Yeah I remember these, like with Internet Explorer, the popular sentiment was to cheer for Flash dying. At most some people were afraid that the creative treasure trove will fade into inaccessibility. Public opinion really is played as a fiddle, by interests with deep pockets.
On a similar note, I think people were _way_ too early to celebrate the death of Flash (security issues aside of course). Developers were making content in 2000 which their contemporaries 20 years later don't come anywhere close to in terms of performance, design, or responsiveness.
The popular sentiment was shaped by gratuitous use of Flash for websites that weren't games or even apps, but that were done entirely in Flash just so they could have cute animated menus and whatnot. A typical website like that would be slow to load, have fixed-size layout, broken URL bar navigation, most text wouldn't be selectable, and accessibility tools would often be broken.
And yet that was the "Flash experience" for the majority of web users who were not into browser games...
Apple had a big hand in this, Whilst there was plenty of negative sentiment towards flash before the iPhone etc I don't remember too many people talking about killing it.
Indeed many website owners liked having flash content on their site, it is only in the last few years that developers can point to a growing and lucrative demographic or users/devices that can't consume flash content.
> Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point.
"Everyone"? I loved it. Kids loved it. The people who hated and killed it were programmers, and to this day they haven't created any alternative that kids would love as much.
It's similar to the murder of Dreamweaver. Actual designers who draw pixels on the screen loved it. Programmers hated it, pushed CSS instead, and visual editing of the web died.
It was divisive, but I wouldn't say "not well received". The "Flash deserves death" camp was very large and very, very happy that someone with power was finally calling them out on their horrific security record.
Losing the high-quality authoring environment, without anyone producing something competitive, was a pretty big blow. But for the rest, I'm quite glad to see invasive browser plugins disappear.
I think Steve Jobs was more responsible for Flash's death than Google. YouTube only stopped serving Flash as the default less than 5 years ago while hubs like Newgrounds were seeing significant declines well before then.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but the golden age of Flash content was certainly over before HTML5 hit in a big way.
This was the main factor that had developers cheering for Flash's demise. 1000 terrible restaurant websites plus the fear that it might catch on and supplant HTML thus ceding ownership of the web to Adobe.
> the general population avoiding it for general sites
I'm not sure that happened. My friends and I got on MSN Messenger and shared flash sites all the time. Kongregate and similar gaming sites were part of it, but so was YouTube, and so were greeting card sites, ESPN, various other news sites and many, many others.
At least from my POV, maybe a few people hanging out places like here didn't like flash, but the general population had no problems with it until Steve Jobs did his best to kill it. Even then, people not on iPods/Pads/Phones didn't seem to have any problems with it. AFIK, the fast majority of people still installed it years later.
None of those things would've lasted if the users didn't use the things created. Flash enabled video in webpages, games in webpages all things users flocked too and enjoyed.
Maybe you have a bias since you worked with flash.
As a flash consumer from 2001-2011 I must tell you that honestly; flash was fucking painful.
Run a very weird binary blob riddled with security holes and questionable browser integrations or suffer.
Yes, some things became possible (habbo hotel, flash games, video/audio before browsers supported it) but it wasn’t worth it. I very much wanted flash to die by 2006 and ran a lot of extensions to bypass flash on Linux such as the “HTML5 everywhere” browser add on that tried to force YouTube to use HTML5 video (with mixed results).
I think anyone looking at flash now is romanticising the past. It was the least enjoyable thing about web browsing in the 00-s
I’m saying that IE and Flash’s popularity didn’t decline because of government intervention - the tool that seems to be the go to of HN posters anytime there is something that they don’t like - even though what ended IE and Flash’s popularity on the web wasn’t the government.
Flash didn't die a natural death, it was murdered by companies that resent any loss of control over their users. Complaints by Jobs weren't in good faith overall - Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day. Jobs was just a control freak along with wanting to keep games/interactive content in the walled-off app store (plain web capability wasn't there yet at the time), Google can't collect data from Flash content as easily and wants its developers more focused on advertising than supporting the ever-dwindling feature list of Chrome (who cares about features like extension capability or viewing flash content when we already captured a ton of users bundling the browser with random installers and we can advertise on the google home page), and Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of blindly following everything Chrome does. We could still be in that brief utopia of new HTML5 capability coexisting with first-class Flash support if the politics played out differently.
Who needs a conspiracy when your product creates such a terrible user experience? I've never written a lick of flash, and I don't care to. I still have awful memories of just how broken Flash sites were. They'd stick out like a sore thumb since none of the widgets ever worked like native ones, there were constantly keyboard focus issues in Firefox, video never seemed to be accelerated and would decimate battery life, the privacy nightmare of the persistent cookies you'd need to load a flash app from Adobe to clear (permissions as with everything else gave the finger to the host system/browser). Who could forget the near constant security and stability issues? I, for one, am glad flash died.
Flash died because while it sucked on desktop systems, it was somehow way worse on mobile just as mobile was becoming more important.
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