RIP Adobe Flash, you changed the internet forever but you will not be missed

[GoodBytes]

Fun fact: Windows XP First Run after install Tour was made in Flash.

 

If you want to see yourself, you can find the files at archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/XPFlashTou

 

You don't need to download Flash Player; the main Flash file has been compiled as a Windows executable (.exe).

Just download all files (torrent link provided) and just run "tour.exe" and voila!

Right-click anywhere to get the About dialog shown above.

[divito]

Sad to say goodbye; Macromedia really helped pave the way with Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks for web content. In fairness to Adobe, they did alright with them after acquisition.

Things like eBaum's before it got horrendous, Newgrounds, etc... helped the internet become a lot more fun back in the day with creative videos and games. Or marveling at places like 2Advanced Studios and others developing crazy flash websites and pushing the boundaries.

 

[Master Disaster]

1 hour ago, GoodBytes said:

Fun fact: Windows XP First Run after install Tour was made in Flash.

 

If you want to see yourself, you can find the files at archive.org:

https://archive.org/details/XPFlashTou

 

You don't need to download Flash Player; the main Flash file has been compiled as a Windows executable (.exe).

Just download all files (torrent link provided) and just run "tour.exe" and voila!

Right-click anywhere to get the About dialog shown above.

Director actually did quite well too. I remember loads of bargain bin PC games (you know the gold/classic type releases) coming with Director based installers.

[unsorted]

15 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Flash's death started in 2015 when Adobe recommended all web developers start using HTML5. Its taken 5 years but now its officially dead.

That's what came to mind here...that announcement years ago. I bet it never really dies. We will see a limb emerge from the tombstone, ready to live another day.

[poochyena]

15 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Everyone raving how they won't miss Adobe Flash at all

15 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Just because it didn't age well in its final stage of lifecycle

 

Why would you say you miss something that you admit didn't age well?

[Kisai]

15 hours ago, Ashley said:

why does everyone hate Flash so much? i never had a security issue with it before... 

Ok, as someone who was there at v1.0

 

1. Flash was originally conceived as a vector image program (1.0 1996.) This purpose was supplanted by SVG. 

2. Flash up to 5.0 (Year 2000) largely was designed to produce vector animations. It was very popular with TV animation to produce cheap animation. It was popular with Newgrounds who built an entire meme/troll culture around flash animation and games. NG content ranged from stuff that is hateful to stuff that was high-effort. When the same tool is used to produce Blues Clues as is produced to Family Guy, it definitely had it's versatility.

3. Video was added in Flash 6 (2002.)

4. Action Script 2.0 was added in Flash 7 (2003), which made it possible to do advanced animation (eg camera pans)

 

Up until Flash 7, it was rather difficult to "exploit" the Flash plugin, because the Actionscript language didn't have much access to the system. However because the OS of the day (Windows 95/98/2K/XP) didn't have as much privilege separation, it started to become a vector for malware due to it's use for advertisements, which also started to be pushed. Security wasn't even a consideration until Flash 8.0

 

5. Flash 8 was introduced in 2005. Finally adding support for gif and png files, along with a more efficient video codec. Adobe tried to compete by building it's own proprietary SVG player (which was short lived and only worked with the output of Adobe Illustrator.)

 

That was the beginning of the end.

 

6. Adobe acquired Flash, discarded it's own SVG plugin work, added a complete ECMAScript implementation (think Javascript) and h.264 support to Flash 9 in 2008. Thus began the era of Flash being the crappy video player that everyone hated as video ads started appearing everywhere, and video sites like Youtube required it to operate.

 

Flash was basically thrown off a cliff by Apple in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

 

And Steve Jobs had a point. Flash was awful, the web was "requiring" it when it should only require HTML5 technology. The same argument can be thrown at jQuery and all the other fly-by-night Javascript frameworks. They are all essentially replicating functionality that we first saw in Flash.

 

By the end of 2011, Adobe ceased development on "Flash" as we know it. There was no reason why web browsers should require a plugin to play video other than the unwillingness of "free" web browsers to natively support it, and they can't license the video codecs. A problem that still exists today, but h.264 patents have basically become moot due to Cisco.

