Re:Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before the...
by nrdvana on Sunday October 12, 2025 @06:48PM
(#45562763)
Maybe at rendering menus and documents, but flash had graphic routines written in optimized assembly that simply weren't possible with JavaScript on that era of hardware.
I feel like people are talking past each other a bit here. FlashScript was never very fast, and rendering a document as a giant collection of bezier curves was not fast, but the people doing animations with it were getting the equivalent of modern day CSS3 animations + SVG, and it ran nicely on hardware two orders of magnitude slower than what we need for CSS3+SVG
Of course modern computers are orders of magnitude more powerful! But Flash was definitely generally worse compared on the same hardware and network stack compared to vanilla (non-plugin based) web tech.