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Wired Remembers the Glory Days of Flash (wired.co.uk) 95

Posted by EditorDavid from the animutations dept.
Wired recently remembered Flash as "the annoying plugin" that transformed the web "into a cacophony of noise, colour, and controversy, presaging the modern web."

They write that its early popularity in the mid-1990s came in part because "Microsoft needed software capable of showing video on their website, MSN.com, then the default homepage of every Internet Explorer user." But Flash allowed anyone to become an animator. (One Disney artist tells them that Flash could do in three days what would take a professional animator 7 months -- and cost $10,000.)

Their article opens in 2008, a golden age when Flash was installed on 98% of desktops -- then looks back on its impact: The online world Flash entered was largely static. Blinking GIFs delivered the majority of online movement. Constructed in early HTML and CSS, websites lifted clumsily from the metaphors of magazine design: boxy and grid-like, they sported borders and sidebars and little clickable numbers to flick through their pages (the horror).

Flash changed all that. It transformed the look of the web...

Some of these websites were, to put it succinctly, absolute trash. Flash was applied enthusiastically and inappropriately. The gratuitous animation of restaurant websites was particularly grievous -- kitsch abominations, these could feature thumping bass music and teleporting ingredients. Ishkur's 'guide to electronic music' is a notable example from the era you can still view -- a chaos of pop arty lines and bubbles and audio samples, it looks like the mind map of a naughty child...

In contrast to the web's modern, business-like aesthetic, there is something bizarre, almost sentimental, about billion-dollar multinationals producing websites in line with Flash's worst excess: long loading times, gaudy cartoonish graphics, intrusive sound and incomprehensible purpose... "Back in 2007, you could be making Flash games and actually be making a living," remembers Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp, when asked about Flash's golden age. "That was a really fun time, because that's kind of what everyone's dream is: to make the games you want and be able to make a living off it."
Wired summarizes Steve Jobs' "brutally candid" diatribe against Flash in 2010. "Flash drained batteries. It ran slow. It was a security nightmare. He asserted that an era had come to an end... '[T]he mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards -- all areas where Flash falls short.'" Wired also argues that "It was economically viable for him to rubbish Flash -- he wanted to encourage people to create native games for iOS."

But they also write that today, "The post-Flash internet looks different. The software's downfall precipitated the rise of a new aesthetic...one moulded by the specifications of the smartphone and the growth of social media," favoring hits of information rather than striving for more immersive, movie-emulating thrills.

And they add that though Newgrounds long-ago moved away from Flash, the site's founder is now working on a Flash emulator to keep all that early classic content playable in a browser.
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Wired Remembers the Glory Days of Flash More

Wired Remembers the Glory Days of Flash

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  • People are getting nostalgic for flash? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by nitehawk214 ( 222219 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @08:38PM (#59304346)

    Seriously, fuck off.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @08:44PM (#59304350)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:People are getting nostalgic for flash? (Score:4, Informative)

        by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @09:05PM (#59304376)

        I have every setting on every instance of Firefox and Chrome I have to disable autoplaying videos, and they still fucking autoplay.

        Interesting. Because I never see autoplaying video on my Firefox. Unless I deliberately enable it for a particular page....

      • So things still flash and swirl, now in JavaScript. But you cannot turn it off (if you want to actually use any modern web site.)

        Flash was much easier to develop in than HTML 5.

        • So things still flash and swirl, now in JavaScript. But you cannot turn it off (if you want to actually use any modern web site.)

          Yes [github.com], you [noscript.net] can [mozilla.org].

          Ha, yes. I forgot. Chrome doesn't allow extensions on its mobile version, so you'll have to switch to Firefox Mobile.
          (Also NoScript requires extensions to the WebExtension standard so it only works with Firefox, not Chrome).

        • "So things still flash and swirl, now in JavaScript. But you cannot turn it off (if you want to actually use any modern web site.)"

          Ahah ! False dichotomy ! You cannot actually use a modern website even with Javascript turned on as the modern web designers have industriously scattered and buried any useful information that you are using the website to obtain.

      • This is why I really hate flash's death. FlashBlock extension and all that crap was gone. Flash put the trash in a trash can, all I had to do was pop a lid on it. Now the trash is spread all over the page.

    • the games and movies need to be saved (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @08:44PM (#59304352)

      the games and movies need to be saved

      • OG tower defense!

        And all the timing-click games like a yeti throwing a penguin, or hitting one with a bat.

