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> the whole thing could be a PWA Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails. I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never

by echelon 9mo ago

> the whole thing could be a PWA Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails. I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs. A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends. You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.

marcosdumay 9mo ago
Just like Microsoft before them. But flash specifically deserved to die.
- NewsaHackO 9mo ago
  Absolutely. Apple had the balls to be the first major tech company to take the first material step to actually end the security nightmare that was Flash for good.
  - as1mov 9mo ago
    I'm sure it was the security that of Flash that worried them, and not the fact that a third party was encroaching on their walled garden that couldn't be extorted.
    - LoganDark 9mo ago
      Just because they can be worried about multiple things doesn't mean they were only worried about the worst of them. Security in Flash was a total and utter nightmare. It was awful.
titzer 9mo ago
Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some utopian thing.
tliltocatl 9mo ago
Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.
- echelon 9mo ago
  Creativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5. During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it. Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable. The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now. Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back. The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible. Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.
  - pdntspa 9mo ago
    > Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware
teaearlgraycold 9mo ago
On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of control over the web? Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable.
- echelon 9mo ago
  Ironically, Macromedia / Adobe didn't try to assert any control back then. They were even opening the standard, IIRC. They learned this much later after learning the game from Meta, Google, and Apple.
thisislife2 9mo ago
Macromedia Flash was indeed a beautiful, innovative piece of software. HTML 5 still doesn't match its features vis the ease and usability that Flash offered in creating and deploying content online. But after its acquisition by Adobe, it just ever so slowly went downhill. It should have been open sourced.
ajross 9mo ago
> I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks Capcut and Roblox would like words. No, that's kinda just wrong. Content generation for non-technical folks has never been easier or more effective. Flash is just something nerds here remember fondly because it was a gateway drug into hackerdom. Some of us are older and might feel the same way about Hypercard or TurboPascal or whatnot.
raw_anon_1111 9mo ago
This myth that Apple “killed” Flash on mobile should die. When Flash finally came to Android in 2010-11, it required a phone that had a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM and barely ran on that. The first iPhone came with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz CPU, it couldn’t even run Safari smoothly. If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard while you waited on the page to render. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011. Adobe was always making promises it couldn’t keep. The Motorola Xoom was suppose to be the “iPad Killer” that could run Flash , Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t go to the Xoom home page on the Xoom at launch because it required Flash.
antod 9mo ago
"Run anywhere" was getting pretty stretched long before it was killed, Linux support was orphaned, old, buggy, vulnerable and hard to run in contemporary browsers. I was stoked to watch Apple nail the coffin shut, and see it consigned to history along with Java applets.
jodrellblank 9mo ago
You say the security and battery issues "were solvable", so why didn't Macromedia or Adobe solve them? Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, the era of Palms, Blackberries, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Phone, Microsoft Tablet PC; mobile devices were not a new surprise by 2005. Adobe did get Flash onto Palm mobile devices and TVs and early Android smartphones, and the experience was poor[1][2] - not just from those two issues; Flash sites weren't designed for mobile or touch or small screens. Customers had a choice of Flash-mobile devices, and preferred iPhones. > "Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch wrote in 2012 "Jobs was right", adding Android users had poor experiences with watching Flash content and interactive Flash experiences were "often wonky or didn't perform well, even on high-powered phones".[9] Mike Isaac of Wired wrote in 2011 that "In [our] testing of multiple Flash-compatible devices, choppiness and browser crashes were common", and a former Adobe employee stated "Flash is a resource hog [...] It's a battery drain, and it's unreliable on mobile web browsers".[10] Kyle Wagner of Gizmodo wrote in 2011 that "Adobe was never really able to smooth over performance, battery, and security issues".[11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash [1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-flash-project-for-palm-pre-webos-flash-support/ https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-fl... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_run_on_webos_20_for_people_with_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_...

by echelon 9mo ago

marcosdumay 9mo ago

Just like Microsoft before them. But flash specifically deserved to die.

NewsaHackO 9mo ago
Absolutely. Apple had the balls to be the first major tech company to take the first material step to actually end the security nightmare that was Flash for good.
- as1mov 9mo ago
  I'm sure it was the security that of Flash that worried them, and not the fact that a third party was encroaching on their walled garden that couldn't be extorted.
  - LoganDark 9mo ago
    Just because they can be worried about multiple things doesn't mean they were only worried about the worst of them. Security in Flash was a total and utter nightmare. It was awful.

titzer 9mo ago

Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some utopian thing.

tliltocatl 9mo ago

Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.

echelon 9mo ago
Creativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5. During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it. Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable. The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now. Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back. The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible. Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.
- pdntspa 9mo ago
  > Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web. No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware

teaearlgraycold 9mo ago

On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of control over the web? Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable.

echelon 9mo ago
Ironically, Macromedia / Adobe didn't try to assert any control back then. They were even opening the standard, IIRC. They learned this much later after learning the game from Meta, Google, and Apple.

thisislife2 9mo ago

Macromedia Flash was indeed a beautiful, innovative piece of software. HTML 5 still doesn't match its features vis the ease and usability that Flash offered in creating and deploying content online. But after its acquisition by Adobe, it just ever so slowly went downhill. It should have been open sourced.

ajross 9mo ago

> I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks Capcut and Roblox would like words. No, that's kinda just wrong. Content generation for non-technical folks has never been easier or more effective. Flash is just something nerds here remember fondly because it was a gateway drug into hackerdom. Some of us are older and might feel the same way about Hypercard or TurboPascal or whatnot.

raw_anon_1111 9mo ago

This myth that Apple “killed” Flash on mobile should die. When Flash finally came to Android in 2010-11, it required a phone that had a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM and barely ran on that. The first iPhone came with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz CPU, it couldn’t even run Safari smoothly. If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard while you waited on the page to render. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011. Adobe was always making promises it couldn’t keep. The Motorola Xoom was suppose to be the “iPad Killer” that could run Flash , Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t go to the Xoom home page on the Xoom at launch because it required Flash.

antod 9mo ago

"Run anywhere" was getting pretty stretched long before it was killed, Linux support was orphaned, old, buggy, vulnerable and hard to run in contemporary browsers. I was stoked to watch Apple nail the coffin shut, and see it consigned to history along with Java applets.

jodrellblank 9mo ago

You say the security and battery issues "were solvable", so why didn't Macromedia or Adobe solve them? Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, the era of Palms, Blackberries, Nokia/Symbian, Windows Phone, Microsoft Tablet PC; mobile devices were not a new surprise by 2005. Adobe did get Flash onto Palm mobile devices and TVs and early Android smartphones, and the experience was poor[1][2] - not just from those two issues; Flash sites weren't designed for mobile or touch or small screens. Customers had a choice of Flash-mobile devices, and preferred iPhones. > "Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch wrote in 2012 "Jobs was right", adding Android users had poor experiences with watching Flash content and interactive Flash experiences were "often wonky or didn't perform well, even on high-powered phones".[9] Mike Isaac of Wired wrote in 2011 that "In [our] testing of multiple Flash-compatible devices, choppiness and browser crashes were common", and a former Adobe employee stated "Flash is a resource hog [...] It's a battery drain, and it's unreliable on mobile web browsers".[10] Kyle Wagner of Gizmodo wrote in 2011 that "Adobe was never really able to smooth over performance, battery, and security issues".[11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash [1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-flash-project-for-palm-pre-webos-flash-support/ https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-fl... [2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_run_on_webos_20_for_people_with_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_...