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In other words, they are implicitly telling us that we should archive their entire site... although I suspect the IA has already done so.

The only thing really bad about Flash was the security, but otherwise it is an extremely efficient vector/animation format that AFAIK none of the "open standards" have managed to come close to. Seeing Flash disappear, only to be replaced by SVG (yuck!), JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, was extremely disturbing.

(I have written a SWF to PDF converter. Parsing the format itself is quite straightforward, I could've probably written most of a player if I went further and added the interactive stuff too.)




Security, the fact that it was a closed standard, touchscreen support, battery life... most of the issues brought up by Steve Jobs are still valid: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/


the fact that it was a closed standard

The standard has been freely available for over a decade now.

touchscreen support

That's an implementation issue.

battery life

Also an implementation issue. Jobs was talking only about video, but I bet the "instruction path length" from reading a file to rendering a vector graphic is probably an order of magnitude if not more for a browser reading an SVG than Flash reading a SWF.

Those who have played Flash games will likely remember its very acceptable performance on a sub-GHz processor with 128MB of RAM or less. I don't think the HTML5 equivalent in a modern browser would even work on such a system.

That said, it was much better when it was Macromedia Flash, i.e. after Adobe bought it they bloated it greatly (which is where most of the security problems came from.)




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