Some of you might remember when a 3mb flash animation could pack in some 5 minutes of animation, with the more advanced ones even having chapter/scene selectors, which could also include clickable easter eggs and other kinds of interactions during the scenes.
The demise of Flash didn't bring any big HTML5/JS equivalent for watching animations; fast internet and better video compression made those types of animations become raster videos as well
a year ago by I Cast Fist to c/showerthoughts
ICastFist 22 points a year ago
My nostalgic sigh is about animations that became rasterized videos, thus losing any chance at being interactive or hiding easter eggs.
I am glad we no longer have sites made in pure flash, but now we have different stupid shit that also blocks back/forward navigation, fucks up scroll bars, hogs the CPU and crashes the browser for no good reason.
paraphrand 12 points a year ago
Those last things you listed were all true of Flash too:
- Back forward buttons, working in a flash site?
- Scroll bars? Same thing.
- CPU usage? Same thing. (See: phone performance.)
- Crashes? It was the number one cause of crashes as reported by Apple when looking at their Safari crash logs. This was true of many plugins of that style from back in the day (being unstable).
CovfefeKills 1 point a year ago
You aren't appealing much inter-intra-frame compressions are famous with conspiracy theories doubt you can keep up with that shit if you are harping on 3mb in 2025
twinklefruit 6 points a year ago path: 0 19805030 19817551, hotness: undefined, score: 6, children: 0
PixelatedSaturn 0 points a year ago
You are wrong. You probably never used it. There is no such tools to develop apps like was possible with flash.
The argument that you can do with x technology today the same thing makes no sense. Today you have to be a skilled programer to do the same stuff and it might still work worse today as it did back then.
HTML5 is nowhere near as capable. Webgl . Is there a graphical tool to use it? JavaScript tool? Dumbass Lottie files tools that cost 20$ per month and suck.
And if you were a good programer in flash/flex, you could build apps just as stable as you can today.
It's stupid that tech like this doesn't exist. Except for dumbass Rive - again 45$ per month and it sucks
PixelatedSaturn -1 points a year ago
That's just a web ide. Flash was a vector tool where you could for animate and also code.
leftzero 9 points a year ago
It's not an IDE; p5.js is a programming language (originally based on Processing) intended to be easy to learn, and focused on making it easy for non-programmers to create art.
You can use it to make anything you could make with Flash, and more (since it's not limited to vector animations).
For instance, here's itch.io's page for games made in this language.
CovfefeKills -1 points a year ago
I specifically stated 'modern web tech you don't bother with' for a reason. These ecosystems are bigger than random assholes with random asshole opinions.
PixelatedSaturn 1 point a year ago
Yes, a lot of assholes around trying to find any possible, no matter how absurd way to insult people about the most pointless stuff.
CovfefeKills -1 points a year ago
Push shove friction creates fire and fire it what gets it fucking done. A local aspect of my: Aussie
frezik 44 points a year ago
There is, SVG with <animate>. It's just not that common.
There's a lot more tooling for creating rasterized videos than SVG. Flash had a whole development environment around it. SVG is comparatively rubbing sticks together to make fire.
KingOfTheCouch 29 points a year ago
A lot of comments on here saying "but X is better". Y'all are missing the point though. These "better technologies" are not being used in the creative and fun ways that flash was - not to the scale that we saw in peak Newgrounds/HomestarRunner era. It goes to show that no one company should ever control tools and the stuff our works are built upon. A lesson we, as a society, sure struggle to learn.
Don't get me wrong, my rose tinted glasses aren't all the way on. I remember critical infrastructure systems developed in flash of all fucking things.
But a very real piece of the creative internet died with flash. Maybe it's a coincidence, and it's the corpo-sites we all congregate around now to blame. I don't know. Peak internet was 2000-2010 and I'll stake my flag on that hill - don't @ me.
ivanafterall 3 points a year ago
kcongregate
Quazatron 27 points a year ago
As a desktop Linux use, Flash was a pain in my existence.
That shitty plugin that never worked right in Linux because fuck Linux users, amiright?
Then whole sites were written in Flash, hurting web interoperability and degrading standards. Of course many public services, banks, followed the trend because shiny.
Fuck those dark ages. The day that shit died was a good day indeed.
I harbor hate for not many things, but Flash is one of them.
winkerjadams 7 points a year ago
That name brings up repressed memories. Curse you for making me remember that abominable software
toddestan 2 points a year ago
I actually had some hope for that because we needed something to break the Flash monopoly, and I trusted Microsoft slightly more than I trust Adobe.
