10 ms·

Love or hate Steve Jobs, his insistence of not supporting Flash on the iPhone (in favor of HTML5) accelerated Flash's demise dramatically.

pell 3mo ago
Flash had many issues for sure, first and foremost security. But I can’t help but feel sad of what was lost since then. The Flash era produced some really unique experiences on the web.
- SG- 3mo ago
  it was about as unique as seeing corn in my poop sometimes.
  - sfn42 3mo ago
    Sounds like you didn't experience all the awesome flash games and animated videos etc that people made.
  - mablopoule 3mo ago
    Lot of it was bad, sure, but there was so much games and animation done by literal kids back then, because of how easy it was to create something with the tooling. Nothing even come close today, unfortunately.
  - tim333 3mo ago
    The JimCarrey.com website was cool. That's about the only flash thing I came across that was though. Now gone as a site but recorded on video https://youtu.be/B1XZixLBurQ https://youtu.be/B1XZixLBurQ I'm not sure you can do those things in javascript to this day?
  - KPGv2 3mo ago
    I suppose there's no accounting for taste, but from happy tree friends to xiaoxiao3's flash fights, indie animators made some pretty awesome stuff back then. My university experience included a lot of checking for new, cool flash animations back around 2002. Homestar Runner was another pretty big one. edit: Space Ghost Coast to Coast was Flash. Harvey Birdman must've been, too.
    - giantrobot 3mo ago
      Flash as an animation tool vs Flash as a web development tool are two very different discussions. There's overlap and they're related but still separate. Flash was very interesting as an animation tool because it was at its core a vector drawing animation tool. All the scripting components were icing on the cake allowing automation of things that's incredibly tedious in traditional animation. The fast vector animations made Flash very useful for web distribution. That's all well and good. But as it became the go-to for interactive websites the structure of Flash was antithetical to the web. Deep links became meaningless and content became locked behind Flash. Adobe was also a terrible steward of Flash and only put effort into Flash for Windows. Every other platform was an also-ran for them and the Flash experience was terrible. The security of Flash was a bad joke on top of it all. As an animation tool and delivery vector for interactive content beyond the abilities of browsers of the era it was useful. As the front end of the web it was an awful mess.
- ndiddy 3mo ago
  It was always fun when you were trying to find a contractor or something and got greeted with https://web.archive.org/web/20101028145116/http://industrialpainter.com/f/painting-painter.html https://web.archive.org/web/20101028145116/http://industrial... .
  - RankingMember 3mo ago
    Lol, damn, I do not miss those days. I'm also reminded of those awful LowerMyBills.com flash ads. Sadly, they're still around, just using whatever tech is at hand to make the worst ads possible, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/98a1yp/lowermybills_and_their_terrible_ad_campaigns_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/98a1yp/l...
tjoff 3mo ago
The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%. And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...
- kalleboo 3mo ago
  There was also the argument that "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash"
- GreyStache 3mo ago
  I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream. The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
  - stefanfisk 3mo ago
    It took them years to realize that the App Store could be a thing.
    - mastermage 3mo ago
      and now they make probably insane marketshare on the AppStore alone.
      - fragmede 3mo ago
        > Apple today announced the global App Store ecosystem facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/app-store-ecosystem-reaches-1-point-4-trillion-usd-as-developers-thrive-globally/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/app-store-ecosystem-r... Then again, they chose to use those exact words in their webpage, so you decide how large a grain of salt to take.
pjmlp 3mo ago
And now were back with WebAssembly, WebGL, WebGPU, targeting 10+ year old graphic cards, without comparable easy of use tooling. Those that think using Godot or Unity is the same, never did Flash games.
- KPGv2 3mo ago
  Those are all open web standards, though. Flash was a proprietary platform. I can't even run Flash stuff anymore because it was proprietary.
  - FLHerne 3mo ago
    Ruffle is quite good now. I haven't found many applets that don't work with it.

pell 3mo ago

Flash had many issues for sure, first and foremost security. But I can’t help but feel sad of what was lost since then. The Flash era produced some really unique experiences on the web.

