my experience. I've recently finished writing a fairly large and reasonably complex HTML5 app and getting it to work across standards compliant browsers Chrome/Firefox/Safari has been absolutely painless. In over 6 months of development I have (without exaggeration) spent no more than 8 hours fixing cross browser issues and this includes cutting edge and vendor prefixed stuff. I think that flash still has its place... it's still way better at doing things like client side image compression/encoding and has very sophisticated binary manipulation capabilities (if you need those). It really is a technology of the gaps, and the number of gaps that it can exclusively fill is rapidly dwindling.

bryans 14y ago

> As an aside, I'm curious how many flash haters out there have actually written flash applications. In my experience, the folks who are most vocally anti-Flash have never written a line of code in their life. I've never seen a reasonable justification for the amount of hate it receives. If anything, Flash deserves high praise for playing such a key role in the evolution of a media rich internet, despite its flaws. I don't think the haters realize how good it actually is compared to the historical alternatives. It makes me physically ill to think of a universe where RealVideo became the dominant format for streaming media.

rimantas 14y ago
> I've never seen a reasonable justification for the amount > of hate it receives. More likely you just chose to ignore it. > I don't think the haters realize how good it actually > is compared to the historical alternatives. Oh, they do. At least some. But being better than alternatives does not make it good.
- dave_sullivan 14y ago
  Could you elaborate? What justification would I be ignoring? Closed source runtime? Bad flash programmers? Plugin hate? Anecdotal "flash always breaks my computer" type stuff? Re: second point, I disagree. Being better than alternatives makes something very good--better than everything else in fact. What you're saying is good is actually some kind of fairy tale perfect that doesn't exist and never will. I mean, hey, use whatever you want, but have you ever written a flash application? And if so, what are the key problems?
  - 2muchcoffeeman 14y ago
    My main reason for supporting the removal of Flash is Adobe's lack of support for Flash on non-Windows platforms especially mobile. It took them ages to come up with a decent Mac OS version. And they already dropped further development and support for mobile. Did they ever get their mobile version working 100% correctly? I think it was clear that Flash was going down years ago, but the fact that they've decided to drop support for the fastest growing computing segment should solidify the fact that everybody needs to move away. HTML5 is pretty sucky in places but has the backing of several big players, it's open and works well on pretty much all platforms and it's being actively worked on. If Google, Mozilla and Apple give up, we just take the software and move on. Is there a downside to this scenario that I am missing?