Comment by eloisant 2 days ago
I wish Flash would have died sooner.
It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser.
Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.
It was both awful when it showed up in the enterprise and amazing at unleashing creativity for many. Most young non-technical people I knew during its rise had regularly made Flash creations or even games, and deeply enjoyed the Cambrian explosion of games and animations for a few years.
It was really meant for animation and games but got misused as a web GUI tool. I think it would've been fine to allow it anyway, and anyone who wants to build a GUI can just not use Flash.
For the most part, people are talking about games and animation, not text based websites.
Did you ever try one of those Flash-based room escape games? It was really amazing to lose yourself in the challenges and puzzles.
> Flash players had zoom built in
The zoom was limited to the frame that the flash player sat in, so you'd end up with different parts of the website at different zoom levels.
Also flash wasn't responsive and couldn't flow like real website content can.
> Flash was the last thing that got people excited for the Web generally
That's only because all the capabilities were new, now they're built into the web itself. See:
- https://ciechanow.ski/airfoil/
- https://superspl.at/view?id=1eacd61c
- https://itch.io/games/platform-web
- https://ruinergame.com/ (scroll down)
- etc...
Flash was the original web Excel (also Lotus 1-2-3) -- a simultaneous design + data + programming tool.
These are terrible for maintainability, but excellent for usability.
On the whole, I'd say it was easily a loss for the greater web that web programming left the citizen-programmer behind. (By requiring them all to turn into hamfisted front-end javascript programmers...)
Many of the centralized evils of the current web might have been avoided if there had remained an onramp for the neophyte to really create for the web.
I.e. Facebook et al. might have instead been replaced by a hosted, better-indexed Macromedia create + edit + host platform
Or the amount of shit code produced by inexperienced front-end devs throwing spaghetti at IE might have been reduced
This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.