However, it never went anywhere because everyone expected Microsoft was just going to kill it, and of course Microsoft killed it, and that was that.
UnculturedSwine 6 points a year ago
Like zombo com where you can do anything. The only limit is yourself.
insomniac_lemon 1 point a year ago
I had some (but not much) issue back when I used Chrome (although IIRC just as much was a mime-type issue not letting them play in the browser) and still use the standalone player without issue.
I don't think anyone is defending Flash used for websites, aside from some personal blog or portfolio maybe.
owenfromcanada 23 points a year ago
Watching Homestar Runner on YouTube doesn't hit the same
ICastFist 6 points a year ago
I vaguely remember one of the animations had Homestar pouring soda in the ending screen. After a while (30s?) he'd comment on how it had a lot more soda than it looked. The closest equivalent is a post-credit gags, but it's not the same thing
MelodiousFunk 5 points a year ago
🎶The never ending sooooooddaaaaaa...🎵
owenfromcanada 4 points a year ago
Appwy liberawy!
village604 4 points a year ago
This reminds me that I need to bug my wife to touch up my Trogdor tattoo (she was a professional artist before the economy went tits up)
owenfromcanada 4 points a year ago
Gotta get that tat freshly burninated!
village604 2 points a year ago
The best part is I now have a gnarly scar right under him that looks like a path of burnination. Unrelated, burnination is a real word.
insomniac_lemon 1 point a year ago
They do have Ruffle on their site (a bit slower to load IME, but functional) even for new animations (click on the HR icon, not the Youtube icon).
There are the orginal .SWFs for that, disjointed in their own way. I wish they (or someone) would've merged things so the old menus actually worked, if not further like each file being a season.
EDIT: they did make the games linked together on the website. And now I do see one of the main pages that links too, though the loading screens make it a bit cumbersome (it seems to be tweaked for Ruffle, or at least only the main page seems to work when the .SWF url is loaded in the standalone player ...unless it just can't do linked swfs).
mic_check_one_two 21 points a year ago
I actually use Flash nearly every day at work. Legacy support is no joke. We have a multi-million dollar system that is all controlled by a computer that is dual-booting Win11 and WinXP. Because the control program is coded in Flash. It’s coded in Flash because there are a lot of moving parts, and the program displays their current positions. And dynamically moving objects is like the one thing that Flash does really really well. Instead of trying to re-program it in a new language, the manufacturer just fucking ships WinXP. Win11 is on another partition, and is only booted when you need to connect to the internet to run firmware updates on the various motors.
ExtremeUnicorn 3 points a year ago
Flash was always broken, as any Adobe software...
GreenMartian 6 points a year ago
Except they weren't always Adobe.
Wispy2891 5 points a year ago
Even in 2004 using adobe flash to control some industrial system was an ugly hacks
When the developer cares way more design than function
I saw some ultra fancy quotation tool that was simply a PDF with JavaScript, and it would just open adobe reader in full screen. Yes, you made it so fancy because you could use complex vectors in the background and multiple pages, and by doing this the fancy UI part was done way faster, but good luck maintaining that mess over the years
A_norny_mousse 20 points a year ago
Wasn't it also proprietary, and you needed Adobe software to create it?
Flash animations have a rather specific usecase imho, as your example proves. It's not a game, it's not a movie, it's (usually) more than a simple animated loop.
There's no exact equivalent for that, but the www has developed way beyond it in all aspects.
PixelatedSaturn 6 points a year ago
At the beginning it was. Later you could write it in code it was oop. Later there was an offshoot called flex that was even more capable.
OsrsNeedsF2P 11 points a year ago
Did it really though? Ruffle is a reimplantation of Flash in Rust, and is available as a browser extension. Anything short of malicious swf files will play. So it seems that any "security issues" were clearly mitigatable.
PixelatedSaturn 1 point a year ago
Not true. It was not about that.
PixelatedSaturn 1 point a year ago
It was proprietary, apple hated it because it wanted to sell apps. And Google followed that model.
insomniac_lemon 2 points a year ago
I wouldn't say it died, I remember years of people calling it dead but it still seemed to have communities up until support was forcibly removed in 2021. I'd say it was killed, in a very "bring out your dead" ("I'm getting better!") fashion.
Like OP is saying, it wasn't really* replaced. If vector video was in HTML5 spec to the point you could watch (non-prerastered) vector animations on Youtube (or former Flash sites similar to what Ruffle does, but with less overhead) that would still be abandoning the interactivity but I'd at least see the argument that there was some attempt to replace it.
Needing a local server and the lack of container format also makes preservation messier.
