In 2007 flash could run 3d games, do shaders, have multiplayer, run physics manipulation, have 3d sound, do bitmap manipulation, socket programming, and had documentation built into the editor.
Even now html/J's can't do all of the things and most of the things that you can do, are not as fast. While browsers are stuck with legacies to uphold. Flash had no dom to worry about, untyped language (as3) or had css holding it back.
General argument was flash sucks because people make terrible content with it. Which is like saying I hate having hands because I trip things over.. so no limbs = no mess PERFECT.
In turn I think it helped push native apps. Since plain Js/html app just sucked in comparison when it comes to experience and capabilities.
Flash should have been open sourced. Hopefully with webgl and web assembly someone can step in and create something similar
Up until a few years ago I was a full time Flash developer, working in ActionScript3 which is a strictly typed, fully OO language which conforms completely with the 4th edition of ECMAScript. I used a great IDE (FlashBuilder) that had full code introspection, static analysis, amazing auto-complete and all sorts of great features built in. Unit testing was not uncommon, as was continuous integration, automated build processes and version control. I, and many others, were doing "real" programming on the Flash platform and felt totally understood as a developer by Adobe.
I'm not going to defend Flash's continued relevance on the web because like most people I think it's had its day but from about 2003 to 2010 the Flash developer community was massive and thriving, people were doing serious programming and Adobe was doing a pretty good job of understanding them and supporting them. It's this wealth of experience that I hope Adobe brings to bear on its HTML5 developer tools.
I feel like the relevance of Flash (and Adobe) is really quite poorly understood. A lot of the expertise and good practises from the more serious elements of the Flash community flooded into the JavaScript community and I feel this is one of the reasons JavaScript has developed so quickly. What's more, a lot of the "web2.0" style dynamic and interactive elements of websites that we take for granted now are watered down (and much better) versions of ideas that were conceived during those frenzied years of UI experimentation in the Flash community.
Granted those years of Flash threw up some UI abominations, but it was also a melting pot of ideas and creativity, the like of which we don't really see anymore, which is a shame in a way. Even though Flash was my livelihood I was happy to move on because I could see it was for the best, but if you ignore Flash your understanding of the last 10 years and the current context of web development is impoverished.
I actually think Flash is not entirely bad, it just does not really belong in browsers. As self-contained apps, Flash applications are pretty cool - they are fun and easy to program (at least AS3 - AS2 sucks), and I often use it as tool for rapid-prototyping little algorithms. Trying to put Flash into browsers though is like putting a sandbox inside another sandbox - it just gets in the way and impossible to effectively interface the two.
HTML5 is fine. The problem is the lack of tooling. That's what's letting me down as a user, designer, creative person. Not the web, the lack of tools.
But HTML5 can not fix that problem. Only the games industry can fix that problem. HTML5 is never going to be a game creation IDE, it's just an API and a set of technologies. Companies like Epic, Adobe, Unity, etc... have to step in and develop game IDEs that are comparable to Flash.
And they just haven't. I don't know why they haven't, people should ask them that question.
There's this idea that web advocates don't understand that web tooling for games is bad, and that's just not the case. As web advocates we do understand the problem, but Mozilla is not in a realistic position to build everyone a game engine. It's not something that browser-manufactures can do. It's something the games industry has to decide to tackle. Calling out the web is counterproductive, we are doing everything that we can do to help with replacing Flash.
> Again, if Flash no longer provide any value to Adobe, may be they could open source it?
That would be great, but I wouldn't bet on it. The hope was originally that Adobe would migrate Flash to HTML5 canvas output. They never did until Flash was mostly dead, and from everything I've heard their new engines are kind of terrible to work with anyway.
The secondary hope was that they'd Open Source Flash, or at least help with emulating SWFs so people could continue to use old versions of Flash to publish to the web. That never happened either because... I don't know why. Maybe licensing issues, maybe Adobe just doesn't care about anyone in their user communities at all.
To see people giving tearful salutes to a company that literally just sat there and watched its product rot rather than do anything at all to help the community... it's just very frustrating. I was a Flash developer too. But I'm not mad at Open web advocates, there are plenty of other people/businesses for me to be mad at.
Well it seems like "Flash" could be replaced with "HTML5" and most of this article would still make sense - many points are arguable whether they apply to either though. Most of these are caused by poor developers rather than the platform itself.
* Gratuitious animation
* Granularity of user control
* Non-standard GUI controls
* Back button
* Moving text is harder to read for users who lack fluency (haha this one made me laugh)
* HTML5 content tends to be created once and then left alone
* HTML5 content is typically superficial
* HTML5 is typically created by outside agents who don't understand the business
It's a pity the demise of flash killed a games/art scene, but the rest of the web is better off with flash gone and nothing new to fill that role.
