alt Hacker NewsCreativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5.
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.
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I second everything except the fact that Adobe was behind Flash, which IMO is what killed it in the first place (with ten years of hindsight, I can say this confidently). I still do creative, non-standard work, but in a free way using pure vanilla JS (using Haxe). Adobe's mistake was keeping the system proprietary instead of letting it be free. Since then, I've left that ecosystem and what a relief!
(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.
> 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.
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
> The battery and security issues were technical problems and fully solvable.
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?
The thing is, HTML5 is far more technically capable than Flash ever was. It was competitive even at the time: Flash's main thing was 2D vector graphics, but iOS Safari has supported both Canvas and SVG since at least 2010, possibly from day one.
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.