 

So for a plugin that largely stopped development 9 years ago, 10 exploits per month have been found every year in it. Every version of flash after 11 (currently 32) 

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=53&product_id=6761

 

Adobe has renamed "Flash" to "Animate" and has kept the core features of flash, but Animate is well behind ToonBoom Harmony, and Animate could have been in the position Harmony is in (where it's used by Disney and most animation studios) had Adobe not tried to turn the Flash client into a video player. 

 

But there's also a huge loss, again laid at the foot of Adobe. Why wasn't Flash re-engineered so we could have UHD vector animations. Forget these 16Mbit-25mbit 1080p streams, send a 4Mbit stream of video where the audio is 90% of the data. Like people forget how utterly wasteful the process of converting 2D and 3D animation into raster data at lower resolution (noise has to be added to prevent the compression from creating banding where there are gradients.) A site like Youtube that only used vector animations (literately newgrounds) would be far cheaper to operate.

 

[captain_to_fire]

Why is it that back in the day, some web content required installation of Shockwave even though Flash is already installed? 

[GoodBytes]

1 hour ago, like_ooh_ahh said:

Why is it that back in the day, some web content required installation of Shockwave even though Flash is already installed? 

Shockwave isn't Flash. Shockwave is a web browser plugin for Micromedia Director, to run its content embedded in a website

 

The different is quite complicated. 

Director was more powerful than Flash in many ways, which I'll get to. But the big defining feature was that Director was rasterized focused, while Flash was Vector focused.

IN addition, Director had 3D graphics support, was easier on the CPU to run (due to the fact that wasn't using Vectors), and was just more powerful (also support OO in terms of its scripting language). That said, Director supported the ability to load Flash content inside and you could get Vector support that way. Director also allowed to use Windows and MacOS system APIs, while Flash was sandboxed in and no system API access. Director could allow one to make proper offline applications. Flash could as well, but it was more an afterthought.

 

So, why Director/Shockwave didn't catch on, and rather Flash did?

Technically speaking, it sounds like Flash would have flopped and Director/Shockwave would have been the main choice, being more powerful. But in reality, convenience has won.

• Flash was easier to developed on than Director.
• Director used the Lingo programming language which pushed OO, Flash used ActionScript which was based off JavaScript (a language that all web dev knew). This has helped Flash be easier to get started. Director, in comparison, had a steeper learning curve. Director IDE had also, a steeper learning curve than Flash.
• Flash, being vector based, allowed the convenience of not require the developer to re-compile/rework their application/game for making things larger without making things more pixelated. And while irrelevant at the time, Flash would have, as a result, high-DPI display support, out of the box, without the dev having thought on it.
• Shockwave took time to load on user machines. Flash was near instant. This is huge, and this is was also one of the reason Java never really penetrated the web. Java took ages to load back then and was hated as a result. While Shockwave wasn't as bad as Java in terms of load time, it still had a load time.
• Flash supported "out of the box" if you want to call it that, dynamic loading. Frame 1 could be displayed (including code execution on Frame 1) before finishing downloading the application/animation. Shockwave required everything to load first before starting anything. Back in the days of 1-5Mbps Internet connection, this was a huge deal. Heck, imagine you can't play YouTube video until it is fully downloaded on your system. This is the experience difference. People don't like to wait.
• Director cost 1,000$ US to get started. Flash required 400$ (although, it went up soon after Adobe bought Micromedia). This made it Flash the choice for most devs, and animators.

Flash was mainly designed for animations, while Director was designed for applications (and therefor games). That said, Flash scripting language (ActionScript) got more and more powerful, which allowed games (and applications) to be made, despite not its main purpose. So, people started doing animations in Flash, and slowly, as ActionScript got more powerful, jump into gaming (and web applications). Once Flash had video support, it really took things off, especially for sites like YouTube. This has resulted in Flash being installed on 95% of systems, and Shockwave was only installed on 50-55% of them. The instant load of Flash with a site like YouTube, made people have the experience they have today: just click on a video, the player is instantly loaded and video is streaming. No need to wait 30sec each time for Java or Shockwave to load each time, download everything and load then display the media player, and THEN it could play the video (assuming it had the same video capabilities of Flash).

