7 ms·

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA a

by acdha 4mo ago

Adobe has always been like this, too. They squandered an enormous marketshare with Flash because the alternative would've been spending a couple million on QA and they managed to unite all of the browser manufacturers in agreement that the web was better off without such an unreliable partner. I shipped a couple of things on Flash back in the day but it was staggeringly bad software — random crashes, various heisenbugs where changes in one area would affect unrelated functionality in other modules, etc. — and while it cost something like $800, it was completely unsupported: I filed a number of trivially reproducible bugs with reduced test cases but never heard anything back until the next release came out and they sent automated suggestions that the bug might be fixed so I should buy a full-price license and find out.

echelon 4mo ago
Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and Adobe for being such awful stewards of one of the most amazing web technologies. Kids growing up today have no idea how magical Flash was. It was like Roblox or Minecraft for web. Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease.
- LeFantome 4mo ago
  You know you can use Ruffle if you really want Flash right? https://ruffle.rs https://ruffle.rs But the only standard you need is WASM. All browsers support it. Use whatever you want to make it. In fact, Ruffle is just a WASM app.
  - ameliaquining 4mo ago
    The problem is that, while there's no theoretical barrier to an authoring tool with a Director-like user experience that exports to Wasm, no one has actually written one, and it's not a small amount of work. (I agree that we're better off without Flash, but this particular problem is real and unsolved.)
  - superkuh 4mo ago
    Ruffle is not complete or comprehensive. In my test of a dozen swf ruffle could successfully display about half. Compare to the actual flash plugin Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202 (11.2.202.643) in my retro machine browser which displayed them all perfectly.
    - aboardRat4 4mo ago
      What about lightspark? htps://lightspark.github.io
  - thisislife2 4mo ago
    Or you can just use PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org/ https://www.palemoon.org/ ) and install the original Flash player plug-in in it.
- m104 4mo ago
  Yeah but the execution still mattered. I'm a Flash / Shockwave fan as well but there's no point pretending that package was sufficient for the job it was pitched to do. Macromedia seemed to be on a really good track with Shockwave and Flash, but either didn't set up the technology for internet success, or really just sold out the goods with the Adobe acquisition. In any case, take heart though. If we did it once, we can do it again.
  - intrasight 4mo ago
    But we won't because this isn't something that can be done by consensus or by an ad company.
- drtz 4mo ago
  > Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?
  - ricardonunez 4mo ago
    what’s he is referring is the editor and the easy way of drawing things, still agree we can do things today but a easy to draw editor like that is missing. I was a fan of flash and fireworks.
    - radley 4mo ago
      The editor was a scripted timeline, similar to a video or animation timeline. It was fantastic for creatives, but counterintuitive for programmers, so most devs hated it.
  - fdgfikgfv 4mo ago
    Flash had its problems but as a user, it looked sharper and smoother than even current websites. And its editor gave non-tech users ability to create amazing animations, interfaces, and even games.
    - dredmorbius 4mo ago
      Image-wise, SVGA + JS probably gets you the clarity. Standard gif / image animations not so much, if that's what you're referencing. This isn't my baliwick, so I've absolutely nothing to say about the ease with which these options can be created.
      - afiori 4mo ago
        Conceptually maybe you can compile flash to SVG+js but this has nothing to do with the point. Many insist (I have no direct experience) that the flash ecosystem (especially the editor) was and is unsurpassed as a publishing platform for interactive experiences. Today with the current focus on mobile+low latency+e-commerce optimizations flash would probably have shown a lot of limitations, yet JavaScript, SVG, canvas, http webgl etc still fail to provide a "competitor" to what flash used to be. The web simply went in a different direction, one that left many unsatisfied
- turpentine 4mo ago
  Magical? Those are some rose tinted glasses. Having to install a binary blob from a free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask. Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns and virtually non-existent Linux support.
  - mvdtnz 4mo ago
    The overwhelming majority of computer users simply DO NOT CARE about things like "install a binary blob" or "free-software hostile vendor" or "non-existent Linux support". They installed the plugin and got a way better experience. > Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of Flash versus Javascript (or other browser technology) vulns over their respective lifespans.