        I loved how you could save the singular flash file and serve it locally in an object tag. Much more difficult with JS games these days.

        Flash enabled creativity more easily than the JS frameworks of today, but the long-term web is better off without it.

        • Much more difficult with JS games these days.
          Flash enabled creativity more easily than the JS frameworks of today,

          If that is the kind of "creativity" you're looking at (making shit on the interwebs with the least amount of clicks),
          the modern javascript is "enabling" way many more web "designers" to be "creative" nowadays, exactly thanks to the over-proliferation of numerous JS Frameworks of which every single webpages nowadays seem to need to pull at least a dozen - the exact same reason why you can't usually serve a javascript game from a single object.

          • Some people have more creative than technical ability .....

            https://www.newgrounds.com/por... [newgrounds.com]

          • And this is real annoying. Even with a blocker installed, sites like Arstechnica still tries to download frameworks from dosens of sites. And I am filtering based on partial text that a URL contains. I have to use a blocker because I am often using my limited tethering data, and I am getting my data wasted on shit that I don't want and does not benefit me whatsoever. I decided to say screw it and thus Ars does not get much use by me these days. God I remember when people were complaining about ads which we

          • I think we are making a similar point about the difficulties of javascript. It's the oppositeof trivial to make a simple game. Whereas with Flash, an amateur could create something compelling, or fun, or terrible.

            With JS it's almost all terrible for amateurs, while only pros can make something pleasant.

            The security model of flash was atrocious, but the privacy implications in JS are very similar.

    • You may not be here in the future, but Amishguy2006 is!

      https://everyoneishereinthefut... [everyoneis...future.com]

      MEDICAL WARNING: FLASHING LIGHTS

    • Nah. Just for the good old times where you could create ad revenue from a website with nothing on but the Hampster Dance. Or Badger Badger Badger...

    • Seriously, fuck off.

      No, you! :D

      Not even kidding, there were of course some security and annoyance issues (especially it seems in the later years), but it also broke a new grounds, so to speak.

      Flash got web video finally working decently without a million incompatible plugins and codecs. You could make legitimately fun web games and animations before canvas even existed. As well as "cloud" apps before that was a thing either.

      Most of this can now be done better of course, but at the time I think it was a net benefit for the onli

  • Flash was/is a badly written software, full of security holes, aimed at filling the need of a "video" feature for MS. So, why would we need Flash, today?

  • Same old thing (Score:3)

    by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @08:49PM (#59304358)
    I wrote some Flash apps back in the day. Now I would use React. It's pretty much the same to me.

    • And I would block you just the same. Get rid of your addiction to executing your and untrustworthy third-parties code on my computer. You will not be permitted to do so. And because you will not be permitted to do so, if you had anything of worth to say, then neither I nor anyone else who prohibits unfettered remote code execution will ever see it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        Say someone made a web-based chat application. Would you prefer to have to press Ctrl+R every ten seconds to see if anyone else said anything in a channel?

        • I would prefer to have a native chat client that uses my deskop's GUI toolkit, and was signed by the developer so we know what's running it exactly what they published... but that's hard for server operators to monetize.

          • I would prefer to have a native chat client that uses my deskop's GUI toolkit

            Which GUI toolkit might that be? And after each website asks you to install its chat client, how many are you likely to keep installed?

            To put it another way: Say the developer of a chat client distributes its source code to the public under a free software license, but it relies on the Cocoa GUI toolkit. I'm interested to see how you would go about compiling, linking, and executing a Cocoa application on anything but a Mac, iPhone, or iPad.

            and was signed by the developer so we know what's running it exactly what they published

            Websites already do this with the JavaScript that they host. Your HT

            • "Which GUI toolkit might that be? And after each website asks you to install its chat client, how many are you likely to keep installed?"

              The answer is ZERO. ZERO will be installed and ZERO will therefore remain installed. I will not be installing a "chat client" that a website asks me to install. If they wish to communicate with me they can use the telephone or e-mail. Otherwise, they can fuck off!

              • If they wish to communicate with me they can use the telephone

                Feel free to pay an extortionate toll per minute to your phone company for things like conference calling and international calling.

                or e-mail.

                E-mail is an option, but it is asynchronous. If you desire a reply in a minute rather than an hour, such as to assist in troubleshooting a problem in front of you before you leave work for the day, mail isn't really designed for that use case because of delays introduced by greylisting [wikipedia.org]. Greylisting is an antispam measure that sorts desired mail from abuse based on desired mail

            • And after each website asks you to install its chat client, how many are you likely to keep installed?

