Flash was like using poor quality native apps, which was a step backwards from a browser.

Link me to the most user-hostile Flash-based web page you can find, and I'll watch a ten year old hour-long video presentation from a Gnash developer explaining their 100-year plan to ship a usable open Flash runtime alternative.

Flash didn't have any of that, and was much slower to load than modern JS websites.

And this is not some student's first approach at modern web technologies, its fucking YouTube from google. They can't get their shit working on their own browser. I have yet to see an SPA with a convincing UX that's more than just some wannabe webdev's "about" page.

It's sad that Google is revered by the developer community as a role model for software engineering because their frontend web work has—at least for the last ~10+ years—always been terrible and a really great example of worst practice.

Gmail's early HTML version is possibly the last faded memory of a quality frontend product coming from Google. Everything they've created since the advent of GWT has been aggressively anti-user and anti-interop. Gmail took a long time to get full browser support and a longer time to play will with back buttons, etc.—meanwhile the Gmail interface has slowed and bloated with each iteration; the latest bordering on unusability on my very new midrange laptop. Wave never worked in anything but Chrome, the same is true of the early iterations of most of their large newly released products over the years. The Google homepage provides a totally inconsistent experience across browsers—on mobile I see three different results views in three different browsers, two are Blink-based! Why doesn't search by image work on mobile? We're thankfully no longer lumped with the distaster desktop experience the was Google Instant Search.

Similarly, Microsoft and Apple don't have great histories here. When looking for good development practices, you should always look at the example set by companies that need to compete. Monopolies don't need usability.

This is a great example of Google's spotty frontend work -- especially since you can simply tap the share button on iOS, and then scroll over to "Request Desktop Site". And voila, image search now works perfectly. You can even click the camera icon to upload an image directly from your phone. And yet, this functionality is completely hidden by default on mobile.

Efficiency has a lot of different definitions depending on whom the efficiency is "for". I would say Google put a lot of resources into increasing the bloat (adding abstractions) in order to automate the creation and maintenance of their services. They are the pioneers of removing humans from the equation: they're using ML to create their maps, instead of the previous focus on humans driving around with cameras, they have a notorious lack of human-intervention customer service for most of their paid services, even GWT which I mentioned above removed human JavaScript devs (admittedly in order to allow Java devs to write it, but unlike other transpilers—e.g. Typescript/Coffeescript—which produce a relatively readable direct JS equivalents, GWT is heavily abstracted and the output isn't in any way representative of what a human would create).

"Gee, I remember seeing this unique comment on a youtube video. Let me search for it, maybe some web-crawler has indexed it and made it available to the rest of the web. Nope."

"Oh I remember the video, it was XYZ. I'll just go there and find the comment. Oh, it's not at the top of the comments, and there are 5600 comments."

"It's okay, I'll just ctrl-F for that specific word I distinctly remember was used in that comment. Nope, ctrl-f only finds what's loaded in the Dom, you've got to scroll!"

"Hmm, maybe I can just keep scrolling for a while till I find it. Scroll, wait. Scroll, stop, loading icon, scroll some more, wait, scroll some more, wait."

Hey, at least I can share a specific time-stamp location within the video on Google+ and Facebook!

That is because following the standard semantics of the Web in Javascript is easier than breaking it, while for Flash it was the other way around. Of course that does not mean that every JS powered page is good, or that every Flash powered one was bad, and ironically it does mean that the more JS, the worse it tends to be, but the more Flash, the better it used to be.

Building a usable experience in Flash was possible, but sufficiently difficult that almost none did.

Building a usable experience in JS is significantly easier than it was in Flash, though sadly still seems to be sufficiently difficult that too few do. The ratio of usable JavaScript apps is a lot higher than it was for flash, but is still a minority. It is at least an improvement though, if an incremental one.

At the start of 2005, I was helping lead a team build a highly interactive experience for a major car company using Macromedia Flash and Flex 2. When we launched the site we had full cross-browser pixel accuracy, fully supported URL deep-linking, bookmarking, page history navigation, web crawling, keyboard navigation, screen reading support, interactive video, highly animated experiences and even had fully integrated web mapping using a beta version of Microsofts first interactive map tech (it eventually became branded as Bing maps).

What we built then was possible only because of Flash, there was no way we could have created the complete experience in JS/HTML/CSS. Granted, we could have done a lot of it in native web tech (and in some cases, we had to under the hood), but to make it fully pixel accurate cross-browser would be tripled the dev & testing time. On top of that, some of the features would have been impossible without Flash.

Let's recall where we were in 2005. Chrome was still 3 years away (it was released in 2008), Firefox was still version 1.0 (1.5 didn't release until Nov. of that year), Gmail was just released into beta (you had to have a friend to get access), Google Maps was still in an experimental beta and was truly pushing the boundaries of what JS/HTML could do. The browser history API didn't exist so we had to do crazy iFrame hacks to create deep-links and history (this was true of any app, no matter what tech). There was no video in browsers without a plugin (HTML5 spec wasn't finalized until Oct. 2015). There was no such thing as CSS animations, they got their first release in Firefox 5 (June 2011).

