During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it.
Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone. He was worried about competition. The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable.
The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now.
Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.
Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back.
The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible.
Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.
But the creation tools and the culture never really lined up the same way, and developers focused on creating apps instead.
For non-games, HTML has always been technically superior. iOS Safari may have a long history of rendering bugs, but it beats Flash/AIR, which always looked very out-of-place even on desktop.
I do wonder what would have happened in an alternate universe where either Flash or HTML5 took off on mobile instead of apps. We would have both the upsides of openness, and the downsides of worse performance and platform integration and the lack of an easy payment rail. Pretty much the same situation we still see on desktop today.
We wouldn't have had the same "gold rush" from the early App Store, which happened in large part because of the ease of making money. There would probably be more focus on free stuff with ads, like Android but more so.
(I know I'm mixing different levels here, and my personal experience isn't really an argument).
ps: HTML scope is way more advanced than whatever Flash could have been.
No they wouldn't. We've forgotten just how bad and sloppy flash apps were. The handful of companies that used Adobe Flex turned out awful POS that barely worked. It occupied the same space that Electron does today -- bloated, slow, and permitting cheap-ass devs to utilize cheap talent to develop 'apps' with all the finesse of a sledgehammer
As a kid I loved flash, I was making interactive apps in AS2/3 in high school. But I watched in horror as it became the de facto platform for crapware
This. Except Electron crap at least runs on top of a well-designed and relatively reliable platform (HTML/Chromium) - and sometimes the crap even offer an actual PWA version with all the sandbox benefits a real browser has to offer. Flash didn't even had that.
And let's be realistic, there will always be demand for a crap-running platform for vendors that don't care (or just have their core values elsewhere).
My kingdom for some way of gatekeeping platforms so that entities like this are forbidden from participating
- Lack of gatekeeping was THE advantage that made Web viable and competitive against traditional media.
- You can't gatekeep crapmakers without also gatekeeping that kid in his parent's basement with an awesome idea.
- Crapmakers with enough money will punch through any gatekeeping.
- Sometimes you have to accept that vendors don't care. Can't expect a transport company to give too much love to their timetables app. Yes, they are expected to hire someone competent to do it, but the "someone competent" also rarely care. Still better than having no access to the timetables.
Unfortunately every peabrained enterpreneur saw that and began eroding the moat until it was gone. The knowledge required to build things has been on a steady decline, and now with AI that decline has completely destroyed it. Now, every fucking hack with an "idea" is not only able to act on them but now they act like they are as good as the people who paid a heavy price to get to the same level through years of study and hard work.
Seriously? Is that why I ran all my desktop browsers with flashblock even before the iPhone was out?
Dare to tell me Adobe was feverishly working in secret on reducing pointless CPU usage and saving my battery?
> "Ryan Lawler of TechCrunch wrote in 2012 "Jobs was right", adding Android users had poor experiences with watching Flash content and interactive Flash experiences were "often wonky or didn't perform well, even on high-powered phones".[9] Mike Isaac of Wired wrote in 2011 that "In [our] testing of multiple Flash-compatible devices, choppiness and browser crashes were common", and a former Adobe employee stated "Flash is a resource hog [...] It's a battery drain, and it's unreliable on mobile web browsers".[10] Kyle Wagner of Gizmodo wrote in 2011 that "Adobe was never really able to smooth over performance, battery, and security issues".[11]" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
[1] https://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9692/palm-joins-adobe-fl...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/ere0c/how_does_flash_...
I was stoked to watch Apple nail the coffin shut, and see it consigned to history along with Java applets.
Capcut and Roblox would like words. No, that's kinda just wrong. Content generation for non-technical folks has never been easier or more effective. Flash is just something nerds here remember fondly because it was a gateway drug into hackerdom. Some of us are older and might feel the same way about Hypercard or TurboPascal or whatnot.
But flash specifically deserved to die.
Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable.
They learned this much later after learning the game from Meta, Google, and Apple.
The first iPhone came with 128MB RAM with a 400Mhz CPU, it couldn’t even run Safari smoothly. If you scrolled too fast, you would get a checkerboard while you waited on the page to render. An iPhone with those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Adobe was always making promises it couldn’t keep. The Motorola Xoom was suppose to be the “iPad Killer” that could run Flash , Adobe was late leaving the Xoom in the unenviable position that you couldn’t go to the Xoom home page on the Xoom at launch because it required Flash.