[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.