    - kstrauser 4mo ago
      If Flash hadn’t sucked harder than a neutron star, that would be an argument to have. People install lots of proprietary plugins today. Flash would’ve been just one more on that list. But it did suck, and badly. It crashed the browser all the freaking time, often hard enough to crash the whole OS. (“But the OS shouldn’t let that happen!” True, although even with that said, it was in the short list of common apps capable of crashing that badly. It was almost a talent.) Flash was horrid. While idea was fine, the implementation was terrible. No mobile OS could have run it solidly and without sucking batteries like no tomorrow. Flash in the right hands could have been nice. We’ll never know because that never happened.
      - radley 4mo ago
        > No mobile OS could have run it solidly and without sucking batteries like no tomorrow. By the time mobile could run Flash, it was too late. Between Apple & Adobe, it had no shot of making the transition. But before that, Flash was pretty amazing.
        kstrauser 4mo ago
- Papazsazsa 4mo ago
  You'll get hammered for this on HN, but the web was magical and weird with Flash around, and now it feels quite vanilla and boring. I long for the days of weird experimental art and goofy animations and bonkers UIs.
  - dpark 4mo ago
    It was a fun and experimental time for sure. Way more stuff was weird in a good way. Standards hadn’t settled. All kinds of fun stuff was created in Flash that could not have been built with the standardized web tech of the day. I don’t really miss Flash but I do miss the early internet sometimes and Flash was part of that. (Remember when it was FutureSplash?) I would be remiss if I didn’t post the most early-Internet-type thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Dungeon Soup. https://m.youtube.com/@DungeonSoup https://m.youtube.com/@DungeonSoup Once upon a time this would have been my favorite Flash cartoon series. “Season one” playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSq76P-lbX8Ws6vgAAC2WhwSuBwFyzJWJ&si=AnUE8xGM0EMhPdOL https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSq76P-lbX8Ws6vgAAC2WhwSu...
  - zelphirkalt 4mo ago
    I would rather say, that now the web feels like being handed turds at every turn, and needing to wear a hazmat suit, if one wants to stay clean. Not what I would call boring. More like infuriating.
- fragmede 4mo ago
  Compared to the best that someone can vibe code? Not to show my age, but we were kids when flash came out. That copy of macro media? I don't know about you. We spent hours and hours and hours with that spend hours and hours and hours with vibecoding and tell me that you really can't accomplish similar shit. Then you just to deploy it you and I might be to smart to just paste your Vercel API key in ChatGPT, but pretend you're 16 right now. I can tell you how much tsc sucks off the top of my head but what I can't do is tell you to hit ctrl+enter in Claude desktop to play movie. What kids know today is how magical Claude desktop and ChatGPT are. The deploy story is trivial. just give the AI the key. We can judge someone for being dumb enough to do that, but unless you're selling consulting services, it's not nice to laugh. if you are selling consulting services then let's talk sales channels lol
  - watwut 4mo ago
    Yes compared to vibe coded stuff too. And it costed less money.
- LooseMarmoset 4mo ago
  this is unfortunately, the most revisionist take I can imagine. I don’t mean this in a personal way, mind you but while it may have been magical to publish interactive websites, using flash, that magic is utterly outweighed by the mundane vulnerabilities that flash was riddled with. It’s safe to say we all miss sites like Homestar runner, and I had a co- worker who generated many meme – worthy flash presentations of his coworkers, which were hysterical. however, flash generated security vulnerabilities on the daily, and unfortunately, these vulnerabilities were very conveniently cross platform. These vulnerabilities, which Adobe couldn’t, or wouldn’t, resolve resulted in many many lost hours fixing virus – and Trojan horse – infested PCs, Macs, and cell phones. Adobe never managed to sandbox flash at all. I miss a lot of old flash content, and I’m sure many people miss the ease with which you could create interactive content for websites. The fault here lies squarely on Adobe, who wouldn’t fix the situation.
- m463 4mo ago
  I would think: 1) macromedia -> 2) adobe -> 3) steve jobs I think 2 was the root cause, not #1 or #3. https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple... That said, I wonder how easy it is to publish on apple? I think of xcode in sort of the same way sj complaining about adobe being cross-platform and slow.
- spankibalt 4mo ago
  > "Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease." Somewhat mirrors my experience with all those rubbish non-PDF formats for digital document publishing, e. g. ePub: Often terminally ugly and utterly useless on top of it (not properly citeable, et cetera).
- thisislife2 4mo ago