 

Why the mix up?

You are not the first to confused Shockwave and Flash. This is because, for some reason, Micromedia called Flash plugin, "Shockwave Flash" for a period of time, before calling it just: "Flash", which is what most people just called it to break the confusion. For some reason, Micromedia didn't want to call its plugins the platform name. Why "Shockwave plugin"? Why not just "Director plugin"? Anyways.

 

 

[Master Disaster]

8 hours ago, Kisai said:

Ok, as someone who was there at v1.0

 

1. Flash was originally conceived as a vector image program (1.0 1996.) This purpose was supplanted by SVG. 

2. Flash up to 5.0 (Year 2000) largely was designed to produce vector animations. It was very popular with TV animation to produce cheap animation. It was popular with Newgrounds who built an entire meme/troll culture around flash animation and games. NG content ranged from stuff that is hateful to stuff that was high-effort. When the same tool is used to produce Blues Clues as is produced to Family Guy, it definitely had it's versatility.

3. Video was added in Flash 6 (2002.)

4. Action Script 2.0 was added in Flash 7 (2003), which made it possible to do advanced animation (eg camera pans)

 

Up until Flash 7, it was rather difficult to "exploit" the Flash plugin, because the Actionscript language didn't have much access to the system. However because the OS of the day (Windows 95/98/2K/XP) didn't have as much privilege separation, it started to become a vector for malware due to it's use for advertisements, which also started to be pushed. Security wasn't even a consideration until Flash 8.0

 

5. Flash 8 was introduced in 2005. Finally adding support for gif and png files, along with a more efficient video codec. Adobe tried to compete by building it's own proprietary SVG player (which was short lived and only worked with the output of Adobe Illustrator.)

 

That was the beginning of the end.

 

6. Adobe acquired Flash, discarded it's own SVG plugin work, added a complete ECMAScript implementation (think Javascript) and h.264 support to Flash 9 in 2008. Thus began the era of Flash being the crappy video player that everyone hated as video ads started appearing everywhere, and video sites like Youtube required it to operate.

 

Flash was basically thrown off a cliff by Apple in 2010.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

 

And Steve Jobs had a point. Flash was awful, the web was "requiring" it when it should only require HTML5 technology. The same argument can be thrown at jQuery and all the other fly-by-night Javascript frameworks. They are all essentially replicating functionality that we first saw in Flash.

 

By the end of 2011, Adobe ceased development on "Flash" as we know it. There was no reason why web browsers should require a plugin to play video other than the unwillingness of "free" web browsers to natively support it, and they can't license the video codecs. A problem that still exists today, but h.264 patents have basically become moot due to Cisco.

 

So for a plugin that largely stopped development 9 years ago, 10 exploits per month have been found every year in it. Every version of flash after 11 (currently 32) 

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list.php?vendor_id=53&product_id=6761

 

Adobe has renamed "Flash" to "Animate" and has kept the core features of flash, but Animate is well behind ToonBoom Harmony, and Animate could have been in the position Harmony is in (where it's used by Disney and most animation studios) had Adobe not tried to turn the Flash client into a video player. 

 

But there's also a huge loss, again laid at the foot of Adobe. Why wasn't Flash re-engineered so we could have UHD vector animations. Forget these 16Mbit-25mbit 1080p streams, send a 4Mbit stream of video where the audio is 90% of the data. Like people forget how utterly wasteful the process of converting 2D and 3D animation into raster data at lower resolution (noise has to be added to prevent the compression from creating banding where there are gradients.) A site like Youtube that only used vector animations (literately newgrounds) would be far cheaper to operate.

 

Do you think its possible Adobe bought Macromedia with the intention of keeping Dreamweaver & Fireworks but discontinuing Flash?

[We Didnt_t start_the_fire]

On 1/1/2021 at 1:11 AM, Master Disaster said:

Yesterday was December 31st 2020, it was the end of a terrible year and also the end of what became a terrible piece of software. It was Adobes official end of life date for Flash Player.