* sure, a subset of it was replaced for popular usage and even some of it is still technically possible, but good luck with that. I'm pretty sure communities around that are more dead than Flash was before the end, and maybe even still (for instance, NG with Flash Forward jams).
PeriodicallyPedantic 17 points a year ago
The problem isn't animation - as you said there is raster video and also animated SVGs.
The problem is that there is no way to package interactive content like there was. Flash wasn't just animation, it was also games. And even flash animations often had interactive bits, like homestar runner Easter eggs.
You can technically do it with JavaScript and HTML, but it's difficult now and unfeasible back when flash died. Not only did the tools not exist, but html didn't even have things like canvas yet for the tools to use.
squaresinger 5 points a year ago
That's not really true. You can do animation in HTML5 just like you could in flash. In fact, there are even quite a few ways you can acomplish the same.
- HTML5 + JS
- CSS + JS
- There are multiple flash player projects running in WASM or JS
- Animated SVG + JS
All of that allows for animation, games and interactivity, no problem.
There are dozens of tools that allow you to build flash-like animation and package it easily. Tons of game engines allow to export to HTML5, just at the press of a button. And there are still websites hosting browser games that fill that spot. There's even HTML5 browser games that run in VR.
But there are two big caveats:
- With much more performance, storage and internet bandwidth, there's no reason to go for flash-style skeletal animations. That's not because it's not possible, but because we have better alternatives.
- Nobody hosts their own websites anymore and most platforms (large ones like Youtube, Facebook or Reddit, but also small ones like Lemmy) don't allow you to just upload whatever HTML5 code you want. So if you want to reach more people, you'll just upload a video instead.
PeriodicallyPedantic 2 points a year ago
Sorry if this sounds a bit defensive, it's frustrating when someone writes a novel telling you're wrong but didn't spend the time to read what you wrote first.
I didn't say it's not possible.
I said that back when flash functionally died, it wasn't feasible.
HTML 5 was barely supported by browsers. HTML 5 canvas had no support at all. WASM didn't have any support. Having flash animators and flash game devs manually code the JavaScript and HTML just wasn't realistic, and no tools existed at the time to span the gap.
Now it is a little easier with things like canvas, and more importantly now there are tools that animators can use and export as a webpage.
But in the intervening years, all the flash hosting websites died. Even newgrounds is a ghost of what it was. So even if the tools are there, the communities are all gone. Animators just export to video now, because that's where the viewers are.
squaresinger 1 point a year ago
You mean in 2021 HTML5 was barely supported by browsers? Adobe ended support for Flash Player on 31th December 2020.
For comparison, the original HTML5 W3C recommendation was retired in 2018 and even Version 5.3 was retired less than a month after Flash Player was retired.
PeriodicallyPedantic 1 point a year ago
Functionally. Functionally. I said functionally for a reason. I didn't just add that word in because I liked how it looked.
When was the last time you actually saw flash content?
Browser extension support deteriorated. It never worked on iOS. People stopped making flash content because folks couldn't view it long before it officially became unsupported.
PixelatedSaturn 16 points a year ago
I built websites and apps in flash. It was awesome. You could do a lot, especially in the later years, 3d games, anything was possible.
It was so easy and clean to create smooth animations, transformations, it was limitless. It's a travesty that we got no replacement. You could do more quicker in the year 2005, than you can do today.
magic_smoke 18 points a year ago
All of that is possible with modern JS and WebGL
Really I think a lot of this stems from a toolset designed for programmers, and not one designed for artists.
PixelatedSaturn 6 points a year ago
Sure it's possible, but you can't actually do it. Because you need a dedicated programer and you need to convey as a designer what to do, so it's time consuming and expensive. Elaborate scifi UIs are extremely rare now.
After flash was killed, a big portion of creativity died with it. Every webpage started to look the same. I know I'm romanticizing it, but there is truth in that.
magic_smoke 2 points a year ago
There where just as many cheesy UI's done without flash back in the day. Its because web development became more of a commodity as more people got into it. Everything's been done and the cheapest thing to do is to slap together something using the framework of the month.
These days, with the help of some LLM generating substandard, unchecked code.
cypherpunks 2 points a year ago
Sure it’s possible, but you can’t actually do it. Because you need a dedicated programer
I try to avoid recommending proprietary software but FYI the multimedia authoring tool formerly known as FutureSplash Animator which you presumably knew as Adobe Flash Professional (or perhaps Macromedia Flash before that) in fact lives on today as Adobe Animate and it can now target HTML5/SVG/WebGL/etc.
