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Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders r

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

Y-bar 1y ago
Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else. I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.
- Sankozi 1y ago
  Flash performance is still better than current web stack's. Probably will always be - you could write non trivial games that would work on 128MB memory machine. Currently single browser tab with simple page can take more than that.
- OtherShrezzing 1y ago
  Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software. The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of. Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.
- GuB-42 1y ago
  Performance was way better than what we have now with modern web stacks, we just have more powerful computers. I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem. I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been a web standard.
  - Y-bar 1y ago
    Lots of people say performance was good, but that seems to be through the nostalgic lens of a handful of cool games. Those did sometimes run really great, but most implementations were indeed very slow. I remember vividly because it was part of my job back then to help with web performance and when we measured page speed and user interface responsiveness flash was almost always the worst.
    - masfuerte 1y ago
      Right. But that doesn't mean the performance of Flash was bad for what it was doing. Or that it was worse than the performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS now.
      - Y-bar 1y ago
        The default, and by far the most common, output from Flash had significantly slower click-to-response and for network latency and for rendering than HTML+CSS is today. You remembering a few optimised instances does not change the reality that Flash was bad.
        masfuerte 1y ago
        You're still comparing Flash on twenty year old hardware to HTML+CSS on modern hardware.
        Y-bar 1y ago
        I am not and have never compared them in the way you say I did. You literally wrote ”Or that it was worse than the performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS now.” so I had to somehow repsond to that strange claim. Of course modern computers are orders of magnitude more powerful! But Flash was definitely generally worse compared on the same hardware and network stack compared to vanilla (non-plugin based) web tech.
        1y ago
- KaiserPro 1y ago
  > more security holes than anything else. yeah it wasn't secure but; > bad performance I don't think thats the case. For the longest while flash was faster than js at doing anything vaguely graphic based. The issue for apple was that the CPU in the iphone wasn't fast enough to do flash and anything else. Moreover Adobe didn't get on with jobs when they were talking about custom versions. You have to remember that "apps" were never meant to be a thing on the iphone, it was all about "desktop" like web performance.
  - Y-bar 1y ago
    I remember well. I earned my living for a few years around 2010 porting slow Flash sites to regular web tech. It was hard to translate some functionality, but Flash was definitely slow compared to the equivalent regular website done without the plugin.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > more security holes than anything else. Adobe was never known for its security or quality.
watwut 1y ago
Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  So much college years time spent (wasted?) on Addicting Games.
  - kjkjadksj 1y ago
    Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted.
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      I agree. My transcripts, on the other hand, have a different opinion.
- portaouflop 1y ago
  Kids now create games in Roblox. More constrained, more commercial, more exploitative- but there is still a huge scene of non-developers creating games if you care to look.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  There is still a way to run flash apps via https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ You can probably still make flash games and run them via ruffle.
  - PhilipRoman 1y ago
    Ruffle is amazing. I launched a 20+ year old game yesterday with zero compatibility issues. Even better than the original Flash because of superior security isolation mechanisms.
    - 1y ago
neya 1y ago
Even if Adobe had gotten their act together and fixed all security holes, Apple would have still killed it. It was always a threat as a popular design tool. And decades later, with the HTML canvas hype faded, there's still no replacement to what Adobe Flash could do - any designer could create stellar, interactive design that can be embedded into any website...without a monthly subscription.
- prox 1y ago
  True, I do think Godot is on the right path, I haven’t had time to look into it in detail, but their HTML5 export seems solid from the videos I saw.
  - herpdyderp 1y ago
    Eh... it's very hit or miss. It keeps getting better though!
donatj 1y ago
Personal pet peeve, but as someone who still makes gifs, Image Ready. Adobe kind of absorbed Image Ready into Photoshop and it's just never lived up to how easy it was to make simple gifs in Image Ready
mikkupikku 1y ago
Enabling novice normies to make games was excellent, and I believe the whole game industry benefited from this resulting injection of fresh ideas. A lot of indy developers with fresh takes on what games could be got started this way. Zachtronics is one example of many that comes to mind right now. On the other hand, for every flash game made there were about ten thousands flash-based ads, and nearly as many websites that used flash poorly for things like basic navigation (remember flash based website dropdown menus?). And for a few years it seemed like every single restaurant with a website was using flash for the entire thing, the results were borderline unusable in the best cases. And let's not forget that as long as flash was dominant, it was choking out the demand to get proper video support into browsers. Flash based video players performed like dog shit and made life on Linux a real chore.
- Doctor_Fegg 1y ago
  Which made it much easier to block ads than it is now.
- snicky 1y ago
  This post reminded me about the good time I had watching Salad Fingers and Happy Tree Friends. "Na, na, nanana na".
sen 1y ago
Godot is pretty awesome. Easy to learn, can do 2D or 3D, and can export to HTML5/webasm that works across all major OSes and browsers including mobile. It’s far from perfect but I’ve been enjoying playing with it even for things that aren’t games and it has come a long way just in the last year or two. I feel like it’s close to (or is currently) having its Blender moment.
- OkayPhysicist 1y ago
  > even for things that aren’t games This is a slept-on feature of Godot, IMO. It's been my go-to native UI library for all my C# projects since I tried making a game with it 2 years ago. It perfectly straddles the line between drag-and-drop WYSIWYG and software defined layout.
bombcar 1y ago
Flash was the HyperCard of the 90s/early 2000s. There hasn’t been a replacement, yet.
eloisant 1y ago
I wish Flash would have died sooner. It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser. Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.
- acheron 1y ago
  This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
  - big_toast 1y ago
    I dunno, a whole subtree of the internet died and I’m not sure it really came back. It was a beautiful Galápagos Islands.
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    For the most part, people are talking about games and animation, not text based websites.
  - acidburnNSA 1y ago
    Did you ever try one of those Flash-based room escape games? It was really amazing to lose yourself in the challenges and puzzles.
  - 9x39 1y ago
    It was both awful when it showed up in the enterprise and amazing at unleashing creativity for many. Most young non-technical people I knew during its rise had regularly made Flash creations or even games, and deeply enjoyed the Cambrian explosion of games and animations for a few years.
  - morshu9001 1y ago
    It was really meant for animation and games but got misused as a web GUI tool. I think it would've been fine to allow it anyway, and anyone who wants to build a GUI can just not use Flash.
- 1y ago
achisler 1y ago
Try Roblox! Unless you haven't yet. I was SO impressed. Everything works as expected. 5 minutes after starting the game making kit I totally understood why Roblox is worth billions. It just works. It's magic. All can be scripted, but also any 6y.o. can use it.
morshu9001 1y ago
I was even fine with Flash being misused for web GUIs, just to pressure the open web to get its act together. At least devs got to pick 2 between [fancy, fast, easy]. If you want something better, make it instead of hobbling the competition.
make3 1y ago
it's called Roblox and it's bigger than Flash ever was
Wistar 1y ago
Well, I miss Director which I used a lot for demos/prototyping.
al_borland 1y ago
The big issue with Flash was how overused it was. When Flash was on its way out one app made at the place I worked still said they needed it, and I couldn't figure out why... it was a Java app. After some digging, I found it, some horizontal dividers on the page. They could have, and should have, just been images. They didn't do anything. Yet someone made them in Flash. I'd also say all the drop-down menu systems were an overuse. Splash screens on every car company's home page. It was out of hand. I guess you could call it a victim of it's own success, where once it was time for it to die (due to mobile), very few people were sad to see it go.
josefrichter 1y ago
It was actually fantastic even for creating websites. To think that 20 years later we still don't have tools to make similar stuff with similar ease is mindblowing.