 

As of yesterday Adobe recommends that anyone with Adobe Flash installed on their devices should remove it, most browsers already block flash content and Microsoft will be removing it from Windows PCs (likely on the next patch Tuesday). From January 12th 2021 Flash Player will stop playing Flash animations entirely and the final remnants of the first iteration of a multimedia internet will die forever.

Flash's death started in 2015 when Adobe recommended all web developers start using HTML5. Its taken 5 years but now its officially dead.

Of course there's now a huge push to archive as much flash content as possible before it dies permanently.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/31/22208190/adobe-flash-is-dead

 

Flash really did change the face of the internet. I remember the early days of the modern internet, we got our first family PC in the early 90s with dial up and 3 months free Compuserve. I remember surfing for hours, endless walls of green comic sans text on black backgrounds, larger images had to be physically downloaded to be viewed, every page had a visitor counter on it.

 

I was actually the perfect age for Flash, by the time I hit my late teens/twenties it was everywhere. Ebaums world was my favourite place, my mates and I would spend hours watching satire and nonsense.

I got into nostalogical mood before New Year and wanted to play a bit of flash games on Y8(sites I remember from my primary days) or any other. I ended up playing more than 800 hours+ day and night for almost a week now especially over Ninjakiwi. The nostalogical nolife returned as well.  

 

I was planning on playing Cyberpunk Matrix for 8-10 hours however I decided to wait till the Oracle of CDPR to hav eneough battery to fix the Matrix first. BTW the next Matrix should be Beyond death. 

[Master Disaster]

27 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Shockwave isn't Flash. Shockwave is a web browser plugin for Micromedia Director, to run its content embedded in a website

 

The different is quite complicated. 

Director was more powerful than Flash in many ways, which I'll get to. But the big defining feature was that Director was rasterized focused, while Flash was Vector focused.

IN addition, Director had 3D graphics support, was easier on the CPU to run (due to the fact that wasn't using Vectors), and was just more powerful (also support OO in terms of its scripting language). That said, Director supported the ability to load Flash content inside and you could get Vector support that way. Director also allowed to use Windows and MacOS system APIs, while Flash was sandboxed in and no system API access. Director could allow one to make proper offline applications. Flash could as well, but it was more an afterthought.

 

So, why Director/Shockwave didn't catch on, and rather Flash did?

Technically speaking, it sounds like Flash would have flopped and Director/Shockwave would have been the main choice, being more powerful. But in reality, convenience has won.

• Flash was easier to developed on than Director.
• Director used the Lingo programming language which pushed OO, Flash used ActionScript which was based off JavaScript (a language that all web dev knew). This has helped Flash be easier to get started. Director, in comparison, had a steeper learning curve. Director IDE had also, a steeper learning curve than Flash.
• Flash, being vector based, allowed the convenience of not require the developer to re-compile/rework their application/game for making things larger without making things more pixelated. And while irrelevant at the time, Flash would have, as a result, high-DPI display support, out of the box, without the dev having thought on it.
• Shockwave took time to load on user machines. Flash was near instant. This is huge, and this is was also one of the reason Java never really penetrated the web. Java took ages to load back then and was hated as a result. While Shockwave wasn't as bad as Java in terms of load time, it still had a load time.
• Flash supported "out of the box" if you want to call it that, dynamic loading. Frame 1 could be displayed (including code execution on Frame 1) before finishing downloading the application/animation. Shockwave required everything to load first before starting anything. Back in the days of 1-5Mbps Internet connection, this was a huge deal. Heck, imagine you can't play YouTube video until it is fully downloaded on your system. This is the experience difference. People don't like to wait.
• Director cost 1,000$ US to get started. Flash required 400$ (although, it went up soon after Adobe bought Micromedia). This made it Flash the choice for most devs, and animators.

