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I owe my technology career to Flash. Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together. This tool was able to draw in cr

I owe my technology career to Flash. Still find it incredibly sad that Adobe and Steve Jobs were able to destroy it together. This tool was able to draw in creative, previously non-technical people and provide a gradual ramp of complexity that we could navigate. Nothing has come close since.

nntwozz 1y ago
I remember the white MacBook Core 2 Duo with 100% CPU, fans maxed out while watching YouTube 720p. This was months before the iPhone announcement. I can see why they killed it.
- croes 1y ago
  Because it was a security nightmare
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    No it was a usability nightmare. Watching Flash Youtube on Android technically worked but it was a horrible experience. Google were ok with "works but janky af", but Apple weren't.
    - kakacik 1y ago
      We could have kept that creative environment (that seem to just disappear without any alternative to this day) while leaving videos to evolve as they did. People here complain like they have issues with long term memory, but reality was - there was no real web video before. That apple had more issues than others was problem that should have been contained to apple walled garden alone. World was, is and will be much larger than that.
      - empath75 1y ago
        That 'creative environment' was mostly used for obnoxious advertising by the time flash died.
      - IshKebab 1y ago
        Maybe, but playing videos was 99% of the use case for Flash by the time it was killed by Apple. Adobe could have kept maintaining it for the 1% Flash games, ads and terrible websites, but you can see why they gave up...
      - SchemaLoad 1y ago
        The creative environment could have been built with HTML/JS as well. I feel what killed it more so was mobile gaming took over casual games, and modern game engines enabled a single person who would have been making dinky little flash games to now make what used to take an entire studio.
    - croes 1y ago
      It can be both but it definitely had a security problem > Mitre lists more than 1,000 Adobe Flash vulnerabilities. >Flash ranks 14th on the list of products ranked by the number of vulnerabilities – one of only two applications in the top 25 that aren’t operating systems or browsers. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security-and-risk-management/an-adobe-flash-ghost-may-be-haunting-your-data-center https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security-and-risk-manage...
jb1991 1y ago
The product itself still exists as Adobe Animate, I think (or one of the Adobe CC tools). It's just as good or better than it ever was, with the same workflow. But instead of exporting to SWF now people just export to video and share it on video platforms. Lots of great stuff still being done with it on Youtube.
- riffraff 1y ago
  But flash was interactive, videos are not. I miss the days kongregate had a bunch of new fun games regularly. I suppose itch.io fills that niche now.
- anymouse123456 11mo ago
  Exporting to video does solve some portion of the use cases (i.e., early South Park), but the power of interactivity is what captivated me.
empath75 1y ago
The problem with flash is that it was a security, performance and usability nightmare for web browsers. Yes the games and videos were cool, but 99% of the usage of Flash was awful ads and UI/UX elements.
- hollerith 1y ago
  For most of Flash's existence on the web, I had my computers configured to block flash. (The block was achieved by removing files IIRC).
- jonbiggums22 1y ago
  I just used an click to load flash extension in firefox back then and everything was fine.
  - DANmode 1y ago
    True. That’s basically how h.264 and DRM is being done in the browser for stuff like Netflix, today, right?
hangonhn 1y ago
Flash was a poorly written piece of software. It had numerous bad memory leaks and a CPU hog. It was never allowed on the iPhone probably because it would have drained the batteries really quickly. On top of that HTML5 was starting to catch on and could eventually do everything Flash could and do it better without the memory leaks and poor CPU usage. I have the very unfortunate claim to the title of being an engineer on the world's biggest Flash/Flex app. The memory leaks were so bad that Adobe advised us to just restart the app periodically -- despite Adobe marketing Flex as enterprise ready. We found compiler bugs for Adobe. Adobe and Jobs didn't set out to destroy it. Macromedia wrote bad code that performed poorly and it wasn't worth the effort for Adobe fix it once HTML5 won.
- cess11 1y ago
  None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind. Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do something cool without ever learning about things like memory leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying platform.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - wolrah 1y ago
    > None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind. Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were not just excessive resource usage and instability, they were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plugin was simultaneously one of the greatest strengths of Flash as a creative platform and one of the greatest risks to the average person browsing the web in the 2000s. The plugin needed to die. Unfortunately the Flash community was so firmly built around the web plugin as their distribution method of choice (presumably because many of us were browsing animations and playing games at work/school where we couldn't necessarily download and run arbitrary .exes) that the plugin was more or less a diseased conjoined twin, and when it died the community didn't have long left. Compare this to Java where the death of the browser plugin caused a number of badly designed banking sites to have to be redesigned in a less stupid (but quite often still very stupid) way but the community as a whole continued on without huge disruption. The browser plugin was just one of many places Java existed, it wasn't the dominant focus of the community.
as1mov 1y ago
Same here, I somehow acquired a pirated copy of Flash when I was 10 or 11. Went through the included offline manual and within a few days somehow knew I'll probably end up doing this programming thing for the rest of my life :D It's sad what happened to Flash, sure we have plugin free interactive content using JS but I'm not sure if anything has replicated the IDE. Though I guess the decline can also be attributed to the users moving onto other platforms. The kids making games moved on to making Android/iOS games and the animators moved to Youtube.
Night_Thastus 1y ago
The vast majority of games I played, for years, were flash games. I have a lot of fond memories of that time. However, Flash sucked. It ran terribly, it was insecure, and a mess to maintain. It needed to go.
DANmode 1y ago
Unity.

