Re:QuakeJS – A Quake Port to JavaScript with Emscripten
by jchw on Monday April 06, 2020 @05:07PM
(#22797890)
iPhone never had Flash I don’t believe. I was an Android user at the time and the only way Flash on my device could be described is in terms of locomotive incidents. Flash games and applications almost worked, although virtually none of them were responsively designed, and they mostly worked pretty poorly with touch controls, and unlike HTML there was no way to reasonably work around or improve this at the browser level, because it was just a big proprietary black box.
Worse than this was sites that used Flash in non-essential ways like ads. If you had Flash enabled on a blog or other site that just happened to pop up a flash ad, it would make the whole page janky, greatly hurting pan and zoom functionality and killing your battery life for no benefit.
Worst of all, Flash frequently crashed my browser and sometimes even caused the entire phone to reboot.
Phones now have better CPUs and GPUs and I am relieved beyond words that Flash is totally dead now. It was never ideal for what it was most popular for (videos, streams) which only became apparent after the alternatives stabilized. But even for games and other software, I just don’t think the NPAPI browser plugin model was worth keeping. Would the problems with touch usability and accessibility be resolved at some point? Maybe I don’t know - I presume Adobe Air was able to do it for native apps, although my experience with Adobe Air apps was also not very good.
J2ME may have been not the most thrilling platform, but I’d not be surprised if it had a better security track record at the end of the day. I disabled Flash before most people, and was using a userscript to use the then-new and buggy <video> tag for YouTube. I still, before that point, had been personally hit by a Flash 0day, and a couple of my friends got hit later by a malicious Mediafire Flash payload. There was a period of time where it felt like there was a new use-after-free in Flash every month. And when you look at all of the functionality stacked into this unsandboxed blackbox to keep it competitive and alive, I don’t feel it’s terribly surprising.
I don’t enjoy everything about the bloated platform that is the modern web, but the design of it is a lot more sound. It’s designed more as a platform than a product. You get a lot of totally brand new functionality, like WebRTC, that just wasn’t really going to happen with Flash.
Flash had to die. It wasn’t a part of the web platform, it was part of an Adobe product that was shoehorned into web browsers. If it has a good legacy, I reckon it will mostly be from nostalgia fueled denial.
Worse than this was sites that used Flash in non-essential ways like ads. If you had Flash enabled on a blog or other site that just happened to pop up a flash ad, it would make the whole page janky, greatly hurting pan and zoom functionality and killing your battery life for no benefit.
Worst of all, Flash frequently crashed my browser and sometimes even caused the entire phone to reboot.
Phones now have better CPUs and GPUs and I am relieved beyond words that Flash is totally dead now. It was never ideal for what it was most popular for (videos, streams) which only became apparent after the alternatives stabilized. But even for games and other software, I just don’t think the NPAPI browser plugin model was worth keeping. Would the problems with touch usability and accessibility be resolved at some point? Maybe I don’t know - I presume Adobe Air was able to do it for native apps, although my experience with Adobe Air apps was also not very good.
J2ME may have been not the most thrilling platform, but I’d not be surprised if it had a better security track record at the end of the day. I disabled Flash before most people, and was using a userscript to use the then-new and buggy <video> tag for YouTube. I still, before that point, had been personally hit by a Flash 0day, and a couple of my friends got hit later by a malicious Mediafire Flash payload. There was a period of time where it felt like there was a new use-after-free in Flash every month. And when you look at all of the functionality stacked into this unsandboxed blackbox to keep it competitive and alive, I don’t feel it’s terribly surprising.
I don’t enjoy everything about the bloated platform that is the modern web, but the design of it is a lot more sound. It’s designed more as a platform than a product. You get a lot of totally brand new functionality, like WebRTC, that just wasn’t really going to happen with Flash.
Flash had to die. It wasn’t a part of the web platform, it was part of an Adobe product that was shoehorned into web browsers. If it has a good legacy, I reckon it will mostly be from nostalgia fueled denial.