Re:Flash Player is about to stop working on Windows 10
by userbinator on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @10:07PM
(#25589155)
Jobs' rant about Flash was really a good example of "shooting the messenger".
Flash is an intrinsically more efficient format; it was designed back when 56k modems were the norm, and computers far less powerful, so SWF made use of lots of interesting tricks to squeeze the most of out the platform and be extremely simple to parse.
Those who remember playing Flash games will definitely know just how much computing power they needed --- a fraction of that needed for today's "equivalent" with HTML/CSS/JS.
You will never get close to that level of efficiency with HTML/JS/CSS, although they are certainly trying with things like WASM.
I say this as someone who has implemented a significant part of a SWF player, including parts of the AS2 VM.
Flash is an intrinsically more efficient format; it was designed back when 56k modems were the norm, and computers far less powerful, so SWF made use of lots of interesting tricks to squeeze the most of out the platform and be extremely simple to parse.
Those who remember playing Flash games will definitely know just how much computing power they needed --- a fraction of that needed for today's "equivalent" with HTML/CSS/JS.
You will never get close to that level of efficiency with HTML/JS/CSS, although they are certainly trying with things like WASM.
I say this as someone who has implemented a significant part of a SWF player, including parts of the AS2 VM.