alt Hacker News> the whole thing could be a PWA
Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.
I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.
A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends.
You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.
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This myth that Apple “killed” Flash on mobile should die. When Flash finally came to Android in 2010-11, it required a phone that had a 1Ghz processor and 1GB RAM and barely ran on that.
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.
Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some utopian thing.
Macromedia Flash was indeed a beautiful, innovative piece of software. HTML 5 still doesn't match its features vis the ease and usability that Flash offered in creating and deploying content online. But after its acquisition by Adobe, it just ever so slowly went downhill. It should have been open sourced.
> I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks
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.
Just like Microsoft before them.
But flash specifically deserved to die.
On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of control over the web?
Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable.
Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.