> instead of learning more about CSS- and SVG-based animations
Contrarian opinion: Flash was one of the best things about Web 1.0.
The forced move to CSS and the constellation of other "standards" still hasn't caught up to what Flash once offered us.
Flash was all at once a video format, animation format, programming environment, video player, interactive UI system, game programming engine, multiplayer MMO game dev engine, infographics system -- actually, it was literally everything you wanted it to be. And it was so simple that even kids could use it.
If Adobe had opened everything - the format, the player, etc. - it could have become something tremendous that is still with us.
I think there's space for this to be rethought and redone. We shouldn't be so dogmatic that CSS and SVG and HTML and Javascript are the only way. They've had nearly 40 years to shine and we're still struggling with the same issues.
We should be trying to reinvent the wheel.
And not just that, it was downloadable. This was huge for me then and even PWAs haven’t caught up (though admittedly are more mutable). It was so nice to be able to download 90% of a webapp for offline use and have it be portable across all my systems as a file. Only JAR files come close nowadays but there’s not really an ecosystem behind that
MPEG-4 was supposed to be the solution, and was quite the bandwagon around 2001 or so. But for whatever reason, the momentum petered out and here we are with a retrograde mess two decades later.
Here for Team Flash. That was an incredible era during its peak. Apple brought on its demise not because it wasn’t competition and Steve Jobs penned the famous criticism which marked the downfall. Flash was ahead of its time.
Steve put the nail in the coffin but the downfall started and was primarily caused by Macromedia being purchased by Adobe, IMHO. All the problems of Flash were solvable had it continued to been driven by a team and leadership that understood and cared about product quality. IMO this is one of the clearest cases of tech acquisition making the world worse.
Flash was great but it was from an era that brought a ton of baggage that wouldn’t have scaled without a full rethink.
From energy use, to security and accessibility, it was very problematic.
We need a long documentary about that era. We had video, audio, animation in a web app without the friction of the Netscape browser. There was a burgeoning ecosystem of content producers. Major networks were broadcasting news live in Flash. There was also RealNetworks with real-time audio streaming. This was in late 90’s early 00’s. It was exciting, then http-based everything took over and it felt like media took a ten-year step backwards.
I've worked with RealNetworks tech in the 90s and think it is much better now with open source techology and HLS.
I think you’re viewing that era with significantly rose tinted glasses.
Yes, people were using that Flash for that but it came at a great expense. Flash was a massive battery drain, and to get better performance it required punching massive security holes in the browsers.
Flash is only really great as a content creator/developer who doesn’t care about the specifics of delivery.
But it would have phased out anyway regardless of the iPhone. HLS would have killed it for streaming video, advancing JavaScript and web standards would have killed it for more advanced websites.
The only thing we took a step back on was web game delivery.
Eh. I was on dialup in the age you describe and none of that stuff ever worked for me anyway, even for low-bitrate radio the jitter was a killer. HTTP as transport coincided with wide democratization of access, and I don't think that is at all coincidental; by the time bandwidth penetration made broad access to packet-switched ~realtime (ie broadcast equivalent) streaming feasible, HTTP had achieved the required penetration to represent a local minimum.
Flash was one of those things that tried to do too much, and some of its things started being at cross-purposes with each other. The video conflicted with its roots as a vector/animation studio, and that's why Apple famously didn't use it - it ended up being a battery hog.
A lot of interests in web-based video wanted DRM, which meant it was never going to be usable by Free Software.
It was trying to do too much and then the usual corporate mismanagement led to its demise.
Apple famously didn't use it because it didn't sit inside their walled garden and they couldn't put any ads in it, take a cut of every sale, nor charge developers annually for the privilege of building on their property. That's 3 revenue sources that users and developers were skipping out on.
Android phones had Flash support and it worked well enough. Was it desktop-level, of course not. But Android native apps themselves were a mess from a power consumption standpoint until they implemented a JIT compiler in v2.3 "Gingerbread" as well as a task manager that freed up RAM by closing inactive applications. I remember specifically choosing an ASUS android tablet over an iPad because I wanted to use the full web, open multiple tabs at a time and play Flash games, rather than deal with iOS' "one app open at a time" philosophy.
Apple famously included a web browser on the iPhone, which puts a hole in your theory.
The Internet of 2007 was more than Flash, so of course it had a web browser. It was designed to compete with Nokia, Blackberry and Windows Mobile, all of which had web browsers. The App Store didn't even exist before the second iPhone model came out in 2008.
> We should be trying to reinvent the wheel
Especially now as web browser vendors are openly trying to get you off the web and into their walled gardens. Apple and Google have no interest in pushing web capabilities forward because they don't see any money from doing that. Mozilla has long since given up, they don't even support "save to homescreen"/"save as web app" functionality.
100%!