Flash was mainly designed for animations, while Director was designed for applications (and therefor games). That said, Flash scripting language (ActionScript) got more and more powerful, which allowed games (and applications) to be made, despite not its main purpose. So, people started doing animations in Flash, and slowly, as ActionScript got more powerful, jump into gaming (and web applications). Once Flash had video support, it really took things off, especially for sites like YouTube. This has resulted in Flash being installed on 95% of systems, and Shockwave was only installed on 50-55% of them. The instant load of Flash with a site like YouTube, made people have the experience they have today: just click on a video, the player is instantly loaded and video is streaming. No need to wait 30sec each time for Java or Shockwave to load each time, download everything and load then display the media player, and THEN it could play the video (assuming it had the same video capabilities of Flash).

 

Why the mix up?

You are not the first to confused Shockwave and Flash. This is because, for some reason, Micromedia called Flash plugin, "Shockwave Flash" for a period of time, before calling it just: "Flash", which is what most people just called it to break the confusion. For some reason, Micromedia didn't want to call its plugins the platform name. Why "Shockwave plugin"? Why not just "Director plugin"? Anyways.

 

 

I can attest to this. I was always into coding but I have about as much creativity as your average 2 year old. I cannot draw to save my life, like my handwriting looks like a spider ran through some ink before running over a piece of paper.

 

One of my friends from back then was at college studying graphic design and he was learning Flash, Director, Illustrator & Photoshop as a part of his course.

 

He managed to teach me Flash and I got quite competent at it, it was very easy to pick up and actionscript was/is basically readable and understandable by a human (once you understand a few basic concepts), my animations might have been crude and badly drawn but I could basically do almost anything I wanted (the concept of nested animations blew my mind when I first saw it used). Director on the other hand was much more difficult to understand, the code looked very low level type and I was always at a loss as to what was happening (it probably didn't help that he used an iMac as his main platform and I was very much a Windows guy).

[We Didnt_t start_the_fire]

22 minutes ago, GoodBytes said:

Shockwave isn't Flash. Shockwave is a web browser plugin for Micromedia Director, to run its content embedded in a website

 

The different is quite complicated. 

Director was more powerful than Flash in many ways, which I'll get to. But the big defining feature was that Director was rasterized focused, while Flash was Vector focused.

IN addition, Director had 3D graphics support, was easier on the CPU to run (due to the fact that wasn't using Vectors), and was just more powerful (also support OO in terms of its scripting language). That said, Director supported the ability to load Flash content inside and you could get Vector support that way. Director also allowed to use Windows and MacOS system APIs, while Flash was sandboxed in and no system API access. Director could allow one to make proper offline applications. Flash could as well, but it was more an afterthought.

 

So, why Director/Shockwave didn't catch on, and rather Flash did?

Technically speaking, it sounds like Flash would have flopped and Director/Shockwave would have been the main choice, being more powerful. But in reality, convenience has won.

• Flash was easier to developed on than Director.
• Director used the Lingo programming language which pushed OO, Flash used ActionScript which was based off JavaScript (a language that all web dev knew). This has helped Flash be easier to get started. Director, in comparison, had a steeper learning curve. Director IDE had also, a steeper learning curve than Flash.
• Flash, being vector based, allowed the convenience of not require the developer to re-compile/rework their application/game for making things larger without making things more pixelated. And while irrelevant at the time, Flash would have, as a result, high-DPI display support, out of the box, without the dev having thought on it.
• Shockwave took time to load on user machines. Flash was near instant. This is huge, and this is was also one of the reason Java never really penetrated the web. Java took ages to load back then and was hated as a result. While Shockwave wasn't as bad as Java in terms of load time, it still had a load time.
• Flash supported "out of the box" if you want to call it that, dynamic loading. Frame 1 could be displayed (including code execution on Frame 1) before finishing downloading the application/animation. Shockwave required everything to load first before starting anything. Back in the days of 1-5Mbps Internet connection, this was a huge deal. Heck, imagine you can't play YouTube video until it is fully downloaded on your system. This is the experience difference. People don't like to wait.
• Director cost 1,000$ US to get started. Flash required 400$ (although, it went up soon after Adobe bought Micromedia). This made it Flash the choice for most devs, and animators.