              Why does each site need its own chat client? I want one client on MacOS, one on KDE, one on Android and so on, all on a common network - like Matrix/Riot, but finished.

              Websites already do this with the JavaScript that they host.

              And some javascript they don't host, but sign anyway. When The Web has a better answer to ad-delivered malware than "*shrug* we don't control the ad network", we can talk about webapps delivered over HTTPS being equivalent to signed software packages.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by tepples ( 727027 )

                Why does each site need its own chat client? I want one client on MacOS, one on KDE, one on Android and so on, all on a common network - like Matrix/Riot, but finished.

                Because each service has different ideas on what features to add to call it "finished." Even if all services agreed on a baseline protocol, such as IRC, XMPP, or Matrix, you'd still need to use service-specific clients in order to use extensions to the base protocol implemented by that service. For example, one service may support an online whiteboard, another may support attaching a file to a message, and another may support adding an emoji as a reaction to a message.

                When The Web has a better answer to ad-delivered malware than "*shrug* we don't control the ad network", we can talk about webapps delivered over HTTPS being equivalent to signed software packages.

                One possible policy is to allow an HTML

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by beernutz ( 16190 )
        It's possible you dont realize it, but React is just Javascript. Nothing happening with unfettered remote code execution or plugins.

        • JavaScript is executable code. React is a pile of shit written in JavaScript that is downloaded from an unknown and untrustworthy third party that seeks to execute on my computer. JavaScript is turned off for exactly that reason, in order to prevent code from unknown and untrustworthy third-parties from executing on my computer. If they want to execute some code, buy your own bloody computer.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tepples ( 727027 )

            JavaScript is executable code.

            Native code is also executable code.

            React is a pile of shit written in JavaScript that is downloaded from an unknown and untrustworthy third party that seeks to execute on my computer.

            The downloadable native client for popular chat services, such as Skype, Slack, or Discord, is also a pile of shit written in JavaScript that is downloaded from an unknown and untrustworthy third party that seeks to execute on my computer.

            If they want to execute some code, buy your own bloody computer.

            This could easily be misunderstood as claiming that you would prefer to buy a separate computer from the publisher of each networked application on which to run the native client for that application. Could you clarify?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by doom ( 14564 )

              Could you clarify?

              Yeah. Do you enjoy being used for someone else's bitcoin mining operation?

              Do you enjoy having every website shove a javascript popup window in your face?

              Please stop telling us how wonderful the World Wide Javascript is.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by tepples ( 727027 )

                Do you enjoy "Sorry! This application is not available for your computer." when you attempt to download a native application?

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by doom ( 14564 )

                  I run linux, I install things with Apt. I know what's in the repo when I install-- which is the entire universe of free software.

                  Do I enjoy living with out your "Apps"? Yeah, actually I do.

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by tepples ( 727027 )

                    I run linux, I install things with Apt.

                    Let me rephrase: Do you enjoy E: Unable to locate package <name of app> because the client side of a particular network application isn't packaged in your distribution's repository?

                    I know what's in the repo when I install-- which is the entire universe of free software.

                    I know of several free applications that are not yet packaged in the default repositories of Debian or Ubuntu. What repositories am I probably missing? I also know of several nonfree applications required to do my job.

  • truly odd nostalgia (Score:3)

    by zephvark ( 1812804 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @08:51PM (#59304360)

    ...for something that was always irretrievably broken and indeed a security nightmare. Adobe never has figured out how to fix that nightmarish mess of code. I'm going with the assumption that they could, at least briefly, afford a few decent programmers, but either they didn't or the programmers fled in horror. No amount of bug fixes ever seemed to get close to fixing the problems.

    It should have been rewritten from scratch years ago but, I don't see it as being missed much. A key error was trying to fix the existing code, which apparently just isn't remotely possible.

    • Really to me until winblaster very few people took security seriously and so things like flash, who cared. People wrote viruses but most did nothing but send emails to all your contacts. I can remember our whole company shutting down because of winblaster, my computer was still fine as I had the RPC port blocked by a personal firewall but we had to all basically leave and wait for IT to scramble around and look important trying to solve the issue. Really to me that was the day when companies started to take

    • Flash cannot be fixed because it is designed on an ill-conceived premise. In order to "fix" it you need to get rid of that premise, and as soon as you do that, there is nothing left at all. I am not, however, surprised at how long it took to die. I predict that by 2025 there will be a movement afoot to get rid of JavaScript (and all code) executing in the Web Browser (since it is an inherently flawed, insecure, and ill-conceived concept), and that by 2030 JavaScript will suffer the same death as Flash, b

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        In your opinion, what ought to replace JavaScript for networked applications?