  Those downvoting you have no idea of what you are talking about. Flash was what truly brought multimedia to the internet. You could make complex vector animations so easily in it, and it would only take a few minutes to load on a dialup or ISDN because of its small size (10's or 100's of KB). At one point, it used to power the whole of Youtube (and many other video sites). "Web applications" in this era actually meant something built with Flash. And it did all this on ancient hardware. Flash used to run on 90+ % of internet connected PCs at one point if I remember right. And because of that, you could count on Flash player more than the browsers they ran in. Adobe 100% screwed it up.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
    I have less rosy memories of self-indulgent Flash loading pages which took forever over dialup and contributed nothing. And a lot of weird-for-the-sake-of-it UI experiments. There were also fun sites and games and generally silliness, but there was a lot of Flash slop. Was it a more interesting web? It was more experimental and colourful. The Flash/Kai's Power Tools/Fireworks maximalist period was more inventive, but the UX wasn't necessarily friendlier. It was a great time to be running a design agency, but not always a great time to be an ordinary user. What actually killed Flash? Social media. That took the user interest, siloed it, and cut off the oxygen of individual attention. Which is why even if someone reinvented a simple animation -> js etc tool it wouldn't make a difference. The attention isn't there to support a culture where creative sites become memes in their own right and search engines make them easy to find.
- kalleboo 4mo ago
  What I never understand is why we never got a Flash-level authoring tool that exported to modern JavaScript/Canvas. Ruffle shows it can be done. Adobe could have retuned Animate to do it, but instead let it languish as a niche animation tool for some animation studios to use before trying to kill it.
  - monknomo 4mo ago
    this seems like a huge gap in the market
fnord77 4mo ago
> heisenbugs gold
- dredmorbius 4mo ago
  A well-established term of art dating to 1983: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug>.
- JadeNB 4mo ago
  Gold, but not new gold: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html
- 2cynykyl 4mo ago
  I also learned this term pretty recently, loved it. Another fav tech term is automagically :-)
  - IshKebab 4mo ago
    I'm guessing you are very young!
- dddw 4mo ago
  Fnord gold
  - helterskelter 4mo ago
    Fnord Knox
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
  - cwnyth 4mo ago
    23 skidoo.
pmarreck 4mo ago
Flash was better back when it was called VideoWorks. ;) Notably, there was also a MusicWorks. Both Mac-only. But like EARLY Mac-only. /dates me
m348e912 4mo ago
Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.
- tjoff 4mo ago
  The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%. And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...
  - GreyStache 4mo ago
    I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream. The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
    - tracker1 4mo ago
      When the iPhone came out, Flash was solely responsible for MOST of desktop app crashes... It was a pretty easy win not to even support it.
    - eli 4mo ago
      Maybe. But also Flash, on the mobile devices of that time that did support it, was a miserable experience. Slow and broken and drained the battery.
    - stefanfisk 4mo ago
      It took them years to realize that the App Store could be a thing.
      - 4mo ago
willXare 4mo ago
[flagged]
- giancarlostoro 4mo ago
  I wonder which one's more "Evil" Oracle or Adobe, it's surprising they didn't eat each other alive.
  - acdha 4mo ago
    Oracle, no question. They were so much better at executing competently.
  - Retr0id 4mo ago
    btw the account you're replying to is an LLM bot
    - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
      Fair, but also surprised its not shadowbanned if thats the case.
      - Retr0id 4mo ago
        Looks like it is now, but probably took them a while to classify it, with all the upvotes people were giving it.
willXare 4mo ago
[flagged]
stellamariesays 4mo ago
[flagged]
tracker1 4mo ago
I worked in eLearning in the early-mid 00's and Flash/Flex were king at the time... Came to find so many flaws that were used, and kept me from using Flash at home. A bit earlier... when Adobe had taken over Macromedia, my hopes were really that Flash would become something like a .zip file with assets as SVG, audio, etc. and ActionScript/JavaScript as the glue... I think it could still be a good package format for browsers. Given Adobe's work prior to that on advancing/enhancing SVG support for browsers etc. Making Flash just the best of breed tool for creators. That's not what happened though. Adobe is just a massive rental scheme at this point, and I think the time may be up sooner than later... I honestly think at this point, the first well-placed competing product with solid Linux support will unseat them. I know a lot of people are using Davinci Resolve and Photopea, and if those work well enough for you, that's great. Not sure the effort it would take to get some of the open alternatives into a better position overall.

