[Bjorkbat]

It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash. Absolutely miss Newgrounds. It's still around of course, I'm reflecting more on the vibes when it was in its heyday. Unbelievable the games people were making with Flash back then and how it spawned the careers of a ton of indie darlings. Also, not Flash at all, but does anyone remember Exit Mundi? Absolute gold.

Honestly, I kind of look back on blogging unfavorably. Before that people made websites to showcase their interests and hobbies, and because of that even the most basic looking websites could have a lot of "color" to them. Then blogging became a thing and people's websites became bland and minimalist. Arguably blogging culture is as responsible for the death of creativity on the internet as much as the constraints of mobile-friendly web design and Apple's aforementioned killing of Flash.

[alwillis]

> It really is crazy how much was lost when Apple killed Flash.

Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.

The iPhone had about 14% marketshare at the time, so it's not like Apple was in a commanding position to dictate terms to the industry.

But if you read his letter, what he said made total sense: Flash was designed for the desktop, not phones—it certainly wasn't power or memory efficient. Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.

And of course Flash was proprietary and 100% controlled by Adobe.

Jobs made the case for the (still in development) HTML5--HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

What people don't seem to remember: most of the industry thought the iPhone would fail as a platform because it didn't support Flash, which was wildly popular.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple...

[johnfn]

> Steve Jobs published "Thoughts on Flash" [1] in 2010; Flash was discontinued by Adobe in 2017. If Apple supposedly "killed" Flash, they sure took their time doing so.

I’m really surprised anyone could say that. To my view, “Thoughts on Flash killed Flash” is about as true as “the sky is blue”. It’s fairly clear to me that without a strong stance, a less principled mobile OS (like Android) would have supported it, and probably Flash would still be around today. Apple’s stance gave Google the path to do the same thing, and this domino effect led to Flash being discontinued 7 years later. You say 7 years as if it’s a long time from cause to effect, but how long would you estimate it would take a single action to fully kill something as pervasive as Flash, which was installed on virtually every machine (Im sure it was 99%+)? You correctly cite that iOS penetration was low at the time, but mobile Safari grew over the next few years to become the dominant web browser, and that was sufficient.

[SXX]

Getting rid of Flash was never ever about using HTML5 for Apple. It was always to obviously to make battery life better and ofc adding more experiences to their walled garden store.

Safari is lagging on HTML5 features for decade far behind Firefox. And any features useful for "PWA" is just sabotaged. E.g like Screen Wake Lock API finally implemented in iOS 16 but to this day broken on Home screen. And like not quite obvious to use in Safari too.

Because working web standards support would make cross platform mobile apps possible outside of App Store.

[toast0]

> Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS at the time, a device with 256Mb of RAM and a 600Mhz 32-bit processor.

That's a ton of ram. I recall spending a lot of time on flash websites in the early 2000s in college on the school issued laptop with maybe 64 mb of ram (and I think maybe pentium iii 650mhz so more cpu oomph)

[GTP]

Given Steve Jobs' character, there may be another reason behind it: that year, before the decision to stop supporting Flash, Adobe broke their agreement with Apple by releasing Photoshop for PCs before the version for Mac for the first time. This could sound as a conspiracy teory, and I don't know how much evidence we have that this might have been the reason (or one of the reasons) behind the decision. But, given Jobs' personality, I think this is plausible.

We should also consider that, having Flash support, would have opened the door to non-Apple-approved apps running on iPhones, something that Apple has always strenously opposed. All-in-all, at the time I got the feeling that the technical reasons provided by Jobs weren't the main reasons behind the decision.

[lunias]

Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and install them.

I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I would have multiple websites all linking to each other, each with a different design, and subtly different content, but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.

[Bjorkbat]

> I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites...

Based

I'm working on a revamp of my personal site. I do a lot of creative coding, most of them are throwaway experiments, so I thought I'd showcase more of them there. Besides that though, I have some "rare pepes" that I've been meaning to put somewhere. What I like about these is that they're highly polished, animated gifs that imitate the sort of "holographic" effect you'd find in rare collector's cards, but at the same time you can't track down who originally made them, they aren't part of some professional's online portfolio. In that sense they feel like a special piece of internet folk art, made by some complete rando.

Nowadays we have Pinterest and the like, but I really like the idea of creating my own little online space for images I like.

[NetOpWibby]

> now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol.

I’m guilty of this but at least it’s a different kind of boring (plain text files).

> Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.

YES.

[klondike_klive]

One of my fondest memories of the early Web was getting awards on Newgrounds for my animations(I had one for 250k views. Pretty sure I got into the top ten at one point) , and logging in to read and respond to comments, and to see that view counter tick up and up!

[brazukadev]

> I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly

That's exactly how I got into programming :)

[rchaud]

Agreed on both points. When blogging became the dominant reason for having a website, we were already on the way to the "content" hell. Any semi popular website had pressure to post more frequently, diluting quality. And pretty soon after that, blogs went from 500 words to 140 characters, but 10x the frequency.

Static websites that were updated only once in a while were far better at showing a cross section of someone's life In that respect, StumbleUpon and browser bookmarks were superior to RSS.

[NetOpWibby]

StumbleUpon is the reason I regularly use the phrase, “I stumbled upon” to this day.

What a glorious product.

[m000]

In retrospect, I would say that the "blog rush" was kind of a precursor to the rise of influencers. There was even a crowd of "blogging gurus" that would ask a pretty peny for advice on how to advance your blog.

The blogging pressure got so out of hand, that even some EU bureucrat thought it would be a great idea for each FP6 funded project to have a blog besides its static website. At least with the influencing trend they don't ask researchers to do glamour shots with their food.

[doublerabbit]

Ruffle needs more love. The time and effort that's gone in to a browser extension to emulate flash, should be receiving that sponsorship from Cloudflare.

https://ruffle.rs/

[Gormo]

It's not just a browser extension -- it's also available as a JS library that can be added added to any site to restore seamless Flash support.

[rzzzt]

I'm waiting for microphone support so I can make the frog on Ze Frank's website sing.

[snickerbockers]

It's more to do with HTML5 than lack-of flash, although it could be argued that flash's long-prophesied downfall was one of the reasons for HTML5's rapid adoption.

HTML5 is when the web stopped being the web. It has no legitimacy in calling itself "hypertext", it's an app-delivery mechanism with a built-in compatibility layer. In this regard Flash is just as bad and probably even worse, but since it wasn't in anyway standardized or even open-source there was a fair amount of pushback from all fronts. HTML5 had no such pushback.

[tolciho]

Flash was the first broken site I ever encountered, some restaurant had an all-flash webpage. Never did end up going to that restaurant. Why bother? If they render content inaccessible behind some needless jank like Flash or JavaScript, why bother? Another fun thing to do was to keep a tally of how many "OMG stop the presses!!" security vulnerabilities Flash had racked up over time, which was lots. Many hundreds. Made even a lolfest like Windows look bad. Flash, it was not killed with fire soon enough. Chrome and other such bloatware arguably also need some sort of fire, or at least a diet or trepaning or something, but that's a different rant, though one very much related to the Old Web or the smolweb.

[brazukadev]

Apple killed Flash, Google killed RSS, both are killing the web and the PWA dream

[AlexandrB]

More like PWA nightmare. PWAs are the final iteration of "you'll own nothing" when it comes to software.