SG- 3mo ago
it was about as unique as seeing corn in my poop sometimes.
- sfn42 3mo ago
  Sounds like you didn't experience all the awesome flash games and animated videos etc that people made.
- mablopoule 3mo ago
  Lot of it was bad, sure, but there was so much games and animation done by literal kids back then, because of how easy it was to create something with the tooling. Nothing even come close today, unfortunately.
- tim333 3mo ago
  The JimCarrey.com website was cool. That's about the only flash thing I came across that was though. Now gone as a site but recorded on video https://youtu.be/B1XZixLBurQ https://youtu.be/B1XZixLBurQ I'm not sure you can do those things in javascript to this day?
- KPGv2 3mo ago
  I suppose there's no accounting for taste, but from happy tree friends to xiaoxiao3's flash fights, indie animators made some pretty awesome stuff back then. My university experience included a lot of checking for new, cool flash animations back around 2002. Homestar Runner was another pretty big one. edit: Space Ghost Coast to Coast was Flash. Harvey Birdman must've been, too.
  - giantrobot 3mo ago
    Flash as an animation tool vs Flash as a web development tool are two very different discussions. There's overlap and they're related but still separate. Flash was very interesting as an animation tool because it was at its core a vector drawing animation tool. All the scripting components were icing on the cake allowing automation of things that's incredibly tedious in traditional animation. The fast vector animations made Flash very useful for web distribution. That's all well and good. But as it became the go-to for interactive websites the structure of Flash was antithetical to the web. Deep links became meaningless and content became locked behind Flash. Adobe was also a terrible steward of Flash and only put effort into Flash for Windows. Every other platform was an also-ran for them and the Flash experience was terrible. The security of Flash was a bad joke on top of it all. As an animation tool and delivery vector for interactive content beyond the abilities of browsers of the era it was useful. As the front end of the web it was an awful mess.
ndiddy 3mo ago
It was always fun when you were trying to find a contractor or something and got greeted with https://web.archive.org/web/20101028145116/http://industrialpainter.com/f/painting-painter.html https://web.archive.org/web/20101028145116/http://industrial... .
- RankingMember 3mo ago
  Lol, damn, I do not miss those days. I'm also reminded of those awful LowerMyBills.com flash ads. Sadly, they're still around, just using whatever tech is at hand to make the worst ads possible, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/98a1yp/lowermybills_and_their_terrible_ad_campaigns_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/98a1yp/l...

tjoff 3mo ago

The best feature of flash was that it was so easy to disable. Because 99% of the use was annoying ads that pinned your cpu at 100%. And that was Jobs argument, that it was too resource intensive. Predictably though, now that annoying crap moved to "newer" tech (javascript) and now we can't disable it as easily or without as little consequence. Just as resource intensive though...

kalleboo 3mo ago
There was also the argument that "We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash"
GreyStache 3mo ago
I never bought the benevolent technical angle for not supporting flash. I'm pretty sure Apple strategists knew the value of the gate-kept platform, the app-store revenue stream. The pivotal point was that flash would break this stronghold by allowing rich applications that are reasonably self-publishable. (Excuse me while I go rinse that sentence out of my mouth)
- stefanfisk 3mo ago
  It took them years to realize that the App Store could be a thing.
  - mastermage 3mo ago
    and now they make probably insane marketshare on the AppStore alone.
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      > Apple today announced the global App Store ecosystem facilitated over $1.4 trillion in developer billings and sales in 2025 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/app-store-ecosystem-reaches-1-point-4-trillion-usd-as-developers-thrive-globally/ https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/06/app-store-ecosystem-r... Then again, they chose to use those exact words in their webpage, so you decide how large a grain of salt to take.

pjmlp 3mo ago

And now were back with WebAssembly, WebGL, WebGPU, targeting 10+ year old graphic cards, without comparable easy of use tooling. Those that think using Godot or Unity is the same, never did Flash games.

KPGv2 3mo ago
Those are all open web standards, though. Flash was a proprietary platform. I can't even run Flash stuff anymore because it was proprietary.
- FLHerne 3mo ago
  Ruffle is quite good now. I haven't found many applets that don't work with it.