by acdha 4mo ago

echelon 4mo ago

Flash is still unsurpassed as the easiest publishing medium. JavaScript build system layer cake and "web standards" are a million times harder than just drawing some stuff, maybe writing a simple function, then building a static file that can be embedded anywhere and even downloaded. You have to spend so much time setting up any flash alternative, and the "standards" are worse. I hate Steve Jobs for killing Flash and Adobe for being such awful stewards of one of the most amazing web technologies. Kids growing up today have no idea how magical Flash was. It was like Roblox or Minecraft for web. Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease.

LeFantome 4mo ago
You know you can use Ruffle if you really want Flash right? https://ruffle.rs https://ruffle.rs But the only standard you need is WASM. All browsers support it. Use whatever you want to make it. In fact, Ruffle is just a WASM app.
- ameliaquining 4mo ago
  The problem is that, while there's no theoretical barrier to an authoring tool with a Director-like user experience that exports to Wasm, no one has actually written one, and it's not a small amount of work. (I agree that we're better off without Flash, but this particular problem is real and unsolved.)
- superkuh 4mo ago
  Ruffle is not complete or comprehensive. In my test of a dozen swf ruffle could successfully display about half. Compare to the actual flash plugin Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202 (11.2.202.643) in my retro machine browser which displayed them all perfectly.
  - aboardRat4 4mo ago
    What about lightspark? htps://lightspark.github.io
- thisislife2 4mo ago
  Or you can just use PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org/ https://www.palemoon.org/ ) and install the original Flash player plug-in in it.
m104 4mo ago
Yeah but the execution still mattered. I'm a Flash / Shockwave fan as well but there's no point pretending that package was sufficient for the job it was pitched to do. Macromedia seemed to be on a really good track with Shockwave and Flash, but either didn't set up the technology for internet success, or really just sold out the goods with the Adobe acquisition. In any case, take heart though. If we did it once, we can do it again.
- intrasight 4mo ago
  But we won't because this isn't something that can be done by consensus or by an ad company.
drtz 4mo ago
> Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. Is this a troll? What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today (excluding the obvious answer of runtime vulnerabilities that allowed apps to escape the sandbox)?
- ricardonunez 4mo ago
  what’s he is referring is the editor and the easy way of drawing things, still agree we can do things today but a easy to draw editor like that is missing. I was a fan of flash and fireworks.
  - radley 4mo ago
    The editor was a scripted timeline, similar to a video or animation timeline. It was fantastic for creatives, but counterintuitive for programmers, so most devs hated it.
- fdgfikgfv 4mo ago
  Flash had its problems but as a user, it looked sharper and smoother than even current websites. And its editor gave non-tech users ability to create amazing animations, interfaces, and even games.
  - dredmorbius 4mo ago
    Image-wise, SVGA + JS probably gets you the clarity. Standard gif / image animations not so much, if that's what you're referencing. This isn't my baliwick, so I've absolutely nothing to say about the ease with which these options can be created.
    - afiori 4mo ago
      Conceptually maybe you can compile flash to SVG+js but this has nothing to do with the point. Many insist (I have no direct experience) that the flash ecosystem (especially the editor) was and is unsurpassed as a publishing platform for interactive experiences. Today with the current focus on mobile+low latency+e-commerce optimizations flash would probably have shown a lot of limitations, yet JavaScript, SVG, canvas, http webgl etc still fail to provide a "competitor" to what flash used to be. The web simply went in a different direction, one that left many unsatisfied
turpentine 4mo ago
Magical? Those are some rose tinted glasses. Having to install a binary blob from a free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask. Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns and virtually non-existent Linux support.
- mvdtnz 4mo ago
  The overwhelming majority of computer users simply DO NOT CARE about things like "install a binary blob" or "free-software hostile vendor" or "non-existent Linux support". They installed the plugin and got a way better experience. > Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns I wonder if anyone has done an analysis of Flash versus Javascript (or other browser technology) vulns over their respective lifespans.
  - kstrauser 4mo ago
    If Flash hadn’t sucked harder than a neutron star, that would be an argument to have. People install lots of proprietary plugins today. Flash would’ve been just one more on that list. But it did suck, and badly. It crashed the browser all the freaking time, often hard enough to crash the whole OS. (“But the OS shouldn’t let that happen!” True, although even with that said, it was in the short list of common apps capable of crashing that badly. It was almost a talent.) Flash was horrid. While idea was fine, the implementation was terrible. No mobile OS could have run it solidly and without sucking batteries like no tomorrow. Flash in the right hands could have been nice. We’ll never know because that never happened.
    - radley 4mo ago
      > No mobile OS could have run it solidly and without sucking batteries like no tomorrow. By the time mobile could run Flash, it was too late. Between Apple & Adobe, it had no shot of making the transition. But before that, Flash was pretty amazing.
      - kstrauser 4mo ago
Papazsazsa 4mo ago