The way some people used to make entire websites as flash apps that would bring old computers to their knees is not something I miss. Websites that should have just been static html, like a restaurant's website for their menu, were getting turned into monstrously inefficient interactive nightmares that wouldn't even load at all if you didn't have flash (which btw, broke constantly with Linux.)
This kind of superfluous interactivity is still possible with javascript/etc, but it seems to be less popular and is more likely to gracefully degrade (usually the relevant content still displays even if you have JS disabled.)
This feels a bit like rewriting history, it wasn't for that long that people used flash to write websites. In my recollection there was like a 2 year window when you'd occasionally hit a flash site and groan to yourself. It was google that stopped that when people realized their sites weren't getting listed with SEO. And it seemed to be confined to mainly restaurants for some reason ;)
I actually think it didn't hurt the web, it was a massive driver for change, Flash highlighted the lack of functionality in html/js and was part of the reason that forced html to finally get canvas, etc.
If you're completely honest with yourself, you'll realise that html/js are still years behind what you can do in Silverlight and Adobe Air.
Now it's mobile apps that are forcing the web to carry on evolving and highlight just how backward html/js is. In years time we'll have people saying that phone specific apps were terrible, but in reality, without something to show us the flaws of html/js are, it wouldn't move forward.
Personally I'm no fan of the mono-culture of the web, the idea that you can only use one language, either for markup or for programming, should be anathema to all of us and instead it is bizarrely celebrated. I'd far prefer to be using Python or Ruby or whatever than javascript and in reality I think it's probably costing the world billions or trillions in wasted effort as we schlep around with javascript.
One of the biggest advantages of flash was that beyond a few DOM wrangling capabilities it basically threw away the rest of the browser and was really more akin to a Java applet than being part of the browser.
This meant that even somebody using IE6 can have a good experience with a flash app, assuming their flash is upto date.
What annoys me with HTML5/JS apps is I constantly see people showing off demos of something cool they did with the "open" HTML5/JS tools.
Then I load their demo and it's all like "hey, sorry your not using the latest version of Chrome come back when you've installed it"
Hopefully this will get better over time , but you've still got IE dragging it's feet and doing things a bit differently + Microsoft's habit of dropping support for new versions in older OSes.
Maybe the answer is for all browsers to just standardize on one rendering engine / JS implementation otherwise I can see this becoming a nightmare and everyone having to keep multiple versions of multiple browsers installed just to run all the apps they need.
When Typescript came, I was like. Yay! Someone made JS become AS3 like. That's when I seriously got into javascript. Flash could do some amazing things back in the day, They had GPU accelerated graphics, microphone, image manipulation, video, and a whole host of other things that HTML didn't have. I think Flash inspired browsers to do better.
Yeah, despite all its shortcomings Flash had one thing and that was opening up the web to a rich UX. Today, despite all the progress in JS, CSS and browser support for page manipulation, we’re nowhere near what used to be possible with Flash
ActionScript 3.0 is what JavaScript should be. Actual classes, typed variables, and a platform that works the same in every browser.
Contrarian view but I see flash improving its lead on html. Adobe doesn’t have to deal with a bureaucratic standards body and can act decisively when making platform changes. Ex: I’d like to see MS, Mozilla, IE, Chrome, Apple, Opera all agree to implement similar features in Flash 11 (and work the same in each browser). Then I’d like to see them agree on new feature sets when Flash 12, 13, 14 come out etc.
I just don’t see how five browser vendors can equal the agility of one flash vendor. Too much red tape in the html congress…
Yes, Flash is proprietary and it doesn’t work well for mobile. All I can say is that I’ve been burned one too many times by IE not showing CSS table borders on empty cells (last time I checked IE8 still requires that damned ampersand in each cell!). I’m fed up with browser incompatibility. All of the JavaScript frameworks (and now with Google making Dart) confirm that JavaScript is inherently outdated and broken. I gave up on html for Flex and am not looking back.
I choose to do my web application in flash for exactly same reasons that lead you to html and css. Its all interaction and not navigation.
I actually think the mixing of content and interaction that web applications have become is incredibly powerful - I think the idea that we'll prefer desktop style buttons and widgets over text links is wrong, very very wrong. And I think that's where most of the reluctance for flash apps comes from but people don't recognise it. Also web pages progressively load by default and thats important.
On a purely programming tip, actionscript 3 is a joy to program in. The flex components are good.
I'm not sure if I agree with all of this. People forget flash kinda sucked.
