[echelon]

Web standards are great, but they still aren't as good as Flash.

Flash was surreal in how good it was: a fantastic editor, language, and format for building and distributing hermetically encapsulated containers of multimedia greatness.

We need another Flash. It was S-tier and too good for us.

[nayroclade]

I’m sure Flash was great for Flash developers. But speaking as someone who remembers the plague of slow and unusable Flash websites in the 90s and 2000s, it was not good for users and I’m very glad it’s dead.

[boo-ga-ga]

It obviously was bad for web sites, but it was great for games and animations. Great tooling for creators + extremely accessible distribution to any PC was a killer feature.

[eadmund]

The thing that I really loved about Flash and miss still today is that it contained the dynamism: the web page around the embedded Flash object was just plain old HTML. This meant that I controlled whether or not the Flash played.

By contrast, Javascript runs without any action from the user. Consequently, web designers have grown to rely on it always being there, and now many sites rely on it to do things that can be done in pure HTML.

And oh by the way, they also violate my privacy something fierce.

[watwut]

I fondly remember playing flash games on newgrounds and such. As a user, flash allowed for things that are simply impossible now with javascript. By things here I mean "people whose skill is primary in art being able to create cool and great things".

None of that emerged again when flash got killed and the reason is technological - comparatively current technologies sux for those people.

[compsciphd]

that seems like a business issue. i.e. was there much (if any) that one could do technically in flash that one can't do today cross browser using web standards.

If flash was no more capable than what a browser can do with web standards, its a tooling problem for the people who "skill is primary art being able to create cool and great things".

Then the question becomes, why hasn't anyone created tooling on par with what existed for "flash developers" that instead of generating actionscript to be executed by the flash plugin, generated javascript, webassembly, interaction with canvas elements and webgpu. Is it simply because no one sees real business opportunities there? (/ if there is a real growable business opportunities, then why is no one pursuing it?)

If that's the case, then yes, we lost something with the move away from flash (i.e. the inability to use all investment in said legacy tooling that worked, but can no longer generate usable things), but one can also view that as the reason for wanting web standards.

When one is using tools that generate things to web standards, it doesn't matter if those tools become "legacy", if they still work for you, there's a stronger likelihood that they will continue to generate an output into the future that is usable as they are not dependent on a proprietary system to run them, even if the "business opportunity" for the developer of the tools evaporates and they no longer desire to invest in them.

[watwut]

Flash and its tooling was undistinguishable - they did not existed one without another. It was not some separate thing made by someone else. It was made by Adobe, from the start. I think it matters - flash itself was designed so that making great tooling was possible from the start. Web standards are simply not designed for that. They stand in the way, basically.

> why hasn't anyone created tooling on par with what existed for "flash developers" that instead of generating actionscript to be executed by the flash plugin, generated javascript, webassembly, interaction with canvas elements and webgpu.

First, I think there is aspect of "javascript, webassembly, interaction with canvas elements and webgpu" being quite hard to generate in a way that would achieve the same as flash did. As API, they comparatively sux although they are improving.

What you suggest is much harder then it looks like and involved technologies are not making it easier.

[6031769]

It was not made by Adobe from the start. It was made by FutureWave which was bought out by Macromedia who continued to develop it years before they in turn were bought by Adobe.

[mcphage]

> I’m sure Flash was great for Flash developers.

Even more, it was great at turning people who weren’t Flash developers—or even developers at all— into Flash developers, by giving them an easy to use toolset that is still unmatched today.

[echelon]

100%! It led me to engineering, and tens of thousands of others like me.

It was so easy and accessible, and there is no modern comparison.