Flash was mainly designed for animations, while Director was designed for applications (and therefor games). That said, Flash scripting language (ActionScript) got more and more powerful, which allowed games (and applications) to be made, despite not its main purpose. So, people started doing animations in Flash, and slowly, as ActionScript got more powerful, jump into gaming (and web applications). Once Flash had video support, it really took things off, especially for sites like YouTube. This has resulted in Flash being installed on 95% of systems, and Shockwave was only installed on 50-55% of them. The instant load of Flash with a site like YouTube, made people have the experience they have today: just click on a video, the player is instantly loaded and video is streaming. No need to wait 30sec each time for Java or Shockwave to load each time, download everything and load then display the media player, and THEN it could play the video (assuming it had the same video capabilities of Flash).

 

Why the mix up?

You are not the first to confused Shockwave and Flash. This is because, for some reason, Micromedia called Flash plugin, "Shockwave Flash" for a period of time, before calling it just: "Flash", which is what most people just called it to break the confusion. For some reason, Micromedia didn't want to call its plugins the platform name. Why "Shockwave plugin"? Why not just "Director plugin"? Anyways.

 

 

This is  not a shot or shade but just feel a bit ironical when reading complicated. It is ultimately retired because it is old and not complicated enough for today and tmr uses.

[Master Disaster]

20 minutes ago, We Didnt_t start_the_fire said:

This is  not a shot or shade but just feel a bit ironical when reading complicated. It is ultimately retired because it is old and not complicated enough for today and tmr uses.

Complication isn't really a factor in why it died, Adobe could have kept developing if they wanted to.

 

the literal thousands of exploits found in its later life are the reason why it died.

[Kisai]

6 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

Do you think its possible Adobe bought Macromedia with the intention of keeping Dreamweaver & Fireworks but discontinuing Flash?

I think Adobe bought Macromedia entirely to kill a competitor, of which Adobe did in turn kill of Macromedia's products that duplicated functionality with their existing products. Flash actually resembles what many Video NLE's have, and current game development tools like GameMaker, Unity and Godot also lean in hard on the "stage-scene-object" model that flash used.

 

Unity in particular, is setup in a way that resembles flash, and likewise has a lot of criticism that flash is known for, feature creep, inefficient cpu-gpu processes, single-core heavy, inferior mobile ports, and so forth. Many non-compelling alternatives to flash, use a lot of the same development language you would find in Flash as well.

 

Like what could have saved Flash from this would have been to have never have developed AS3.0. Keep the AS functionality simple as possible and instead bake logic into player that actually made use of multiple cores and GPU's as they developed. 

 

As for emulating flash.... er no. While google and some other sites did build some tools to convert the vector animations to SVG, it was often a convoluted process and requires substantial system requirements without any of the benefits of flash. Flash animations before 9.0 can be kind-of transcoded into canvas+javascript animations, but often lack the precise timing. Flash games that didn't rely on sound syncronization are usually fine. Flash 9.0+ content however doesn't transcode very well, and animations typically have to be exported from the Flash/Animate program into h.264 for youtube to retain all the visual aspects, and this is where I throw a BUT...

 

The way Flash/Animate works on Windows is not how it works on MacOS X. Up to Flash 8, you could export an AVI on windows, or a MOV on MacOS X, however you can not export a h.264 video on the PC, with Apple discontinuing Quicktime 7 in 2009, and never having that functionality on Windows. Consider that it's impossible to use NVEnc (with an nVidia card) with Flash exporting to h.264 in software, but the way "flash" is actually transcoded into video is to "play" the flash content and screen capture it in CS5 and later.

 

There is actually a tool on newgrounds called Swivel that uses FFMPEG to transcode flash content in exactly the same way (screen capture), and it doesn't require the original FLA file, and isn't quite as braindead to encode. It also allows increasing the resolution without having to hack the original flash file's stage sizes. IT does this by inserting the flash content into another flash "stage" set at that higher resolution.

 

There's still problems with trying to transcode flash however. While flash might be the only example of pre-HiDPI working as intended, it internally uses twips (1/20th of a pixel) and trying to scale things up, still moves along these. So a 500x500 flash file scaled to 8K goes from having 1/20th pixels to nearly 4/5th pixels and causes scaled up tweening to be incredibly jankly looking.