You'll get hammered for this on HN, but the web was magical and weird with Flash around, and now it feels quite vanilla and boring. I long for the days of weird experimental art and goofy animations and bonkers UIs.
- dpark 4mo ago
  It was a fun and experimental time for sure. Way more stuff was weird in a good way. Standards hadn’t settled. All kinds of fun stuff was created in Flash that could not have been built with the standardized web tech of the day. I don’t really miss Flash but I do miss the early internet sometimes and Flash was part of that. (Remember when it was FutureSplash?) I would be remiss if I didn’t post the most early-Internet-type thing I’ve encountered in a long time. Dungeon Soup. https://m.youtube.com/@DungeonSoup https://m.youtube.com/@DungeonSoup Once upon a time this would have been my favorite Flash cartoon series. “Season one” playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSq76P-lbX8Ws6vgAAC2WhwSuBwFyzJWJ&si=AnUE8xGM0EMhPdOL https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSq76P-lbX8Ws6vgAAC2WhwSu...
- zelphirkalt 4mo ago
  I would rather say, that now the web feels like being handed turds at every turn, and needing to wear a hazmat suit, if one wants to stay clean. Not what I would call boring. More like infuriating.
fragmede 4mo ago
Compared to the best that someone can vibe code? Not to show my age, but we were kids when flash came out. That copy of macro media? I don't know about you. We spent hours and hours and hours with that spend hours and hours and hours with vibecoding and tell me that you really can't accomplish similar shit. Then you just to deploy it you and I might be to smart to just paste your Vercel API key in ChatGPT, but pretend you're 16 right now. I can tell you how much tsc sucks off the top of my head but what I can't do is tell you to hit ctrl+enter in Claude desktop to play movie. What kids know today is how magical Claude desktop and ChatGPT are. The deploy story is trivial. just give the AI the key. We can judge someone for being dumb enough to do that, but unless you're selling consulting services, it's not nice to laugh. if you are selling consulting services then let's talk sales channels lol
- watwut 4mo ago
  Yes compared to vibe coded stuff too. And it costed less money.
LooseMarmoset 4mo ago
this is unfortunately, the most revisionist take I can imagine. I don’t mean this in a personal way, mind you but while it may have been magical to publish interactive websites, using flash, that magic is utterly outweighed by the mundane vulnerabilities that flash was riddled with. It’s safe to say we all miss sites like Homestar runner, and I had a co- worker who generated many meme – worthy flash presentations of his coworkers, which were hysterical. however, flash generated security vulnerabilities on the daily, and unfortunately, these vulnerabilities were very conveniently cross platform. These vulnerabilities, which Adobe couldn’t, or wouldn’t, resolve resulted in many many lost hours fixing virus – and Trojan horse – infested PCs, Macs, and cell phones. Adobe never managed to sandbox flash at all. I miss a lot of old flash content, and I’m sure many people miss the ease with which you could create interactive content for websites. The fault here lies squarely on Adobe, who wouldn’t fix the situation.
m463 4mo ago
I would think: 1) macromedia -> 2) adobe -> 3) steve jobs I think 2 was the root cause, not #1 or #3. https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple... That said, I wonder how easy it is to publish on apple? I think of xcode in sort of the same way sj complaining about adobe being cross-platform and slow.
spankibalt 4mo ago
> "Websites are still inferior to Flash of the early 2000s. It's taken decades and they can only mimic a fraction of its power. And none of its ease." Somewhat mirrors my experience with all those rubbish non-PDF formats for digital document publishing, e. g. ePub: Often terminally ugly and utterly useless on top of it (not properly citeable, et cetera).
thisislife2 4mo ago
Those downvoting you have no idea of what you are talking about. Flash was what truly brought multimedia to the internet. You could make complex vector animations so easily in it, and it would only take a few minutes to load on a dialup or ISDN because of its small size (10's or 100's of KB). At one point, it used to power the whole of Youtube (and many other video sites). "Web applications" in this era actually meant something built with Flash. And it did all this on ancient hardware. Flash used to run on 90+ % of internet connected PCs at one point if I remember right. And because of that, you could count on Flash player more than the browsers they ran in. Adobe 100% screwed it up.
- TheOtherHobbes 4mo ago
  I have less rosy memories of self-indulgent Flash loading pages which took forever over dialup and contributed nothing. And a lot of weird-for-the-sake-of-it UI experiments. There were also fun sites and games and generally silliness, but there was a lot of Flash slop. Was it a more interesting web? It was more experimental and colourful. The Flash/Kai's Power Tools/Fireworks maximalist period was more inventive, but the UX wasn't necessarily friendlier. It was a great time to be running a design agency, but not always a great time to be an ordinary user. What actually killed Flash? Social media. That took the user interest, siloed it, and cut off the oxygen of individual attention. Which is why even if someone reinvented a simple animation -> js etc tool it wouldn't make a difference. The attention isn't there to support a culture where creative sites become memes in their own right and search engines make them easy to find.
kalleboo 4mo ago
What I never understand is why we never got a Flash-level authoring tool that exported to modern JavaScript/Canvas. Ruffle shows it can be done. Adobe could have retuned Animate to do it, but instead let it languish as a niche animation tool for some animation studios to use before trying to kill it.
- monknomo 4mo ago
  this seems like a huge gap in the market

