alt Hacker NewsI think it's taken for granted just how good flash was. It gets hated on a lot because it was proprietary and insecure, but it's really impressive that they had a system where teenagers could make genuinely good games and animations, and then play them in web browsers on machines with Pentium IIs. There's nothing else like that today.
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I think Adobe should have open-sourced the Flash player like 20 years ago.
If they had done that, then it could have been incorporated into the web standards (or at least something somewhat inspired by it). Instead it took like 10+ years for web standards to catch up, Flash Player got crappier and crappier and eventually murdered in 2020.
If they had FOSS'd it, Adobe could still be the de facto leader of web-authoring tech.
Flash created a medium. The particular genius of the authoring tool gave rise to a whole style of animation and game and thing-in-between that only existed in its time and could have only been created with the tool at hand. Software should aspire to this.