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A comment on HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash. Parent comment

Re:HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash by ryandrake on Wednesday December 30, 2020 @11:03PM (#25589460)
Reminds me of a conversation with a coworker in around 1999: Me: “I wish [our product] was cross platform. It would be more enjoyable to develop.” Him (without a shred of sarcasm): “It IS cross platform! It runs on NT and 95!”
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Re:HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash by RcouF1uZ4gsC on Thursday December 31, 2020 @12:50AM (#25589978)
> It would be more enjoyable to develop

In my experience, cross-platform is less enjoyable to develop. Yes, it might be more valuable to users for a program to be cross-platform, but it is definitely more enjoyable to develop something that just has to run on a single platform.

For cross-platform work, you have to use languages, runtimes, and libraries that are supported across multiple platforms.

When you are doing single platform work, you can use all the cross-platform languages and libraries and tools, plus all the other languages, libraries and tools that are on the single platform.

I suspect the difference was even more stark in 1999 because Windows was even more dominant than it is now.

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Re:HTML5 still doesn't replicate what mattered about Flash by mgkimsal on Thursday December 31, 2020 @10:56AM (#25593793)
It might be 'more enjoyable' to develop, but certainly not to test, which... for many people, seems to be something wholly separate from 'development'.
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