 

There's also a lot of third party content that uses flash, though mostly games that do use it, use it in a post-exported manner. One example is Jackbox.tv which uses flash for it's menu's, which suggests to me that the jackbox player might actually just be a chromium (eg nw.js or electron) build that leverages the flash plugin. So do these games stop working if the flash plugin is removed? Or do they have their own build of flash self-contained?

 

I did some research, and Jackbox uses a discontinued (by Autodesk no less, another company run by clowns that acquires things and then discontinues them when they aren't immediately successful, like google) middleware called Scaleform gFX (who's predecessor is gameswf.) So anyone still running flash, quite literately needs to find someone who has a license and source code to the discontinued scaleform flash runtime and compile their application or game to use it.

 

 

 

 

[charlie_root]

This is great news. Not sure why anyone is getting nostalgic about Flash. That's like being nostalgic about gangrene. Flash was quite possibly the worst software ever written and should have been killed off decades ago. It was a remote code execution exploit factory like nothing else.

[pythonmegapixel]

15 minutes ago, charlie_root said:

This is great news. Not sure why anyone is getting nostalgic about Flash. That's like being nostalgic about gangrene. Flash was quite possibly the worst software ever written and should have been killed off decades ago. It was a remote code execution exploit factory like nothing else.

I think you are being rather short-sighted there - Flash was singlehandedly responsible for popularising the idea of client-side interactive content on the web. In its pre-HTML5 heyday, nothing even came close.  There was Silverlight, but it was two years late to the party, had worse platform support than Flash, and wasn't nearly so widely used.

 

Pre-Flash, the web was purely made up of static sites, and sites which could rely on server-side processing for everything except the actual rendering of the site. This prohibited advanced online games (needed Flash's graphical ability), video/audio streaming (HTML of the time didn't provide any sort of framework for that) and advanced browser-based applications.

 

Honestly, what you're saying is like "Why is anyone impressed by the Ford Model T? It was an absolute safety nightmare, with no seatbelts, no airbags, no anti-lock braking and no doors!" while forgetting that the Ford Model T was the first car ever to achieve economical mass production...

[charlie_root]

3 minutes ago, pythonmegapixel said:

I think you are being rather short-sighted there - Flash was singlehandedly responsible for popularising the idea of client-side interactive content on the web. In its pre-HTML5 heyday, nothing even came close.  There was Silverlight, but it was two years late to the party, had worse platform support than Flash, and wasn't nearly so widely used.

 

Pre-Flash, the web was purely made up of static sites, and sites which could rely on server-side processing for everything except the actual rendering of the site. This prohibited advanced online games (needed Flash's graphical ability), video/audio streaming (HTML of the time didn't provide any sort of framework for that) and advanced browser-based applications.

 

Honestly, what you're saying is like "Why is anyone impressed by the Ford Model T? It was an absolute safety nightmare, with no seatbelts, no airbags, no anti-lock braking and no doors!" while forgetting that the Ford Model T was the first car ever to achieve economical mass production...

I know, and don't consider this a good thing. I like static sites better. I don't like the bloated javascript nightmares the modern web has become, or the fact that Firefox has to eat 3 GB of RAM just to display a basic text page.

[pythonmegapixel]

25 minutes ago, charlie_root said:

I know, and don't consider this a good thing. I like static sites better. I don't like the bloated javascript nightmares the modern web has become,

Well, I like the fact that someone can make a basic tool (e.g. a unit conversion system) which I don't have to faff around installing as a standalone application on my computer, and which doesn't have to make requests to some central server.

 

There are disadvantages to it, sure. But there are far more advantages. For one thing, if it wasn't for HTML5 you wouldn't be here now.... the forum would either not exist, or be primitive, slow and unattractive, as well as not properly responsive to display sizes.

 

Quote

or the fact that Firefox has to eat 3 GB of RAM just to display a basic text page.

That would appear, on close inspection, to be a number you have completely made up. And it's way off.

To display three forum pages, a web store I happen to be looking at, and a Discord window on my system, Firefox is using about 330 megabytes of memory.

Now granted, there are some other Firefox processes not included in the screenshot, but they're using negligible (by modern standards) quantities of memory. Like 150KB each.

