[echelon]

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.

[turpentine]

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.

[dpark]

I remember the time of browser plug-ins (not “extensions”). Everyone happily installed Flash, and the Crescendo midi plugin, and multiple other in-retrospect-ill-advised plugins to enable fun stuff to work in their browser.

The “everyone hates Flash” stuff came later. It served a purpose for quite a while and people loved it. Newgrounds was a place of magic.

[riffraff]

FYI, just cause I discovered this recently and I was mildly mind blown: newgrounds is alive and kicking with new stuff.

I do miss kongregate tho.

[wredcoll]

I mean, flash was always a pain in the ass, even when you got it working. The animations and games were great and I'm a big fan of stuff that tries to make it easy to publish programs like that, but I was still a teenager when apple announced they weren't supporting it and I was genuinely happy because I was so annoyed using it even on a windows pc.

[josefx]

> Having to install a binary blob from a free-software hostile vendor that wanted a monopoly to load a website was always ridiculous ask.

The entire browser ecosystem started out closed source. Even JavaScript was written to interact with closed source Java Applets.

> Flash was a constant embarassment of RCEs vulns

Browsers still are the goto target for contests like Pwn2own. It is almost like inviting the entire world to run untrusted code on your computer is not a great idea, no matter how many security buzzwords browser makers like to throw arround.

[kstrauser]

> The entire browser ecosystem started out closed source.

That is completely, 100%, untrue and not remotely historically accurate. WorldWideWeb (the first web browser) was public domain. Lynx came out in 1992. Mozilla was open sourced in 1998. There was never a time when the "entire" browser ecosystem was closed source. It certainly didn't start that way.

> Even JavaScript was written to interact with closed source Java Applets.

No, it wasn't. From WP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript):

> Netscape decided to add a programming language to Navigator. They pursued two routes to achieve this: collaborating with Sun Microsystems to embed the Java language, while also hiring Brendan Eich to embed the Scheme language.

> The goal was a "language for the masses", "to help nonprogrammers create dynamic, interactive Web sites". Netscape management soon decided that the best option was for Eich to devise a new language, with syntax similar to Java and less like Scheme or other extant scripting languages.

> [...]

> The choice of the JavaScript name has caused confusion, implying that it is directly related to Java. At the time, the dot-com boom had begun and Java was a popular new language, so Eich considered the JavaScript name a marketing ploy by Netscape.

Some people might have used it for the purpose you claim, but that's not why it was invinted.

[josefx]

> Netscape decided to add a programming language to Navigator. They pursued two routes to achieve this:

And the reason for that two language approach is given in the linked source:

> We aimed to provide a “glue language” for the Web designers and part time programmers who were building Web content from components such as images, plugins, and Java applets. We saw Java as the “component language” used by higher-priced programmers, where the glue programmers—the Web page designers—would assemble components and automate their interactions using [a scripting language].

Earlier sources clearly state that Java was intended as the primary language and JavaScript merely acting as glue.

[mvdtnz]

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]

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]

> 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]

It was never amazing. It was adequate to give creative people a way to work around its many shortcomings and make something cool anyway. The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it.

For all the many reasons people might dislike Apple, they were 100% in the right on this topic. Flash needed to die. It got everyone to collectively push the web standard technologies ahead into something way, way better.

[radley]

> The tech and the implementation was awful, and all credit goes to people who still managed to shine through it.

Sorry, that's simply not true. The tech was ahead of its time. The implementation was intuitive. Only developers and Steve Jobs hated it, because Flash made it way too easy for anyone to make something fun.

[sdenton4]

And yet, there was no html5 newgrounds. The magic of flash was that it gave a space where a music person, an art person, and a programmer could bang something out. The barrier to entry was comically low, which allowed an absolute explosion of content.

Sometimes good products happen despite bad technical foundations.

[steezeburger]

It was definitely amazing, especially as a creator. It's how I learned to program! Actionscript was my first language. The only thing kinda close to the experience now is Processing. There may have been issues with the tech, but it kickstarted so many creative and engineering professional careers. There were so many good apps and games. It had such a rich ecosystem.

[GoblinSlayer]

Still nothing can solidly run arbitrary code from internets, be it flash, java applets, javascript or even webp and web fonts.

[sfn42]

Yeah but we were kids, we didn't give a shit about any of that. Kind of still don't give a shit about any of it tbh. There's security holes in everything anyway.

[drtz]

> 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)?

[srpablo]

> What could an application do with Flash in 2005 that we can't do with a modern web application today

Show me the JavaScript framework (or tool that exports JS) that you can give it to a middle schooler and have them make a cartoon with audio and moving images that they can draw themselves, while responding to user input. Have the exported artifact be consistent across all major operating systems and browsers.

