The Open-Source Community Is Still Maintaining Flash Player Support In 2024

[Vistaus]

Happy to hear this! I just wish there was a similar project for Shockwave games. Still have a few old ones that I would like to play, such as the Waterballon Drop series.

[Nozo]

Flash was always a nightmare on Linux. It was also terrible from security standpoint. I bet the main reason Adobe didn't want to make it Open Source was the fear of revealing their incompetence.

Flash also had serious issues on macOS, and Flash performance on iOS was awful, which is why it was never supported there. Flash was always too Windows-centric, and had issues on any UNIX-like platform (which are the HTML5 of operating systems btw, and Windows is the Flash Player of OSes). Fortunately that garbage is dead,

The only ones who defend it are people blinded by nostalgia, who refuse to move forward and accept that Flash was never a real standard, it was only a product of an era in which the web was in its infancy and didn't have a standardized terrain, and when standards emerged, Internet Explorer and Flash were discarded so soon that it was discovered that they were no longer necessary, (Not to mention that they worked poorly, Adobe was not clear or transparent with the security issues that they fixed with their patches, possibly most of them have not even been fixed)

[avis]

Isn't it fun that avis is always beating all dead technical horses in the same way? X11, flash,...

I would love to see some articles and its comment sections about Token Ring, Itanium, Xenix, CFCs, Chernobyl and Stalin, just for the record and my personal enjoyment.

Not a fan of Chernobyl and Stalin, I've got nothing to say about the first four items on the list as I don't know what they are/never dealt with any. Oh, actually I've heard of Token Ring, an IBM authored precursor to Ethernet but in my city we had a very limited number of installations and most orgs embraced Ethernet from the get go. And aside from its at times impossible physical implementation and cost, it had multiple features which put it above Ethernet at the time.

Flash was great for what it's worth and I gave a very strong reasoning for that. Its performance and features were unpapalled and were only matched at least a decade later on PCs which required ten times more processing power to do the same.

Instead of valid counter arguments I got derision. Again a quality conversation from fanatics of Open Source. Not. "We hate because we hate".

And tons of crazy amazing Flash games and even animated cartoons have no modern counterparts and will never have.

[Nozo]

Not a fan of Chernobyl and Stalin, I've got nothing to say about the first four items on the list as I don't know what they are/never dealt with any. Oh, actually I've heard of Token Ring, an IBM authored precursor to Ethernet but in my city we had a very limited number of installations and most orgs embraced Ethernet from the get go. And aside from its at times impossible physical implementation and cost, it had multiple features which put it above Ethernet at the time.

Flash was great for what it's worth and I gave a very strong reasoning for that. Its performance and features were unpapalled and were only matched at least a decade later on PCs which required ten times more processing power to do the same.

Instead of valid counter arguments I got derision. Again a quality conversation from fanatics of Open Source. Not. "We hate because we hate".

And tons of crazy amazing Flash games and even animated cartoons have no modern counterparts and will never have.

In short, Jobs was based and right. Screw Flash fanboys.

[Quackdoc]

the best thing about flash was how absurdly easy it was to make games, nothing has come even close to replicating the "flash" experience in that regard. it's not like it was just crummy games either, some were actually quite impressive. If ruffle were to have legitimately good support for stuff like AS3, I could see flash games making a comeback

[Mathias]

I don't think anyone is defending flash for its security issues, bad cross platform support or being a closed source non-standard. Still nothing on the web allowed content that dynamic or videos. It doesn't matter to most users, what the reasons were (patents or whatnot) but it did stuff nothing else could. Maybe ActiveX or Java applets. (IIRC Java applets were severely limited in their graphics capabilities.)

IMO one of the reasons Flash died wasn't Steve himself, but that flash was a shitfest on mobile (the reason Jobs shit on Flash). It wasn't responsive and mostly unusable on mobile. Android had flash support and every website using it was either unusable or drained the battery, usually both.

HTML5 couldn't deliver what flash could for quite some time.

I'm not a flash lover. I loved some games back then, I mostly hated flash itself. It was shit, but the best shit we had at the time. Despite all its flaws.

[kpedersen]

Deep down, not having flash player support was such a great excuse for not having to watch all those shite little youtube video memes that people tend to send me.

RIP A plugin is needed to display this content

[QwertyChouskie]

Happy to hear this! I just wish there was a similar project for Shockwave games. Still have a few old ones that I would like to play, such as the Waterballon Drop series.

For your usecase, Flashpoint is probably your best option

[ireri]

It may have had issues, but it was great for creatives, now we have to deep dive into more than a couple JS libraries if we want to do anything remotely fancy; that's why all sites nowadays look like clones with changed colours or fonts.

I'm not certain about it, but maybe it was a resource hog like some say, sadly things didn't improve at all in that aspect, not at all, today's JS is a nightmare in this too.

[caligula]

I'm not certain about it, but maybe it was a resource hog like some say, sadly things didn't improve at all in that aspect, not at all, today's JS is a nightmare in this too.

Why would it? Both are using almost the same scripting language. ActionScript is like JavaScript. Hard to optimize unlike C. Yes there are now JIT compilers for JS, but AS isn't any worse.

edit: brainfart