fnord77 4mo ago

> heisenbugs gold

dredmorbius 4mo ago
A well-established term of art dating to 1983: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug>.
JadeNB 4mo ago
Gold, but not new gold: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/heisenbug.html
2cynykyl 4mo ago
I also learned this term pretty recently, loved it. Another fav tech term is automagically :-)
- IshKebab 4mo ago
  I'm guessing you are very young!
dddw 4mo ago
Fnord gold
- helterskelter 4mo ago
  Fnord Knox
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- cwnyth 4mo ago
  23 skidoo.

pmarreck 4mo ago

Flash was better back when it was called VideoWorks. ;) Notably, there was also a MusicWorks. Both Mac-only. But like EARLY Mac-only. /dates me

m348e912 4mo ago

Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.

tjoff 4mo ago
The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%. And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...
- GreyStache 4mo ago
  I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream. The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
  - tracker1 4mo ago
    When the iPhone came out, Flash was solely responsible for MOST of desktop app crashes... It was a pretty easy win not to even support it.
  - eli 4mo ago
    Maybe. But also Flash, on the mobile devices of that time that did support it, was a miserable experience. Slow and broken and drained the battery.
  - stefanfisk 4mo ago
    It took them years to realize that the App Store could be a thing.
    - 4mo ago

willXare 4mo ago

[flagged]

giancarlostoro 4mo ago
I wonder which one's more "Evil" Oracle or Adobe, it's surprising they didn't eat each other alive.
- acdha 4mo ago
  Oracle, no question. They were so much better at executing competently.
- Retr0id 4mo ago
  btw the account you're replying to is an LLM bot
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    Fair, but also surprised its not shadowbanned if thats the case.
    - Retr0id 4mo ago
      Looks like it is now, but probably took them a while to classify it, with all the upvotes people were giving it.

willXare 4mo ago

[flagged]

stellamariesays 4mo ago

[flagged]

tracker1 4mo ago

I worked in eLearning in the early-mid 00's and Flash/Flex were king at the time... Came to find so many flaws that were used, and kept me from using Flash at home. A bit earlier... when Adobe had taken over Macromedia, my hopes were really that Flash would become something like a .zip file with assets as SVG, audio, etc. and ActionScript/JavaScript as the glue... I think it could still be a good package format for browsers. Given Adobe's work prior to that on advancing/enhancing SVG support for browsers etc. Making Flash just the best of breed tool for creators. That's not what happened though. Adobe is just a massive rental scheme at this point, and I think the time may be up sooner than later... I honestly think at this point, the first well-placed competing product with solid Linux support will unseat them. I know a lot of people are using Davinci Resolve and Photopea, and if those work well enough for you, that's great. Not sure the effort it would take to get some of the open alternatives into a better position overall.