The death of Flash feels like the start of a dark age for web design when you compare what came before with what came now.
People romanticize Flash these days. Especially people who weren't old enough to struggle with it.
Used improperly – as it very often was – Flash was a resource hog far beyond even the craziest of today's web sites. In many circumstances it could actually crash your computer. Not just the browser, but the entire machine. Sure, the operating system and the browser were complicit, but I'm not going to blame a broken window for not being bulletproof. Plus, it seemed like there was forever update after update after update every time you tried to view a fancy web site. Updating plugins isn't a big deal today. It was a big deal when it happened over a 56k dialup connection.
Can you imagine someone today thinking, "Oh, this looks like an interesting web site. I'd better close every other window and program on my computer, so it doesn't crash." It's unthinkable.
I hate that today's web sites are all boring and desaturated and flat. But I love that I can browse the web and keep a dozen other programs open and doing work at the same time.
Watching all of the new things people are doing with canvas and WebGPU and whatnot makes me think we're heading back to the bad old days of Flash. It seems like an arms race between people who want to turn a browser into an operating system, and browser makers trying to keep everything tidy.
I miss the creative explosions of Flash games. Even with Canvas and WASM today there is nothing which comes close.
My favourite casual puzzler was made in Flash and published in 2010, the same year, Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash".
Thankfully then the developers developed a sequel as an iOS app which took advantage of the iPhones sensor. In 2010 in looked for a short time that creative iPhone games could take the crown of Flash. The sequel died in the 32bitocalpse of iOS 9.
I never developed with Flash, but I grew up on Flash media, in particular old Newgrounds Flash games / movies. I remember some of the pains of the day. The fact that Flash media usually came with a loading bar is seems quaint compared to now when websites are expected to load in mere seconds.
To some extent I'm glad we live in a time where websites are lean and efficient for the reasons you mentioned, but man, I miss the days when the internet was actually worth exploring.
Yes, I loved Flash and ActionScript as a designer, but later viewed it as indistinguishable from malware as an IT support tech. It was frankly the worst, in terms of security whack-a-mole, and because it required patching so frequently, opened up a ton of genuinely malicious actors who could trick even competent people into clicking and installing malware.
The technology was, and still is, amazing. It's unmatched by anything in the modern days. Supposed modern replacements require you to write non-trivial code just to get started, while flash introduced programming very gently. You could get reasonably far with just `goToAndStop(frame)`.
The official implementation, on the other hand, was terrible. Thankfully Ruffle exists. It's written in Rust and at this point it flawlessly plays most of my flash game collection. Now if only we had open-source flash authoring software...
Flash may have been a resource hog in the single-core CPU age, but we have computers today that are much faster, yet Google Chrome is the botleneck, using up gigabytes upon gigabytes of RAM to render a few tabs worth of text and images.
The modern "replacement" for Flash, things like WebGL and three.js are also pretty slow on modern machines. Speed isn't hamstrung by the tool, it's hamstrung by the people that made something with said tool.
People romanticize Flash these days. Especially people who weren't old enough to struggle with it.
Used improperly – as it very often was – Flash was a resource hog far beyond even the craziest of today's web sites. In many circumstances it could actually crash your computer. Not just the browser, but the entire machine. Sure, the operating system and the browser were complicit, but I'm not going to blame a broken window for not being bulletproof. Plus, it seemed like there was forever update after update after update every time you tried to view a fancy web site. Updating plugins isn't a big deal today. It was a big deal when it happened over a 56k dialup connection.
Can you imagine someone today thinking, "Oh, this looks like an interesting web site. I'd better close every other window and program on my computer, so it doesn't crash." It's unthinkable.
I hate that today's web sites are all boring and desaturated and flat. But I love that I can browse the web and keep a dozen other programs open and doing work at the same time.
Watching all of the new things people are doing with canvas and WebGPU and whatnot makes me think we're heading back to the bad old days of Flash. It seems like an arms race between people who want to turn a browser into an operating system, and browser makers trying to keep everything tidy.