Y-bar 1y ago

Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else. I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.

Sankozi 1y ago
Flash performance is still better than current web stack's. Probably will always be - you could write non trivial games that would work on 128MB memory machine. Currently single browser tab with simple page can take more than that.
OtherShrezzing 1y ago
Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software. The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of. Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.
GuB-42 1y ago
Performance was way better than what we have now with modern web stacks, we just have more powerful computers. I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem. I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been a web standard.
- Y-bar 1y ago
  Lots of people say performance was good, but that seems to be through the nostalgic lens of a handful of cool games. Those did sometimes run really great, but most implementations were indeed very slow. I remember vividly because it was part of my job back then to help with web performance and when we measured page speed and user interface responsiveness flash was almost always the worst.
  - masfuerte 1y ago
    Right. But that doesn't mean the performance of Flash was bad for what it was doing. Or that it was worse than the performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS now.
    - Y-bar 1y ago
      The default, and by far the most common, output from Flash had significantly slower click-to-response and for network latency and for rendering than HTML+CSS is today. You remembering a few optimised instances does not change the reality that Flash was bad.
      - masfuerte 1y ago
        You're still comparing Flash on twenty year old hardware to HTML+CSS on modern hardware.
        Y-bar 1y ago
        I am not and have never compared them in the way you say I did. You literally wrote ”Or that it was worse than the performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS now.” so I had to somehow repsond to that strange claim. Of course modern computers are orders of magnitude more powerful! But Flash was definitely generally worse compared on the same hardware and network stack compared to vanilla (non-plugin based) web tech.
        1y ago
KaiserPro 1y ago
> more security holes than anything else. yeah it wasn't secure but; > bad performance I don't think thats the case. For the longest while flash was faster than js at doing anything vaguely graphic based. The issue for apple was that the CPU in the iphone wasn't fast enough to do flash and anything else. Moreover Adobe didn't get on with jobs when they were talking about custom versions. You have to remember that "apps" were never meant to be a thing on the iphone, it was all about "desktop" like web performance.
- Y-bar 1y ago
  I remember well. I earned my living for a few years around 2010 porting slow Flash sites to regular web tech. It was hard to translate some functionality, but Flash was definitely slow compared to the equivalent regular website done without the plugin.
hulitu 1y ago
> more security holes than anything else. Adobe was never known for its security or quality.

watwut 1y ago

Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.

