So good to see flash finally be put to pastor. Am I sad no flash sucked from a developer standpoint but even more from a business standpoint! Why? Here’s why!

....Yes it was fast in the sense of quickly getting content out and functioning BUT this ment you are at the mercy of Adobe / Macromedia (depending on the timeframe) for support AND mercy of the company whom create the browsers for support.

Meaning your product is fully reliant on others for existence and can easily not exist if one of two other beings choose.

For developers shame on you for accepting this you should never have supported this.. if you did it was just for a job you are suppose to be experts in your field and when management came to you for guidence you allowed this technology to be used rather than saying no this isn’t good! It’s too risky...

Fuck... how many people choose a career path that made them flash only developers.. well guess what becuase you niched yourself now your out of a job... rethinking now?

CAN ANY OF YOU TELL ME WHAT OTHER WIDLY USED TECHNOLOGY IS RELIANT ON A SEPARATE ENTITY?!

geee it would be a shame if one day that technology was phased out or no longer supported and then a date was picked and boom shutdown... geee that would suck...

I remember for years before it was announced it would be ending ... I said development around flash should be avoided at all costs because of it’s reliance on someone else for your product to function and exist...

Let this be a foreshadowing/ warning... learning experience/ AMAGE.. to those who use similarly situated technologies...

Developers you were warned.

Businesses you were warned.

It was always a resource hog, security problem, and unstable mess.

In those days that was par for the course... but it wasn't getting better and Adobe kinda punted and seemed to just quit on it.

@N00bPancakes lol, the first part also describes another technology and boy I can’t wait for that day to come when that shit just don’t work anymore.. soooo much stuff right now today is at the mercy of one damn company.. sooo many jobs and products... we are setup right now for failure. And I can’t wait for the domino to fall as my point will be proven and I won’t feel bad for THOSE developers they choose to get in bed and devote their life to a technology that is at the mercy of one company.

This is why I only develop in C, C++ etc. my products will never “cease” to be supported beyond my choosing.

The problem is that for a long time, there's been absolutely no other way to produce a decently small app which:
- could be used in browser to enrich content
- could be used without installing
- would always be up to date
- could contain proprietary code without exposing it
- could efficiently perform operations such as video decoding or cryptography
- could work with vector graphics (without repeatedly updating SVG DOM through JS)
- allowed app to interact with things like file system or mic & camera
- add a shadow to some text
- produce decent responsive UI

I could go on, but the point is that every single one of these things is now provided natively by browsers, but 15 years ago it was impossible to achieve without Flash, and that's why people used it.

Haven't done my research yet.. Will there still be a way to use flash apps in chrome? Or will chrome ban them for good, like the java applet case?

@hitko some things just can’t be rushed and must take time to do it the hard way.. maybe that gateway mentality prevents low quality shit from entering the market ?

Idk

I pretty much have up on websvg until it showed up against years later in the standard. I wrote some seriously impressive stuff in 1998 using it in browser, then adobe launched flash and everyone gave up on alternative impls.

So glad it's dead.

@hitko
The proprietary code bit was sabotaged by the trustworthiness of the source of that code.

There were svg drivers in the late 90s, early 00s that were vastly superior to flash (including one by adobe themselves). Flash won the day because of tooling, not quality.

@SortOfTested Considering it was mostly just used to include codecs in various applets, I don't think trustworthiness was much of a concern

Flash won because it was a single tool which managed to bridge a lot of gaps. Sure SVG was already a powerful tool, but flash had better rendering until browsers finally added HW accelerated animations for example.

@QuanticoCEO You can't just invent a perfect solution. It took a long time before we got HTML5 video, but we only got it because someone figured that flash media capabilities and the Range HTTP header could be combined to make a simple video player for the browser. If there was no flash to demonstrate in-browser video playback capabilities, development would likely take a turn for dedicated RTSP servers and players instead, because that's been the main alternative at the time.

Now this is a bit hypothetical, but without flash animations, games, and media playback, there would definitely be waaaaaay less interes in web from advertisers, media, and entertainment industry back in 2000s, and as much as the .com boom was a pile of crap, most of what internet enables us today is only possible because at one point in history, somebody made flash and companies with lots of money saw it as a "hip" opportunity to try and bring their interactive content to web.

@hitko actually I disagree, if we didn’t push flash, the internet wouldn’t have exploded in a way that made website so resource intensive in the sense of what is needed to download form the server to display on the client browser.

Privileged areas with access to high speed moved forward while less privileged even still today (myself at home) is far under privileged in the sense of high speed internet access. It wouldn’t be a problem is the websites still looked like very basic and shit.

Whenever someone makes internet 2.0 and redesigns the internet and created a new web standard I think it’s important to add there should be some sort of communication back and forth from the client to server to decide how much content to push to the client depending on the capacity.

Sites on the client side would load sooo much faster if there wasn’t so much analytics going to other servers, ads being pushed, super huge java script libraries being pushed just to display something is a cool “fancy” way.

Idk.. modern websites are cool and all.. but it’s all sooo bloated.. truly too much shit going on.

People need to focus on the quality of content, rather than the quality of presentation... as the quality of presentation is measured based on high capacity and capability of the end user.

Imagine how fast shit would run if we all went back to the 90s and early 2000s in the sense of simplicity not these HUGE bloated JavaScript libraries and figured shit out using older technology but with a modern twist..

HTML 5 is great .. JavaScript is great too.. don’t get me wrong.

But soo many websites include sooooooooo many god damn bloated shit. Many times half the shit isn’t used that’s being downloaded it’s just “included” as the package... it’s kinda like node applications one import of some rending library include and BAMM! 500 dependences

What technology are you referring to?

Seeing a rant about flash feels so nostalgic - hard to believe it is only ten years since Flash actually was a thing.

@korrat java ... java devs, businesses everyone who builds products around java are 100% at the mercy of oracle...

@QuanticoCEO You think web is bloated? Take a look at your mobile phone: instead of browsing DevRant in a web browser you need to download a 20 MB app with exactly the same functionality as a ~1 MB website (first request to DevRant is ~500 kB, subsequent requests are ~50kB). Same applies to Twitter, Netflix, Airbnb, weather, notes, calendar, ... A real-time multiplayer game which takes 640 kB to load inside a browser becomes a 15 MB app with unnecessarily large updates and piles of ads when you try to play it from your phone.

That's what bloat is. If websites grew at the same rate as "native" software, a basic website would be well over 10 MB now. And yet, web developers managed to pack and entire spreadsheet editor into 3 MB of JS and CSS. But all some people can do is bitch about having to download "entire 3 MB before they can open a file", even though a "native" spreadsheet editor doesn't even open in the time it takes to download 3 MB nowadays.

@hitko what are you trying to suggest? Please clarify the point you are trying to convey.

As it seems you are trying to suggest that there is some sort of correlation between native apps and web applications/websites in the sense that native application must download the same amount of stuff if not more than a web application?

I also don’t understand why everyone is pushing these online web apps to replace native apps, personally can’t stand browser based applications like google sheets or ms 365 excel online I always open in app. But that’s besides the point, and more personal preference.