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Pure CSS animation(codepen.io)
almost 5 years ago from Maxime Viktorovich, Web developer
Mihai Vladan, almost 5 years ago
Ian, thank you very much for taking the time to give such a well thought out response, really appreciate it. Yes, you are correct, trying to defend Flash by today's standards is a lost battle.
One of the problems with something like Flash is you get all the stuff loaded into the player that you talked about. You can't choose to not load everything. Do you need native desktop integration on a website? Unlikely. For the other things you mentioned, the browser actually has access to most of them.
Yes-ish. At that time Flash had most of the "cool" stuff modern browsers have. If you look at the file size of Chrome 4 (from 2009) it was 11mb. Firefox 18 (from 2013) was 19mb. If you add 20mb for the flash plugin for all those instructions (ex: video/audio playback, or live streaming), you end up with something that resembles today's browsers like Chrome 68 which is 49mb. (i might be mistaken about this tho)
TL;DR - All the things you mentioned like SEO, accessibility, screen readers, are correct. Flash was terrible at them and many other things. What I'm trying to convey is that Flash has been around for more than 20years. It paved the way for numerous platforms we take for granted today. Labeling it all bad would be a terrible thing to all those features it paved the way for.
You're clearly very passionate about Flash. I'm not arguing that Flash wasn't a good platform for the time but it certainly isn't up to snuff now... and I'm not just talking about it not being maintained. It simply doesn't follow globally accepted browser standards at it's core.
One of the problems with something like Flash is you get all the stuff loaded into the player that you talked about. You can't choose to not load everything. Do you need native desktop integration on a website? Unlikely. For the other things you mentioned, the browser actually has access to most of them.
You're also choosing to say that Apple has a locked down ecosystem, which certainly is true, but patently ignores that Apple only locks down what is published as software within it's own system. You are not required to have an Apple laptop to do web development; you could do the same thing with a Raspberry Pi running Linux. That's the beauty of an open web. You don't need to spend thousands of dollars to access or develop websites, and.... eh, to be honest, you seem smart enough to realize that. This argument is pretty moot.
Many of the things we're also ignoring about Flash are important and can't be supported by Flash, like accessibility. Flash screws over people with screen readers. How about SEO? What about sites that require translations and localizations? Database storage? Integration with APIs?
Apple didn't kill Flash. Flash killed Flash because it's not an open system with the flexibility to meet the needs of modern development or animation.