One of the most significant ways in which flash sucked was the performance. Imo, the most famous flash game of all time is Binding of Isaac, which basically couldn't achieve a respectable, consistent frame rate even on the most powerful rigs. It's native rewrite, Rebirth, never had performance issues.
>You can't do pixel-perfect rendering
Sure you can, with canvas, and if you want to have absolutely perfect control, there's WebGL (and nice stuff like PixiJS)
>No nice pipeline for integrating vector animations/art into games
You can render SVG sprites into bitmaps, and use them in WebGL or canvas, as you mentioned, you needed to do this too in flash as well if you wanted decent performance.
>easy to make fancy + good-looking interactive UIs
If I remember correctly, most fancy game UIs were built with some framework, like flixel, which used low-level drawing primitives and built-up the UI from scratch. Alternatively you could use the full power of HTML+Js frameworks to build arbitrarily complex UIs and overlay them on your game scene.
>many of the html runtimes for new engines (Unity for instance) feel waay heavier/more sluggish in the browser
True, but they are meant to be, and meant for bigger games than flash/html5+js is. But for modern engines, HTML5 export sucks, there's no doubt about that. But that's a failure of execution, not technology. I remember Epic citadel a decade ago, which ran by compiling C++ to js with emscripten, and it worked pretty well:
Also, there' a few Electron based indie games, most notably CrossCode, which is a fun, and technically pretty well executed game, and by the devs' own admission, it's built on pretty ancient tech.
What was atrocious about Flash? AS3 was a decent language. Better, more open tools were coming along. Insecurity and privacy concerns were addressed by properly sandboxing it. The biggest downside of Flash is that it wasn't an open web technology, but the answer to that shouldn't have been to remove it before an open alternative was established. All in all I don't see what all that fuss was about.
If WebGL and Flash competed on an equal footing the WebGL tools (including Flash-like, newbie-friendly frameworks) would be forced to get better than Flash.
I don't know. I can write an application in flash and it will run on IE, chrome, Firefox, whatever. A lot of companies still use IE. I can also compile that down to run on ios, android, or blackberry (not that I'd want to). I can do all that from basically the same codebase with an ecma script language (as3) that I find much better for large scale projects than html5 (by which people actually mean js)
Flash is dying I guess, but it will be a long time until it actually dies, and that's good by me because html5/js still has a lot of catching up to do.
As an aside, I'm curious how many flash haters out there have actually written flash applications. Its really a good tool for a lot of applications, but the haters never really provide any specifics on what their problem is besides referencing poorly written apps that crash your browser, of which you'll find plenty of those in any language.
The problem with that, is that flash even as an IDE was not really suited our new responsive web. Its not really good for content or development of anything other than games, animations and ads.
You're complaining about the development environment, which is considered to be better than JS/HTML5 by many people.
However, the Flash runtime is the reason people complain about Flash. It is slow, it leaks memory, it crashes like crazy and has been a second-class citizen on every platform other than Windows since forever.
JS/HTML5 on the other hand is a mess in terms of development tools. But it is getting more and more reliable. And it's a real standard with multiple implementations that are extremely competitive. Apple was right for excluding Flash from their mobile browser, as for mobile phones HTML5 is currently much better, even though the technology powering it is newer than Flash.
Adobe's current plans are to build development tools for HTML5/JS too. They are even pushing for improvements in the standard, like CSS3 Regions.
That's true, but web developers did it to themselves. It's not hard, or at least wasn't hard several years back, to find developers complaining that Flash was ruining the web and needed to go away.
That the results aren't as good isn't surprising. Flash was specifically built (and optimized) for interactive graphic content like games. HTML was originally made to display text documents and it's been a long series of revisions and hacks to get where it is now.
Lars is a game developer, so is presumably talking about interactive/multimedia content rather than pure animation. I fully agree with him that JS doesn't hold a candle to Flash even now (for rich media apps in the browser).
But I don't think Flash could exist nowadays online anyway in the same way - the hardware ecosystem is much more diverse, you can't make a keyboard/mouse game and call it quits so easily, because people with tiny-touchscreen phones might also end up on your site. Trying to treat the web as a single platform is...it's a lot of ground to cover.
Even now html/J's can't do all of the things and most of the things that you can do, are not as fast. While browsers are stuck with legacies to uphold. Flash had no dom to worry about, untyped language (as3) or had css holding it back.
General argument was flash sucks because people make terrible content with it. Which is like saying I hate having hands because I trip things over.. so no limbs = no mess PERFECT.
In turn I think it helped push native apps. Since plain Js/html app just sucked in comparison when it comes to experience and capabilities.
Flash should have been open sourced. Hopefully with webgl and web assembly someone can step in and create something similar
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