Yeah, Flash was never replaced

[26d0]

https://scratch.mit.edu/

[wccrawford]

https://threejs.org/

[al_borland]

The intro is all code. Flash opened a wysiwyg editor and a timeline.

While I’m sure some exceptional middle schoolers are using threejs, I don’t think this is approachable to the average middle schooler.

[fdgfikgfv]

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.

[eichin]

wasn't some of that smoothness because it ran at a 100hz tick without any way of adapting it (and still running existing code)? That was the complaint I kept hearing from people attempting to make flash on phones viable (this led to ludicrous battery consumption)

[spider-mario]

That’s not at all how I remember it (having used it in the Macromedia Flash 8 era, around 2006 or so). You would set your animation’s framerate and that would determine how often your `onEnterFrame` would run.

[GoblinSlayer]

Framerate was for scripts, animation was interframe.

[spider-mario]

To be clear, by “animation”, I meant the whole SWF document. Do you mean that tweens were decoupled from the document’s framerate?

[steezeburger]

I had that same issue with a Tauri rust app recently. It just ran as fast as it possible could. Made my phone heat up.

[ssl-3]

It could be smooth AF in ways that a video on a service like YouTube never could be.

I didn't get into flash games at all, but I used to watch Flash animations.

Like, for instance, Salad Fingers: https://archive.org/details/flash_salad-fingers

This was intended for a slow 2004-era computer with a 4x3 (probably 1024x768) display, where it worked very well.

But it's not 2004 anymore; things are much faster and screens have gotten a lot bigger. Here in 2026, Salad Fingers renders out fine at higher resolutions, and at different aspect ratios. It works great on my desktop at 1080p, without stretching [and with some probably-unintentional extra content on the sides]. It even works on my pocket supercomputer's 3200x1440 20:9 display.

Vectors are fun, and they scale as technology improves. The lines remain smooth and defined. And with Flash, that's a built-in: An unaltered 22-year-old digital animation still looks crisp.

For contrast, if Salad Fingers had been published on YouTube way back around that time, it would have been in chonky fixed-pixel 320x240. Maybe that would be as good as it would ever get unless it were rendered and uploaded at higher resolutions later.

[dredmorbius]

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]

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

[dredmorbius]

The narrow point I was addressing was the claim "it looked sharper and smoother than even current websites".

SVGA graphics, being vector-based (as the name suggests), are indeed sharp, most notably when scaling up or down, and I've encountered SVGA-based interactive graphics which are reminiscent of Flash-based animations in that specific regard.

Again, I'm not addressing other aspects of these options, and I do very little direct development of this type.

I'm quite familiar with the claims that Flash was attractive to publishers and creators. On the receiving end, I was less impressed. Odd Todd excepted. The proprietary nature (I generally run Linux) and constant security concerns, as well as hiding web content within an inaccessible format (e.g., text couldn't be readily extracted) were all frustrations. I'm also generally not a fan of any animation.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odd_Todd>

[GoblinSlayer]

Modern web allows to disallow text extraction.

[ricardonunez]

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]

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.

[Kaliboy]

There was more unique content/UI in the Flash era.

[preg_match]

This went away not only because flash died, but also as the internet commercialized.

I mean, consider this: McDonald’s used to be fun and colorful. Now every McDonald’s is boring and gray. And, wait, every store is boring and gray! And flash had nothing to do with that.

[bigstrat2003]

But McDonald's has been commercialized since forever, as have those other stores. Something seems to have changed in the culture where businesses only want to offer bland, boring experiences any more. It can't be just the profit motive, because that always existed.

[GoblinSlayer]

What was possible in Flash in 2005 in IE6 on a Duron processor with 32MB RAM is possible today in a gargantuan bloatware browser that eats all your hardware.

[Papazsazsa]

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]

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

Once upon a time this would have been my favorite Flash cartoon series.

“Season one” playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSq76P-lbX8Ws6vgAAC2WhwSu...

[zelphirkalt]

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.

[m104]

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]

But we won't because this isn't something that can be done by consensus or by an ad company.

[kalleboo]

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]

this seems like a huge gap in the market

[fragmede]

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]

Yes compared to vibe coded stuff too. And it costed less money.

[thisislife2]

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]

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.

[m463]

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...

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.

[LeFantome]

You know you can use Ruffle if you really want Flash right?

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]

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]

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]

What about lightspark?

htps://lightspark.github.io

[thisislife2]

Or you can just use PaleMoon browser ( https://www.palemoon.org/ ) and install the original Flash player plug-in in it.

[LooseMarmoset]

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.

[spankibalt]

> "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).