So, were Flash apps trash? Absolutely, but not all of them. That's like claiming that modern browsers solve it all. We still have massive load times (look at how much time and effort is put into optimizing content delivery), the cross-browser and backward compatibility is a nightmare, and way more of a challenge then it ever has been. In some ways, modern web development is much better than Flash development was, but to be perfectly frank, we have a LONG way to go. Honestly, we haven't caught up to where Flash was 14 years ago.

But, we are getting there for sure. I can see why Steve Klabnik is so excited about WASM. I can envision where it is going and it reminds me of where Flash was trying to go before it was slaughtered by Adobe. It's an exciting time for sure, but we should also look back at where we came from and instead of just stating Flash is trash and it caused the web to be terrible, we should also look at what it did right and what it allowed us to create before we throw it out with the bathwater.

So... nice one there, green user. You really got'em!

But Flash games were a boon. Everyone with an idea was able to make it into a game. I spent a lot of time playing games in Kongregate and similar sites. Many were really interesting, well worth the effort of sifting through the rip-offs and trash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeKX2bNP7QM

The internet speeds were much slower then, the difference mattered a lot. Also note, from the description:

"Sadly, it's not possible to replicate the pop-up mouse-overs from the "Special Edition" - though I was able to append the "deleted scene" presented in that version. If you want to see that version - or the "Fire BAD!" flash video game where you attempt to extinguish flames on James Hetfield (tragedy + time = humor), you'll have to find the original .SWF files and have a way to play them."

Spend time watching some of each year's WWDC talks and noting how much effort Apple engineers give to fine-tune certain APIs to enable app developers to optimize battery use, disk access, or graphics rendering. State-of the art stuff. And then your Electron app just ignores all of that.

Manually targeting multiple platforms is really hard. How could one person possibly keep track of all the battery-saving API changes in OSX, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Android?

Yeah, it's annoying that Electron apps are so bloated. But the alternative would be > 50% of people can't use those apps at all because you only targeted one platform.

Which I tend to do, particularly since that "one platform" is almost always either Windows or macOS, neither of which I use on a daily basis (and neither of which I have any desire to use on a daily basis).

Meanwhile, there's such a thing as cross-platform GUI applications that don't try to fit an entire web browser into them. Especially if your programming language of choice doesn't require precompilation, frameworks/toolkits like Qt and GTK and Tk are perfectly viable for cross-platform development, at least on the desktop (which is usually where folks are using the likes of Electron or CEF anyway). They also tend to perform significantly better and stay much closer to the look-and-feel of the rest of the operating system (no, I don't care if you think you know better than me about my sense of style; if your app doesn't respect the look-and-feel of the rest of my system, then it sticks out like mold on a slice of Wonder Bread).

I don't think any of them target HTML/JS, though.

You don't. You just use system-provided APIs and get the improvements for free whenever the system frameworks are updated to be more efficient.

I'm not saying everything should be Electron, but it certainly has usecases just like native does.

But what's your game plan under other circumstances? Do nothing?

Just because an enterprise has funding doesn't mean it's wealthy in other, more scarce things like organizational capital. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if all the client developers at Slack would love to split off into dedicated platform teams and do a rewrite. We as developers love that shit.

But you should try to understand why these enterprises make these trade-offs and why they are still in these positions in spite of how much disposable money you think they have.

Electron wrappers for originally web apps, on the other hand, are usually horrible user experiences—often they don’t even support right-clicking elements, or clicking on links to open them in a browser.

No, they don't. Ever tried to drag and drop into an Electron app? How about used VoiceOver?

I don't think more than a handful of the games and little videos that I enjoyed as a kid on newgrounds and addicting games would have been made had they not had such a low barrier to creation.

I do kernel/firmware development now, so I'll be the first to admit that this value proposition isn't valid for all domains. But sometimes, for some use cases, just having a simple to use scripting environment is totally the way to go. Particularly if it's sandboxed well and can't really harm the end user.

Flash for the win! Till the day I die.

AS3 was amazing. When Typescript came out, it was a lot like AS3. I was convinced and became a believer in TS and never looked back.

In those days there was no notion of SPA or other contemporary well-established patterns for online interaction.

I authored several commercial sites using Shockwave and the like and it enabled us to give clients the ability to author media-rich and design-heavy presentations in a fashion they were familiar with from card decks applications. At the time doing so in a 'sexy' way made them stand out.

It was a cul de sac, but it was a worthwhile direction to test in terms of UX.

That it was proprietary was weighted differently in those days. The world was dominated by closed standards and open source was still vestigial especially in commercial applications.

https://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actions...

Not arguing with you about the rest. As a web developer I still haven't made a website in the last 5 years that was as visually impressive as my Flash projects from before, and sometimes I miss the visuals....