 

Screenshot of this information from the task-manager software built into my Linux distribution:

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

It died in the same state as Internet Explorer, hated and laughed at by almost every one. If anything, it made its passing much easier to bear than if it was still good. 

[Kisai]

On 1/2/2021 at 12:28 PM, pythonmegapixel said:

 

 

That would appear, on close inspection, to be a number you have completely made up. And it's way off.

To display three forum pages, a web store I happen to be looking at, and a Discord window on my system, Firefox is using about 330 megabytes of memory.

Now granted, there are some other Firefox processes not included in the screenshot, but they're using negligible (by modern standards) quantities of memory. Like 150KB each.

 

Screenshot of this information from the task-manager software built into my Linux distribution:

Please don't pull this argument. It's like going "my car is faster because the speedometer tops out at XXXmph" rather than describing the fuel engine/fuel tank mpg or km/l

 

 

The amount of memory the browser takes is entirely dependent up what site you're on and what extensions (and how leaky they are), people who run ad blockers tend to have tabs crash.  If you have Twitter and Face book running for 3 days, that can crash the browser by running it out of memory. If you have a browser tab open to a site that refreshes ads every 15 seconds, that crashes the browser tab when it runs out of memory.

 

You know which tab is the most funny there? The Edge one, because it's actually only running one tab. The firefox is running 4. Chrome is running 31.

 

Anyway. Compare: Flash. 12MB empty.

 

[Takt1kal]

[StDragon]

The sad thing is, there's still a lot of aging VMWare infrastructure that's woefully out of date. Meaning, it still requires Flash unless you're on at least 6.5. Though HTML5 isn't fully featured until you're on 6.7 U1. By now, if supporting hardware permits, it should be on 7.

 

If you can find the offline installer, you'll want to keep a copy of Firefox v83 around just in case as that still supports Flash.

[Spindel]

Title of thread is BS. 
 

Macromedia/Adobe Flash was a great thing at one point in time. Still remember spending a lot of time on sites like Albino Black Sheep and Newgrounds. 
 

It enabeled classics like The Ultimate Showdown, The End of the World, Shii etc and interactive web sites in a time when most sites where a couple of frames with text and animated gifs. 
 

Flash will be missed but not mourned since it outstayed its welcome for more than a decade.

[StDragon]

10 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Title of thread is BS. 
 

Macromedia/Adobe Flash was a great thing at one point in time. Still remember spending a lot of time on sites like Albino Black Sheep and Newgrounds. 
 

It enabeled classics like The Ultimate Showdown, The End of the World, Shii etc and interactive web sites in a time when most sites where a couple of frames with text and animated gifs. 
 

Flash will be missed but not mourned since it outstayed its welcome for more than a decade.

The problem wasn't the tool (prior to Adobe's acquisition), rather the how the tool was used.

In the hands of a creative developer, it was awesome tech for its time. But the real reason it sucked so badly was the abuse in using it for ads and it was a security threat from lack of QC/QA of its development.

[Master Disaster]

47 minutes ago, Spindel said:

Title of thread is BS. 
 

Macromedia/Adobe Flash was a great thing at one point in time. Still remember spending a lot of time on sites like Albino Black Sheep and Newgrounds. 
 

It enabeled classics like The Ultimate Showdown, The End of the World, Shii etc and interactive web sites in a time when most sites where a couple of frames with text and animated gifs. 
 

Flash will be missed but not mourned since it outstayed its welcome for more than a decade.

I've already covered this earlier in the thread.

 

For something to be missed it has to go away and there be nothing available to replace it with, it has to open up a hole that cannot be filled by something else.

 

The cassette tape was an amazing product, I remember it very fondly but if someone offered to take away my MP3 player and replace it with a cassette player I'd laugh at them. I love tapes but I certainly don't miss them.

 

HTML5 can do everything (and more) that Flash allowed with more speed, security and with a much higher level of compatibility.

 

We're mourning it right now, this thread wasn't an attack on Flash, it was meant to be a way to say goodbye to something that really did push the internet forward and WAS amazing but has since been superseded in every possible way.