nntwozz 1y ago

I remember the white MacBook Core 2 Duo with 100% CPU, fans maxed out while watching YouTube 720p. This was months before the iPhone announcement. I can see why they killed it.

croes 1y ago
Because it was a security nightmare
- IshKebab 1y ago
  No it was a usability nightmare. Watching Flash Youtube on Android technically worked but it was a horrible experience. Google were ok with "works but janky af", but Apple weren't.
  - kakacik 1y ago
    We could have kept that creative environment (that seem to just disappear without any alternative to this day) while leaving videos to evolve as they did. People here complain like they have issues with long term memory, but reality was - there was no real web video before. That apple had more issues than others was problem that should have been contained to apple walled garden alone. World was, is and will be much larger than that.
    - empath75 1y ago
      That 'creative environment' was mostly used for obnoxious advertising by the time flash died.
    - IshKebab 1y ago
      Maybe, but playing videos was 99% of the use case for Flash by the time it was killed by Apple. Adobe could have kept maintaining it for the 1% Flash games, ads and terrible websites, but you can see why they gave up...
    - SchemaLoad 1y ago
      The creative environment could have been built with HTML/JS as well. I feel what killed it more so was mobile gaming took over casual games, and modern game engines enabled a single person who would have been making dinky little flash games to now make what used to take an entire studio.
  - croes 1y ago
    It can be both but it definitely had a security problem > Mitre lists more than 1,000 Adobe Flash vulnerabilities. >Flash ranks 14th on the list of products ranked by the number of vulnerabilities – one of only two applications in the top 25 that aren’t operating systems or browsers. https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security-and-risk-management/an-adobe-flash-ghost-may-be-haunting-your-data-center https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/security-and-risk-manage...

jb1991 1y ago

The product itself still exists as Adobe Animate, I think (or one of the Adobe CC tools). It's just as good or better than it ever was, with the same workflow. But instead of exporting to SWF now people just export to video and share it on video platforms. Lots of great stuff still being done with it on Youtube.

riffraff 1y ago
But flash was interactive, videos are not. I miss the days kongregate had a bunch of new fun games regularly. I suppose itch.io fills that niche now.
anymouse123456 11mo ago
Exporting to video does solve some portion of the use cases (i.e., early South Park), but the power of interactivity is what captivated me.

empath75 1y ago

The problem with flash is that it was a security, performance and usability nightmare for web browsers. Yes the games and videos were cool, but 99% of the usage of Flash was awful ads and UI/UX elements.

hollerith 1y ago
For most of Flash's existence on the web, I had my computers configured to block flash. (The block was achieved by removing files IIRC).
jonbiggums22 1y ago
I just used an click to load flash extension in firefox back then and everything was fine.
- DANmode 1y ago
  True. That’s basically how h.264 and DRM is being done in the browser for stuff like Netflix, today, right?

hangonhn 1y ago

Flash was a poorly written piece of software. It had numerous bad memory leaks and a CPU hog. It was never allowed on the iPhone probably because it would have drained the batteries really quickly. On top of that HTML5 was starting to catch on and could eventually do everything Flash could and do it better without the memory leaks and poor CPU usage. I have the very unfortunate claim to the title of being an engineer on the world's biggest Flash/Flex app. The memory leaks were so bad that Adobe advised us to just restart the app periodically -- despite Adobe marketing Flex as enterprise ready. We found compiler bugs for Adobe. Adobe and Jobs didn't set out to destroy it. Macromedia wrote bad code that performed poorly and it wasn't worth the effort for Adobe fix it once HTML5 won.

cess11 1y ago
None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind. Perhaps there was a memory leak in Unidentified Flying Assholes or the endless line of punch-a-celeb games or the thousands of stick fight productions and so on, but no one cared and enjoyed them immensely anyway. You could do something cool without ever learning about things like memory leaks or vulnerabilities in the underlying platform.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- wolrah 1y ago
  > None of that matters for the kind of creative work the grand parent likely had in mind. Some of that did, at least for how that creative work was almost exclusively delivered to the world. Those bugs were not just excessive resource usage and instability, they were incredibly often exploitable security flaws that were regularly weaponized against a huge swath of internet users. The ubiquity of the Flash browser plugin was simultaneously one of the greatest strengths of Flash as a creative platform and one of the greatest risks to the average person browsing the web in the 2000s. The plugin needed to die. Unfortunately the Flash community was so firmly built around the web plugin as their distribution method of choice (presumably because many of us were browsing animations and playing games at work/school where we couldn't necessarily download and run arbitrary .exes) that the plugin was more or less a diseased conjoined twin, and when it died the community didn't have long left. Compare this to Java where the death of the browser plugin caused a number of badly designed banking sites to have to be redesigned in a less stupid (but quite often still very stupid) way but the community as a whole continued on without huge disruption. The browser plugin was just one of many places Java existed, it wasn't the dominant focus of the community.

as1mov 1y ago

Same here, I somehow acquired a pirated copy of Flash when I was 10 or 11. Went through the included offline manual and within a few days somehow knew I'll probably end up doing this programming thing for the rest of my life :D It's sad what happened to Flash, sure we have plugin free interactive content using JS but I'm not sure if anything has replicated the IDE. Though I guess the decline can also be attributed to the users moving onto other platforms. The kids making games moved on to making Android/iOS games and the animators moved to Youtube.

Night_Thastus 1y ago

The vast majority of games I played, for years, were flash games. I have a lot of fond memories of that time. However, Flash sucked. It ran terribly, it was insecure, and a mess to maintain. It needed to go.

DANmode 1y ago

Unity.