The amount of hoops you have to jump through to run something interactive in Unity is mind-boggling by comparison (without even talking about sharing that thing with another human on another computer). Processing was also pretty good at the first bit, but it wasn't as tuned to games and sharing your stuff was pretty awful (java applets).

Just because I <3 Flash doesn't mean it didn't have security problems, though. I wish someone had bought the tech off of Adobe and turned it into a gaming platform a-la Steam with proper input support.

Flash also got used for a lot of other things and in a lot of cases it was basically to add in functionality that wasn't supported by native web standards yet. This was why entire websites were built in flash. Because it gave you the freedom to do things that you just couldn't do with regular HTML/JS.

If the point the author wants to make is that creating games in HTML/JS is more cumbersome because there isn't one authoring tool that is used by everybody and has a comprehensive toolset, maybe that's true I don't know. But I definitely prefer this reality to a reality where Flash is still being used in 2020.

When you think about all the challenges the web faced early on, with all the attempted browser lock in and stuff like Flash, we got pretty lucky that things are fully open now.

And because HTML/JS are open and not proprietary, the people whining about it are free to take a shot at creating their own authoring software for games without having to worry about getting anybody's permission or getting sued by a company that owns the rights to JavaScript.

I will say, I think the niche of browser games played by kids is now taken up by phone games from a consumer perspective. I'm not sure even if an easy way to create them existed that they'd be nearly as popular.

Where we are now is that the lock in is so wide that basically everyone is running Chrome, including its competitors.

When google announced the "Manifest v3" thing, which does impact ad blockers, people cried, but nothing happened.

Yes, the standards are theoretically open, but concretely nobody else can keep up, Google-the-server launches X and Google-the-client implements it, and than they propose standardizing it but move on anyway, and everybody else plays catchup.

It's not worse than closed source Flash, but it's huge lock in anyway.

That is for me the right way to frame it. Both flash and the web lost out to mobile. Neither managed to get a sufficient foothold there, and in practice people’s primary computing experience is now through fully proprietary apps distributed through vendor-controlled walled garden app stores.

The technical qualities of the underlying platforms didn’t matter all that much. Mobile platform vendors have control, and they made sure native apps made with their tools distributed through their store was the easier path. Apple could have improved safari’s progressive web apps ability to the point that it became a feasible alternative to making native iOS apps, but they didn’t, so people simply stopped trying to shoehorn web apps onto mobile platforms.

Apple didn’t kill flash to replace it with html5, they killed it to replace it with their own proprietary tech. I’m not sure they intended it that way, but they definitely intend to keep it that way (witness for example how web notifications are in safari on desktop but not mobile).

So from a user's standpoint, things have become better not worse – they don't have to compromise security or accept horrible battery life in doing so.

From the developer's standpoint, things have improved too – they don't have to depend on niche toolchains and they have better monetization options today than ever before. For small game studios it is easier to find mainstream developers who can do game development rather than only those willing to master niche toolchains.

The side-effect of using mainstream toolchains is it has more moving parts and hence has more complexity (that is unnecessary at a solo developer scale).

I agree that the learning curve has become harder a creative arts designer who wants to be a solo game developer to express their creativity.

So maybe the real question is what are the accessible mediums in which creative digital artists put out their hobby/amateur work today?

Battery life wasn't really a thing I worried about before smartphones came along, so I'm not sure that's super relevant (although, if you want to pick that fight, Unity on mobile is a real battery killer). Security was rough, but I think I'd trade a bit of security to ditch the walled gardens we have today.

I do think things are better in most ways for users. Because Flash portals didn't require a download, it was MUCH easier to try new things. This led to a virtuous cycle of people making weird shit. Because so much game content is gated behind app stores these days, you have to download a thing and then wade through permission/notification screens and it's too much of a cognitive burden compared to "oh, that looks neat." (Toss on that app stores are horrible for discovery). I think the way most people discover (mobile) games these days is through ads, and if a game is running ads they're a large company with plans to extract $5-$10+ out of you...

So we've traded big catalogues of free games with crappy banner ads for walled gardens that depend on ads for discovery of exploitative IAP skinner boxes.

I miss flash games and scene that existed around it. Including free aspect of it and ease of development of it. I do not care about complex games game studios put out.

It struck a perfect balance between static and dynamic typing, had all the OOP you wanted, but FP too.

Also, e4x and data binding in Flex was magical.

It could be a combination of both - the tooling for creating that stuff with just JS/HTML is not as good and the diminished demand prevents the creation of such a product.

The simple format made it easy to upload content both for the portal and the developer. The tools made it easy to get started and to grow. The funding made it easy to start, find your footing, and stick around long enough to get good and eventually great.

As the format was attacked and HTML5 didn't work well with the old tools, and as Steve Jobs pushed app stores forward, it all came crashing down.

I saw it happen in real time, these forces evolved together.

The internet is a much less interesting place without it, and the amount of ceremony required to replicate in HTML5 what any Tom, Dick or Harry could slap together with Flash is insane.

We have regressed here.

And then reflect on why there are zero tools for the great collection of technologies collectively called HTML5 that have Flash's timeline tools, independent keyframe animations etc. etc.

It's nonsense to say that "HTML5/JS has [...] gotten worse". It's not a vendor SDK where platform version X doesn't support feature from version because the platform hired a new head of the design team who wants to shake things up by ditching the previous gen for the new shiny that you have to use instead. Web platform standardization is additive. If the new stuff sucks, don't use it, and keep doing things the "old" way. Don't do dumb stuff like trying to stay on the bleeding edge for no good reason and then complain when you get cut.

It's also a total contradiction to double back after all of this and try to claim that HTML5/JS is "programmer-centric". To go further and say that "Flash was content-first" is something all on its own. Standard web tech is content-first in a way that Flash never was, or more accurately, it's user-first. Flash on the other hand was always creator-first, prioritizing authors'/designers' pixel-perfect vision over users and accessibility, and the tacit endorsement of the worldview that the ends justify the means and that it's okay to favor blobs over, you know, content—which is ironically exactly what's wrong with the current world of SPAs driven by inscrutable minified bundles on the order of megabytes just to do something like put half a dozen form controls on a page that still doesn't manage state correctly.