We're about to enter into a "post-web" era if the tech giants get their way. Smartphones were the first attempt to redefine and capture computing (and are an area where we desperately need antitrust enforcement). Now we'll see AI search and AI chat attempt to circumvent people from finding and using websites.
Mozilla has been rudderless for a decade. They're not going to fix this. The leadership is collecting paychecks being Google's monopoly sponge - distracting the DOJ from antitrust action and refusing to actually innovate in the places that matter.
Search needs to be reigned in. Mobile needs to be reigned in. The coming era of AI chat and search will probably also need a regulatory framework to prevent just a handful of tech companies from owning everything they touch.
Well, that's a part of the problem — it was controlled by a corporation which didn't have any interest in opening it. Therefore it has been excised from the Web.
Same goes for Java applets.
It's always politics.
Ruffle exists: https://ruffle.rs/downloads#website-package
Ruffle is great! But there's no great, well-maintained tool to author SWF files.
Unfortunately doing that many things means the codebase must have been rather big. Big enough that auditing and removing licensed code (for instance, the video codecs) seems to be more than they had the stomach for.
It really was a wonderful tool that is still unmatched for creative coding.
How is the modern JS control of DOM elements styled with CSS not the same as ActionScript and Flash sprites. I'd argue that Flash was not a video format. It could play videos encoded in specific codecs, but that's not the same as being a video format. At the end you could wrap MP4 encoded video as an FLV, but that was just a wrapper not a format.
At this point, the only think I see being Flash was the app with its timeline to make the animations visually instead of just with code. I've seen plenty of Show HNs of various apps attempting he animation UI similar to Flash, so I know they are out there. I just have no need for that type of work, so I don't spend too much time with them.
> How is the modern JS control of DOM elements styled with CSS not the same as ActionScript and Flash sprites.
Because DOM is not sprites. Because everything in DOM is laid out with relation to each other, and as you as much as look at it funny, it will cause a full re-paint and re-flow of the entire page. Because animations are bolted on to CSS/DOM after the fact, and the vast majority them are insanely resource-intensive
if you're trying to emulate a Flash element, why would you use CSS relative positioning and not define the position:absolute, at least for the element being used as the stage. That would turn any of the child elements much more sprite-like
You might be interested in this document submitted to HN, by the creator of the HTML 5 spec: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612696
> The forced move to CSS and the constellation of other "standards" still hasn't caught up to what Flash once offered us.
Hard disagree. Modern web apps can be amazing within the browser alone. Look at Figma or OnShape as class leading examples.
I think you’re also misunderstanding Lottie: For web use it is compiled down to those browser primitives you were talking about. It works well, too, so I don’t understand why you’re claiming we’re “still struggling”.
> so I don’t understand why you’re claiming we’re “still struggling”.
Because we are.
If you've ever used Flash, you know how easy and accessible it is to create.
The results were 100% portable and even downloadable. You could treat flash files like gifs or pngs.
The web document standards don't work that magically. They have never lived up to what you once could do.
> For web use it is compiled down to those browser primitives you were talking about.
Gross. I want a single, self-contained file that I can open on my computer without having to open a browser. Not an assortment of JavaScripts and css files.
Anything can be a "standard". The web standards are way too big. And they've accumulated decades of baggage.
Didn't you need proprietary flash player to play your flash file? I would rather run my animation/app/game in a browser than install something like that again.
The problem, as I see it, is that the Flash editing environment doesn't have a widely-accepted descendant, and the person you're responding to is right - there's not really a contemporary editor that is as easy - and more importantly: as potentially deep (as it was also shallow) - for non-techies to pick up and work with.
There are plenty of options today for technically-minded or 'computer people' to work with, but there's a dearth of options for the 'merely' creative to play around with and investigate.
A lot of the magic from the 'old' (mid?) web came from people who had very little initial interest in the technical nature of the solution from just going ahead and making Cool Shit™ anyway. Some of those people might then relish getting their hands grubbier and delving deeper into the technical guts (eg. Praystation et al).
- ed : for the record, at the time i was also critical of the proprietary nature of Flash.
I was a "flash developer" for some time around 2005, but the Flash environment (what was it called, Macromedia Flash?) never really "clicked" for me. I was able to put together some interactive visualizations and even little games, but it was not simple for me. That changed when Adobe Flex and ActionScript came along. That's where I felt right at home. But I'm fully aware Flash made much more sense for others than it did for me.
It needed a browser plugin, but as a developer you just needed to reference it in your object/embed tag. It wasn't something you needed to handle yourself. Most people had it installed already anyway.
Funny that you mention Figma because they literally built their own browser around the browser with C++, Rust and WASM because the current browser situation was untenable to the types of applications they wanted to make.
> within the browser alone
What do you mean by that? My understanding of the above suggestion is that the author dreamed of a world where something like flash would have become the standard, so part of the browser, without the (proprietary) extension.