I had dial up and flash took so long to load I would just give up. Not to mention frequent browser crashes. Then I switched to Linux. For me just a general pain in the butt, and for what, fancy graphics? No thanks.
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All Your Base is a real nostalgia trip for me. A true gem from the early days of Internet memes, before they were weaponized to destroy democracy.
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The worst thing about flash for me was the frequency with which it would kill the entire browser process, was before browsers had per-tab process isolation.
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And quality. Flash is a vector format so you’re inevitably getting a worse copy when you export it as a video file.
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I had to make a lot of Flash games/cartoons at one of my old jobs, and one of them was for Keebler. They wanted a Flash game for a new site that would celebrate their many fudge-covered cookies. So I worked with a very talented developer and we proposed a game where you’d surf down a river of fudge to get to the Keebler Elves’ hollow tree. They loved it, so we prototyped it, then developed the finished game and sent it to Keebler. The next day they told us the project was cancelled because it ‘violated their brand standard’. The brand standard person told me, “this game violates our #1 rule: The Elves’ fudge must never touch the ground.”
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“The Elves’ fudge must always be packed tightly in a hermetically sealed space.”
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It was one things that was the icing on the excellent cake for Strong Bad emails.
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The answer to “will people be willing to wait 30 seconds while the JRE spins up to watch a cutesy animation” turned out to be a resounding no. And that’s before Sun switched the plugin security model to “never run without three trips to StackExchange and dicking around with obtuse configuration pages”.
I would also like to thank Apple for killing off Flash with the iPhone.
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Literally came here just to say the same thing. Nothing beats the original Homestar site and the easter eggs inside SBemails.
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This seems like something Archive.org is probably working on. Some sort of in-browser VM which lets you run flash safely.
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And you’ll need to do it again in 3.1 nanoseconds.
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Just because you had bad bandwidth doesn’t mean that there wasn’t good content being made with Flash. There was a lot of experimental art, animation and games from standalone to some of the first multi-player browser games. Some of it was really good, too.
It’s a bit ludicrous shitting on an entire ecosystem of content just because you couldn’t acess it.
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I always wondered if Macromedia wasn’t gobbled up by Adobe if maybe they could have fixed the security holes… Adobe has this problem where they buy something then fail hard to integrate all software in their bundle, they just seem not to care as much as the original companies for the software they acquire.
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I could care less about your fancy ass website, if it’s such a pain to access.
something something Rob Ford
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Again: yes, accessibility sucked in Flash. It’s good that we moved on to other stuff.
But you are throwing the baby out with the water here.
For little reason besides a pet peeve too, since you are connected to the Internet using a bandwidth many times larger than you had years ago with a device equally more powerful than what you had at the time.
Hell, I’ve spent lots of nights downloading music via Napster on a landline and I’m from a time where we converted pictures to ASCII art to save bandwidth and I’m not half this bitter.
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It is not just that it was widely deployed. It is that, like client-side Java, it supported “mobile code” delivered though the Internet and run in the browser. Making that work securely while supporting complex and varying payloads that can be delivered and run is inherently difficult.
You are right I do have a pet pieve about websites I can’t access.
Mozilla had a project to this effect, which it killed. I think it was just supposed to be a marketing ploy for how fast their javascript engine was (it was basically a flash runtime written in JS,) but then it ran like hot garbage anyway.
Google also had a project where you could upload a swf file and it would give you a zip file of the swf transpiled into an html5 application. That was killed off presumably because Google’s real motto is “kill useful software for no apparent reason.”
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