But people forget that the AWESOME intro that you wait two minutes of loading to see... is only cool the first couple times. Many many people where losing 5 minutes of loading time, just to visit websites that they used EVERY day.

By virtue of being installed on 98% of all computers, Flash video was a de facto standard video target. One that could be played on Linux without getting into legal grey areas too!

Without Flash looming over them, IE would never have supported cross-platform video - this would have been Microsoft undermining the WMP format.

I think that we would have gotten there eventually, but probably not as fast. The close - but not quite good enough - implementation of video in Flash was as much of a catalyst as it was a crutch to lean upon.

I agree with you that it's a little sad that amateur animation fell a bit out of vogue, but the tools are right there for anyone whos interested to pick up.

I have memories of being wowed by what creative people could do with flash in the 90s and I would not call that amateur animation. I think the problem (1) is we currently seem to be lacking in tools that let people skilled in the visual arts create things without knowledge of the mechanics, so to speak. It's like if in order to write a great song someone would first have to understand how a musical instrument is built. I would not call Amanda Palmer or Lee Ranaldo amateur yet I bet they probably can't build their own instruments.

(1) I must make the disclaimer that for a couple of decades already I've been working only on the backend, so I may surely be missing part of the picture here.

Edit: Fixed footnote mark.

And I know there are still issues. Given today's speed, issues are more about security and accessibility.

My point was just that the artists using flash to create good content were not amateur animators.

Edit: My point was wrong as it was based on a misunderstanding of the use of the word 'amateur' by the person I was replying to.

[1] https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=buf&product=N0R&over...

[2] https://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=BUF&product=N0R&over...

[3] https://radar.weather.gov/Conus/northeast_loop.php

I spent hundreds of hours in Photoshop as a teen, but I likely would’ve have bothered with it at all if it weren’t easily piratable.

That's a problem generally with cloud services. Pricing is mostly done considering some countries and contexts, but totally ignoring other. With physical equivalents some years ago, local distributors made deals with their home offices to adjust for this, but that's not something usually done anymore.

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

Taking a step back, man what a different world it was back then. I'd fire up MS Frontpage or Macromedia Dreamweaver and go to town. The expectations have changed on the maintainability, usability, and functionality parts so I understand why we are where we are today. Both I do miss those simple days.

Steve Jobs and browser security holes killed Flash, and no current open web platform covers all the use cases mxml and AS3 covered for cross-browser development. I could analyze audio channels, run lightweight process concurrency via green-threading, store user files, do i81n translation, streaming websockets and work with actual binary data types in the browser in 2006. I could trigger actions based on events in video and audio streams. I had consistently applied css with animations across components in 2006. I had reusable web components in 206. It's now 2018 and we still don't have cross-browser support for all of that. Oh, and I could run my app on the desktop in offline mode and in the browser.

Security was an issue. Looking back now, I think an Android-like permissions scheme is what it, and the browser, needs to fulfill the promise of write once run anywhere that the browser and the web tends to make.

It was heavily based off ES5, which really helped launch my Javascript abilities forward at the time. I was sad to see it go and ended up working with other technology that never felt as fun.

I remembered recently that Haxe was initially based off of MTASC (something I used in the later AS3 days), and checked it out. It's quite a stable ecosystem that feels very familiar in syntax. Add in HaxeFlixel, and it's almost like Flash never left.

flash was a good tool for the websites they used to create, usually graphics and animation heavy websites low on interactivity. they used the export function to generate the swf including the html index page to embed it.

over the years focus shifted more and more to dynamic websites with content generated from databases and they were mostly lost there. dynamic content (loaded by http requests from databases) in flash usually turned into a huge pain in the ass after a while. for those projects we switched to a traditional website model where dynamic content mostly wasn't loaded into flash, instead it was a html-by-php website where flash animations replaced header jpegs (i.e. animated passive content).

so, in our case, flash was a good replacement for animated and slightly interactive but not dynamically generated content.

A lot of users did, too. But it was usually along the lines of "Oh, wow. This page has flash. Well, I guess I'll go get a Coke while the Flash plugin loads into the browser and my computer can't go anything else. If I'm lucky, the whole thing won't crash and take all my work with it by the time I get back."

We romanticize the past.

Java applets OTOH had the exact experience you describe. Those were absolutely terrible.

Not really. Action Script has always been close to Javascript/JScript.Net and now Typescript, it is the same syntax. In fact ActionScript 3 was supposed to be the template for ECMASCRIPT 4, before it was abandoned.

Not Adobe Edge was killed dead, it was not rolled into Adobe Animate. Edge did export animation with jQuery and DOM element, while Adobe Animate exports animations in pure canvas.

https://tumult.com/hype/pro/

But it would still come with many of the drawbacks.

is supposed to be an implementation of the Flash VM in typescript, But it can't even run in latest Firefox browser anymore apparently and no commits from 2 years.