[unleaded]

absolutely. really is strange that you used to be able to download a music video in less than 2-3mb with lossless video quality, but now that's not really a thing anymore. I feel like if Adobe didn't get greedy and encourage its use for absolutely everything (and/or web standards got up to speed faster) people wouldn't wouldn't approach talking about Flash with the 10-foot pole they often do today (as a platform—not how everyone talks about how much they loved flash games)

[comex]

What do you mean by “HD music video”? If you mean a literal video, then today’s video and audio codecs are more efficient than what Flash used, not less. If the music videos were that small then they must have given up a lot in quality. If you mean a Flash vector animation, then that’s different of course, but that doesn’t describe a typical music video.

[kccqzy]

Conventional video codecs are also pretty good at compressing animations. I once made a multi-minute animation of a plane taking off and H.264 compresses it to hundreds of kilobytes.

[unleaded]

yes i mean vectors, of course theres some cheating to reach that figure ;)

[mxfh]

What do you mean? Lossless animations with a soundtrack or some embeded video?

This is 570k and runs in a webassembly runtime:

https://archive.org/details/flash_badger

SVG could do that too. Minimal javascript plus audio tags.

http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg

[unleaded]

>badger.swf

yes stuff like that & the IOSYS MVs. you technically can do stuff like that today theres nothing stopping you from doing it with svgs but i meant more the social part of it. its just interesting that if you want to do the same thing (put an animated video on the inernet) the usual way its now 10x bigger yet looks worse.

also i dont think theres anything like Flash (the authoring software) but for SVGs. i hope there is one but for now I wouldnt say inkscape + a text editor counts

[xp84]

What else was wildly cool about Flash was that the player itself was a shockingly tiny download -- even on 56K it was an incredibly fast download, and because we were all using MSIE then, the installation of this ActiveX thing that was the Flash Player required like one quick click and it was installed, and in 5 seconds you were seeing the Flash content.

Obviously the fact that it was that low-friction to install any non-sandboxed application code was a very naïve thing to allow, but I still have to hand it to the Macromedia developers for packing the whole player into such a tiny download and making it so frictionless. I'm pretty sure that had a HUGE impact on its adoption over say, Java applets. Java took a lot more time and effort to install, and while it had decent penetration (many "chat room" services and in-browser games like Yahoo Games used Java) it was never taken for granted that 'everyone has it' the way Flash was (until Steve Jobs singlehandedly burned that assumption to the ground with fire).

[viraptor]

People loved the games, but not the super custom flash based menu that requires a loading bar and works totally different and slightly janky on each website.

[philsnow]

A time before HIGs.. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/03/03/macromedia-fla...

[kccqzy]

That's because people have more bandwidth today and therefore videos online are higher quality now. You can easily transcode a music video to 3MB using modern codecs (and even not so modern ones like H.264), and it will look somewhat worse than typical online video sites but still pretty good.

[tiagod]

Honestly, we can have that today. The real power of Flash was the fully integrated development environment. It was one of the first programming experiences I had, and all I needed to do amazing stuff was a book and a copy of Flash MX.

[kccqzy]

One of my own first programming experiences was when my dad bought me a copy of Dreamweaver and a book about it. To this day I still ponder what might have happened if I was instead given a copy of Flash instead.

[acdha]

Adobe needed to take Flash seriously as a platform. Instead they neglected it, making it synonymous with crashes and security problems, and they milked developers as much as possible.

I bought Flash once. I found a crashing bug and jumped through hoops reporting it. A year or so later, they updated the ticket to suggest I drop $800 for the privilege of seeing whether it had been fixed. I did not make the mistake of giving them money ever again.

They had such an opportunity to take advantage of a platform with a pre-iPhone deployment in the high 90% range, and they just skimped it into oblivion. What a disgrace for everyone who actually cared.

[kccqzy]

Yes seriously. At that time Steve Jobs was harping on HTML5 and CSS3 being open standards but Flash not. Adobe could have ensured Flash's survival by making Flash an open standard (much like it has made PDF an open standard where the specification is free to everyone) and making Adobe Flash only one of the possible authoring tools, and the Flash Player only one of the player tools. Basically they should have invited the community and other companies to make more Flash tooling while continuing to sell their own. Given how often I see people still paying for Acrobat Pro today, I think this is a good business strategy too.