        A. Running the entire application on the server and having clients view it through a remote desktop protocol, such as Microsoft RDP or VNC RFB
        B. Distributing the client side of each application as an executable for each combination of architecture and GUI library and requiring each user to download and install it, if it's even ported to the user's operating system
        C. Distributing the client side of each application as source code un

        • "what ought to replace JavaScript for networked applications"

          Absolutely nothing. The only thing which should pass between the client and the server is data. Pure unexecutable data. Like used to exist BEFORE all this JavaScript crap. If the client is a Browser, then it should be sent the page to display and send back the input collected to the server. The server processes the data and returns another page to display. Lather, rinse, repeat.

          JavaScript execution in the browser only exists so that stupid d

          • The only thing which should pass between the client and the server is data. Pure unexecutable data.

            Then how should each networked application's client get loaded onto the user's computer in the first place?

            If the client is a Browser, then it should be sent the page to display and send back the input collected to the server. The server processes the data and returns another page to display.

            Say you wanted to make a networked application that allows one or more users to draw on a whiteboard. HTML forms support a click position input (sometimes called a server-side image map) but not a drag path input. This means that in order to draw on the image, the user would have to click each point on the curve to form a polyline or Hermite spline, causing the server to have to resend the entire image

  • How about a story about Flashâ(TM)s predecessor? Director and Shockwave.

    • Re:Director? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @09:46PM (#59304446)

      Kids today can't imagine a world where flash is the lesser evil, but back in the Olden Times that's really how life was.

      There was once a really good "internet radio" interview (that's what a podcast was called back then) with Larry Wall, where he mentioned Ruby. It was the first time I'd heard of it. But it was only distributed as a RealMedia file, and so nobody archived it and it got thrown away with the last of the RealMedia browser plugins.

      • Anti-DRM day recently - how long until modern podcasts are in some irretrievable format like RealMedia? I guess they might stay open, but full of ads?

        • What the fuck is a podcast? Do you mean an audio file? A video file?

          Ah, Invasion of the Body Snatchers -- the aliens used a podcast ...

          • I'd define a "podcast" as a web feed (h-feed, Atom, RSS, etc.) linking to audio files (Opus, MP3, etc.), each holding one episode of a program structured similarly to talk radio.

            • Ah. A Web Page with a bunch of files linked. Why the cutesy name? Why not call it a Dockenshugger? It is equally descriptive.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by tepples ( 727027 )

                Ah. A Web Page with a bunch of files linked.

                Web feeds are more structured than the average HTML document in order to allow programmatic download of new episodes.

                Why the cutesy name?

                Blend of "Apple iPod [or other digital audio player]" and "broadcast".

          • The name "podcast" is stupid, but the listening world is open to suggestions!

            We used to call them "radio download", but it wasn't radio. Or "mp3 program" but it wasn't always mp3 encoded.

      • Realmedia....ugh! I'm glad that one is dead, but like a zombie it refuses to die as there are at least a couple sites still using RM.

  • Flash wasnâ(TM)t ALL that bad... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by PFritz21 ( 766949 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @09:02PM (#59304374) Homepage Journal
    Three words for you: âoeStrong Bad E-mailsâ. Sure the method of delivery may have been terrible, but the content was some of the best the internet had to offer in 2002-2004.

  • Pros and cons (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @09:25PM (#59304410) Journal

    The cons are well known. But there were pros.

    It was easy to develop with.

    It used ActionScript (essentially JavaScript-ish) for programing, but really you could do lots of interactivity without programing at all (or, if you prefer to see it that way, with a truly non-"verbal" high level programming interface).

    It solved the problem of browser incompatibilities, which was a MUCH bigger problem at the time than it is now.

    For anything of any complexity, that little devil would appear on your shoulder whispering "or, you could just use Flash ...". and there were reasons that it was tempting.

    • I actually still have some flash animations that are real animations written by programming sprites, not just embedded videos.

      In the beginning, flash wasn't even usually used for embedded videos because the internet was still too slow, as were most computers.

      But these days there are better animation tools, freely available.