rkomorn 1y ago
So much college years time spent (wasted?) on Addicting Games.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted.
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    I agree. My transcripts, on the other hand, have a different opinion.
portaouflop 1y ago
Kids now create games in Roblox. More constrained, more commercial, more exploitative- but there is still a huge scene of non-developers creating games if you care to look.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
There is still a way to run flash apps via https://ruffle.rs/ https://ruffle.rs/ You can probably still make flash games and run them via ruffle.
- PhilipRoman 1y ago
  Ruffle is amazing. I launched a 20+ year old game yesterday with zero compatibility issues. Even better than the original Flash because of superior security isolation mechanisms.
  - 1y ago

neya 1y ago

Even if Adobe had gotten their act together and fixed all security holes, Apple would have still killed it. It was always a threat as a popular design tool. And decades later, with the HTML canvas hype faded, there's still no replacement to what Adobe Flash could do - any designer could create stellar, interactive design that can be embedded into any website...without a monthly subscription.

prox 1y ago
True, I do think Godot is on the right path, I haven’t had time to look into it in detail, but their HTML5 export seems solid from the videos I saw.
- herpdyderp 1y ago
  Eh... it's very hit or miss. It keeps getting better though!

donatj 1y ago

Personal pet peeve, but as someone who still makes gifs, Image Ready. Adobe kind of absorbed Image Ready into Photoshop and it's just never lived up to how easy it was to make simple gifs in Image Ready

mikkupikku 1y ago

Enabling novice normies to make games was excellent, and I believe the whole game industry benefited from this resulting injection of fresh ideas. A lot of indy developers with fresh takes on what games could be got started this way. Zachtronics is one example of many that comes to mind right now. On the other hand, for every flash game made there were about ten thousands flash-based ads, and nearly as many websites that used flash poorly for things like basic navigation (remember flash based website dropdown menus?). And for a few years it seemed like every single restaurant with a website was using flash for the entire thing, the results were borderline unusable in the best cases. And let's not forget that as long as flash was dominant, it was choking out the demand to get proper video support into browsers. Flash based video players performed like dog shit and made life on Linux a real chore.

Doctor_Fegg 1y ago
Which made it much easier to block ads than it is now.
snicky 1y ago
This post reminded me about the good time I had watching Salad Fingers and Happy Tree Friends. "Na, na, nanana na".

sen 1y ago

Godot is pretty awesome. Easy to learn, can do 2D or 3D, and can export to HTML5/webasm that works across all major OSes and browsers including mobile. It’s far from perfect but I’ve been enjoying playing with it even for things that aren’t games and it has come a long way just in the last year or two. I feel like it’s close to (or is currently) having its Blender moment.

OkayPhysicist 1y ago
> even for things that aren’t games This is a slept-on feature of Godot, IMO. It's been my go-to native UI library for all my C# projects since I tried making a game with it 2 years ago. It perfectly straddles the line between drag-and-drop WYSIWYG and software defined layout.

bombcar 1y ago

Flash was the HyperCard of the 90s/early 2000s. There hasn’t been a replacement, yet.

eloisant 1y ago

I wish Flash would have died sooner. It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser. Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

acheron 1y ago
This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
- big_toast 1y ago
  I dunno, a whole subtree of the internet died and I’m not sure it really came back. It was a beautiful Galápagos Islands.
- sarchertech 1y ago
  For the most part, people are talking about games and animation, not text based websites.
- acidburnNSA 1y ago
  Did you ever try one of those Flash-based room escape games? It was really amazing to lose yourself in the challenges and puzzles.
- 9x39 1y ago
  It was both awful when it showed up in the enterprise and amazing at unleashing creativity for many. Most young non-technical people I knew during its rise had regularly made Flash creations or even games, and deeply enjoyed the Cambrian explosion of games and animations for a few years.
- morshu9001 1y ago
  It was really meant for animation and games but got misused as a web GUI tool. I think it would've been fine to allow it anyway, and anyone who wants to build a GUI can just not use Flash.
1y ago

achisler 1y ago

Try Roblox! Unless you haven't yet. I was SO impressed. Everything works as expected. 5 minutes after starting the game making kit I totally understood why Roblox is worth billions. It just works. It's magic. All can be scripted, but also any 6y.o. can use it.

morshu9001 1y ago

I was even fine with Flash being misused for web GUIs, just to pressure the open web to get its act together. At least devs got to pick 2 between [fancy, fast, easy]. If you want something better, make it instead of hobbling the competition.

make3 1y ago

it's called Roblox and it's bigger than Flash ever was

Wistar 1y ago

Well, I miss Director which I used a lot for demos/prototyping.

al_borland 1y ago

The big issue with Flash was how overused it was. When Flash was on its way out one app made at the place I worked still said they needed it, and I couldn't figure out why... it was a Java app. After some digging, I found it, some horizontal dividers on the page. They could have, and should have, just been images. They didn't do anything. Yet someone made them in Flash. I'd also say all the drop-down menu systems were an overuse. Splash screens on every car company's home page. It was out of hand. I guess you could call it a victim of it's own success, where once it was time for it to die (due to mobile), very few people were sad to see it go.

josefrichter 1y ago

It was actually fantastic even for creating websites. To think that 20 years later we still don't have tools to make similar stuff with similar ease is mindblowing.