There are also many free/libre open source alternatives to it.
lichtmetzger 14 points a year ago
That's true, but there is a project called "ruffle" now, which is written in Rust and can play .swf files. So if you really want, you can still build Flash animations and share them online.
Ruffle also runs in browsers, thanks to wasm.
captain_aggravated 13 points a year ago
Streaming video killed whatever Flash was.
Flash took the binary categories of animation and video game and made it into a spectrum. Even when they were mostly animations, there would be some interactive elements. It was apparently a technical horror show, but it was used to create unique pieces of art that define a narrow era.
PixelatedSaturn 4 points a year ago
Nowhere near as capable. It's more difficult and time consuming to develop for worse performance even today.
fruitycoder 11 points a year ago
Web 2.0 and the stiffling of the indie web is the issue to me.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, etc aren't built to cool web pages in front of people as those could leave people off of the site.
There are some crazy cool html5 stuff out there.
ZephyrXero 8 points a year ago
People could use SVG animations + JS to accomplish the same thing. It just never took off for some reason
ICastFist 5 points a year ago
My guess is because there's no "easy to use" program that allows them to make the whole thing then export for easy web visualization, most of the people who'd make animations won't want to write down keyframe positions and code for the animation proper
The_Decryptor 3 points a year ago
They actually did, Flash is still around (now called Animate), and can export to a HTML+JS bundle you can include on your own website.
Problem is nobody uses their own websites these days, and you can't upload stuff like that to Twitter/Facebook/YouTube.
Natanael 4 points a year ago
There were lots of programs for making Flash content though, and there was a lot of knowledge about how to make stuff in it. There isn't the same culture of remixing stuff now. More interactive web games are also more server dependent even for elements where they don't need to be, unlike tons of old standalone flash games
aesthelete 3 points a year ago
This is a great idea for a project honestly.
ICastFist 3 points a year ago
I guess the "easiest" way to approach it is to take a working JS game engine, like pixijs or melonjs or p5js, creating the animation editor with keyframes and whatnot, then allowing it to export as "web animation", which would be the javascript file + compacted resources
aesthelete 4 points a year ago
This sounds very cool. I'm a programmer by profession but used to love drawing animations as a kid. I should try to make something like this.
magic_smoke 7 points a year ago
Interactive Vector Animations as a web standard are technically possible, but it'd be best implemented as animation software that compiles a file/archive that's usable by a standard browser based client that renders things locally using a canvas element.
In-fact its so possible flash has been re-impmenented this way using an action script interpreter compiled to web assembly.
They didn't give you the entire kit because that wasn't the W3C's job, it was to give you the tools necessary to build the kit.
RedStrider 5 points a year ago
I've seen quite a few kids embed Scratch projects into their websites, which I guess is actually a pretty close approximation of Flash. Stupid easy to use, vector based, customizable with forks, tiny file size(negated by the fact that you also need to embed the entire vm once for every project to get it to run). Kind of ironic that it was originally built in Flash itself though.
Smokeless7048 4 points a year ago
Recently found an old .fla of a game I made in highschool, and I have no idea how to turn it into a playable file. Would love to recover it
Smokeless7048 3 points a year ago
I'll check that out. I thought that a .fla is the project file, and .swf would be the game.
Wispy2891 1 point a year ago
Ultra bad advice, flash player was installed at system level and it opens a huge security gap on the system (although I think it would not install at all in modern systems)
Plus when it calls the adobe servers, it downloads the "final" update which automatically disables/uninstalls it
Alternative interpreter: https://ruffle.rs/downloads
edit: i misunderstood, yes adobe flash, the editor app, can still be cracked (they don't rent it anymore) and run on modern systems
Smokeless7048 1 point a year ago
Yea, not hard to boot up a VM
SlartyBartFast 3 points a year ago
I miss Flash
RubberElectrons 2 points a year ago
Homestar wya?
showerthoughts
@lemmy.world
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
go to feed...
showerthoughts
@lemmy.world
44147
4167
5554
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
go to feed...
Nostalgia goggles in effect. Flash was crap while every other tech caught up and surpassed it. Even today CSS/HTML is replacing Javascript in their area simply because people realize it has gotten that good. People acting like there is no alternatives but in reality people just gave up on that stuff as everything became reddit, twitter, youtube and facebook. The HTML5 stack has always surpassed Flash there is no excuse for the dickheads in this thread acting otherwise. WebGL2 WebASM? I recently made a tool that uses the Web Bluetooth API thingy. Javascript frameworks compare to Flash. You cannot compare the modern web tech you don't bother with to Flash but you could compare it to Phaser.js.
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