      What really sucked IMO was the post-dot com, pre-standardization period when companies were using flash applications in place of having real websites. More common in some industries than

    • The other pro was that it was so much better than the alternative at the time: java applets.
  • ... is eventually exploited by malware. With the resulting diminishing of popularity. Except Windows. Why doesn't this apply to Windows? Why do corporations still embrace the malware world of Windows?

  • Original Flash was way ahead of the history (Score:5, Informative)

    by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @10:26PM (#59304510)
    The original Flash was way ahead of the history. It allowed smooth anti-aliased animation on 166MHz Pentium CPUs, which is not an easy feat at all.

    In part it was helped by its ingenious architecture, so called "modern" animation frameworks simply model the scene as a set of polygons and lines. They lose all the information about adjacency, so you need very precise floating point math to avoid tearing. In contrast, Flash used a model of a plane divided into adjacent polygons, so that the Flash renderer always knows exactly what lies on either side of a line. So it was able to do high-quality rendering with simple fixed-point integer math.
    • Can you elaborate on this or provide me with some references? I never got into authoring Flash animations, but your comment has piqued my interest in the format and optimizations involved.

  • Machinarium (Score:3)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Sunday October 13, 2019 @10:51PM (#59304536)

    When flash dies, Machinarium, one of the most charming games I've ever played and which is still on my Win 10 system to this day (haven't tried it anytime lately) will die with it.
    And that will be a true loss to computer gaming.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by _merlin ( 160982 )

      Machinarium came with an embedded Adobe AIR runtime, so it's not dependent on the Flash browser plugin. Newer versions of it have been re-made with some other toolkit not using Flash at all. If you update it on steam you'll get the new non-Flash version.

  • To me Flash was the modern evolution of Hypercard, a multimedia system that Apple released on old Macs.

    Yes, it was abused for ads and malware, and HTML5 video replaces a lot of the need for it.
    But it had the niche of delivering self-contained programs (like a PDF) that could run across machines.
    One could say it was like Java applets in that respect, but Java did not come with authoring tools that made it much easier to learn.

    It's sad that there isn't anything quite like it for game development backed by a c

  • Hook, line, & sinker (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Monday October 14, 2019 @12:26AM (#59304674)

    I was astonished how almost everyone immediately accepted Steve Jobs' criticisms of Flash completely uncritically. I guess that was the effect of his infamous negative reality field, known outside the Apple-fan cult as bullshitting, i.e. saying stuff for the effect & not caring whether it's true or not.

    Love or hate it, Flash was less of a security risk than Javascript & PDFs. In fact, it was a long way down the list of threats published by most web security companies. Also, Jobs didn't seem to mind Flash on his iOS platform when it was distributed through his App Store. Back in the day, many of the most popular iOS games were Flash, packaged as Adobe Air & pushed through the App Store. As long as Jobs got his 30% cut, he didn't seem to care.

    Many of the popular JS libraries for animation, 2D & 3D modelling, audio & video recording & playback, etc. were ported over from Flash libraries & web conferencing service providers are now frantically playing catch-up to try & get HTML5+JS+CSS to do the things that are so easy with Flash+RTMP.

    Despite the horrifyingly inappropriate uses for it & some truly awful design, Flash is an incredibly effective & easy to use platform for developing interactive, multimedia web apps. It's a shame that it was prevented from evolving into a free & open source browser-based platform & a potential replacement for JS (Yep, that's the way it was heading at the time). Flash's ActionScript 3.0 is a more mature & fully featured scripting language than JS, especially for OOP.

    It's a shame :(

    • To be fair to both you and the late Jobs, Flash on desktop was NOT flash on mobile. By the time the iPhone was released, Adobe had already been treating Flash like crap. The mobile ports of Flash were late to the party and horribly inefficient. Desktop Flash relied on fast CPUs and gobs of RAM, two things mobiles REALLY didn't have. I'm not saying Flash was bad, rather people were abusing it and doing it all wrong.
      Plus this was the time in history when the years of neglect were showing. Buffer overflows ha

    • I was astonished how almost everyone immediately accepted Steve Jobs' criticisms of Flash completely uncritically.

      Ok what criticism of Flash do you deem untrue? But let’s look at his specific criticisms then.

      1. Flash is proprietary. This is 100% true. Having a proprietary format isn’t the problem; having one that is required for web is another issue.
      2. Flash is the “full web” but only if you have it. And most of it was used to deliver video when other formats are available.
      3. Security, reliability, and performance. These are all true. Yes other platforms have security problems but at the time Flash was

      • The Flash wasn’t designed for touch. Again, completely true. It was designed for mice using rollovers to access functions. Could Flash change. Sure but it would be a while.

        Nor was JavaScript designed for touch. It was designed for mice using onmouseover and onmouseout to access functions. It took a while for JavaScript to change, and it would probably have taken exactly as long for Flash to change.

        There are numerous problems with relying on a 3rd party platform for app development including control.

        Some of which Richard Stallman described in his essay "Free but Shackled - The Java Trap". It is just as true of iOS, as Apple represents a third party in an interaction between a user and an application provider.

        • How long did it take for Flash to change this design? From what I remember by the time they did it, it was already irrelevant. And it was only one of the problems of Flash. As Jobs stated, they waited years for Adobe to release a version of Flash that addressed all the shortcomings then finally gave up.

    • "I was astonished how almost everyone immediately accepted Steve Jobs' criticisms of Flash completely uncritically. ...
      Love or hate it, Flash was less of a security risk than Javascript & PDFs."

      The reason that Steve Jobs' criticisms of Flash where accepted is because they were all absolutely true. Anything which purports to be DATA but is really a method of sneaking in executable code is a security risk. PDFs used to be safe, but then they became more than simply DATA and allowed the embedding of exec

  • .. Now that's out of the way, I'm glad people are preserving the games as there were some very good ones. Some of these were also meant to be very short lived, created to promote a product, but the game play was still solid.

    I checked out http://bluemaxima.org/flashpoi... [bluemaxima.org] and the 'full package' weighs in at 178GB for the DL. Yikes! The 'download as you go' is a more manageable 200MB initial, but I hope somebody is mirroring all of this because websites have a very nasty tendency to suddenly vanish,

  • You call it Flash, I call it total job security.

    --Your IT security department

  • So a plugin in a browser that allows you to run flash blobs...

    Errm, I think thats called a Flash plugin!

  • The cartoons were good (Score:3)

    by johnsie ( 1158363 ) on Monday October 14, 2019 @07:31AM (#59305202)
    The cartoons were good. Flash websites sucked though.

  • Nothing of value was lost.

  • Other than the fact a Flash web site let you ensure your graphics would look the same on any platform/browser combo, it really was a technology better left to die.

    As the Slashdot summary alludes to; the era of Flash development meant a bunch of people trying to morph web pages into graphically-heavy interactive cartoons or paintings of sorts. A lot of data had to be downloaded to draw all the "fluff" for a screen that might only be communicating that you could select from 3 or 4 menu items. The trend really

    • But none of this was impossible to do as a stand alone executable app for a computer.

      What architecture and file format does "a stand alone executable app for a computer" use? And to what GUI library does it link? Java, Flash, and HTML5 with JavaScript at least ran on Windows, macOS, and X11/Linux, as opposed to "Sorry! This application is not available for your operating system."

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by King_TJ ( 85913 )

        Sure ... but chasing cross-platform compatibility was always an immediate and big compromise vs writing the app to run natively on each platform you wished to support. (At the end of the day, only 2 really mattered in most cases; Mac or Windows formats. You could do a Linux version too if you so desired.)

  • https://www.wired.com/2015/07/... [wired.com] actually HTML5 + SVG is starting to match what flash did: https://www.genolve.com/svg/en... [genolve.com]

  • Flash? That flash?

    The crap held back the Internet a decade, broke standards, forced us into the terrible JS as the only viable alternative, held back development of HTML5 and SVG and getting rid of it was like finally, after decades of taking the shit, leaving an abusive marriage.

    Mourning flash is an open-and-shut case of Stockholm syndrome.

  • Newgrounds was groundbreaking in the 90s. It predates even Slashdot.

    A little site with a few Flash games and animations made by Tom Fulp gradually turned into something huge and mostly generated by users, who submitted their own work to "The Portal". An excellent early example of a voting and comment system ensured that the best creations made it to the top.

    I'm too old for Newgrounds now, but there appears to still be a vibrant community there.

    https://www.newgrounds.com/ [newgrounds.com]

  • I can't believe I'm posting this, but thanks for the link. :)

  • I shed no tears for the demise of Flash as it was woefully abused by marketing. I hated websites that were bloated with Flash animation and did not offer a non-Flash entry point. I especially hated trying to read an article then an animated Flash ad blocks the content. Both those would land the websites on my banned list.

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