I think that's rewriting history a bit. The decline certainly didn't begin with Apple's decision. Apple saw where things were headed, and jumped on (an early) bandwagon. Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point. I hope in a few years people don't start saying that Apple killed Flash, as I remember specifically that was not what happened at that time.
In the Linux / programming world Flash was a pariah that didn't conform to their standards. But it was booming for creatives and end-users. In 2010, almost all websites used Flash video and Flash gaming was exploding on Facebook. (Apple had to fake their Keynote to demonstrate the iPhone could view the "entire internet.")
Security complaints are a weak argument: both Apple and Google have had security issues on their proprietary platforms. (I'll concede Adobe was a very poor steward.)
Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new platform to lock out competition. The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash and made Apple look weak. The iPhone business model depends on consumer lock-down, so making Flash compatible was counter-productive.
Performance, performance, performance. Battery life matters. Smooth animations matter.
People seem awfully sure Apple's anti-Flash move was 100% motivated by platform-building and 0% by perf. I'm not so sure it was 100%/0%, because I actually saw how shockingly bad Flash perf was, and I saw how big Apple's perf push was at the time.
One time (2010-ish?) I accidentally left SpinControl.app open after a dev session for ~1 week. SpinControl was an app that would automatically dump a stack trace whenever any application failed to drain its event queue for more than a few seconds and beachballed. Super handy. In any case, when I came back to development and noticed SpinControl, I was surprised to find that 100% of the hundreds of stack traces collected after my development session involved flash. Not 99%, not N-1, literally 100%. WebKit was finding its way into different applications so the symptoms weren't limited to Safari, but I still suspected that I had a filter enabled or something. Surely Flash couldn't have accounted for 100% of my beachballs? I triggered a Mail.app reindex, and sure enough, a stack trace popped up in SpinControl, this time in sqlite, as expected. It wasn't an instrumentation problem. Flash had literally been 100% responsible for all of my beachballs over the past week. Crazy.
This was around the time that Apple started to push developers away from APIs that made it impossible for Apple to aggregate background thread wakeup events to save battery life. In other words: they were willing to sacrifice goodwill to obtain perf.
I'll grant you that platform considerations likely played a big role in Apple's decision, but also remember that Flash was literally the single largest performance-limiting factor when it came to desktop freezes and battery life at the time, and that probably played a role too.
It is worth recalling that in the early fumblings of the phone market someone tried to get Flash running on Android. It didn't work out particularly well, and all the high value customers kept buying iPhones and browsing webpages.
There is a pretty good argument that it was 0%/100%. It isn't like there is anything threatening to Apple that Flash could do that isn't theoretically mimic-able on iOS using Safari.
It was literally the official solution for DRM video on the platform.
It didn't have amazing performance, but it did just about play DRM video and Google didn't really get native Widevine support working for several years.
It's certainly a valid reading that Apple knew video providers couldn't stop using DRM (they were contractually required to), and therefore would have to distribute using the App Store rather than the browser to get a DRM solution that worked in the absence of Flash, and therefore Apple could attempt to extract 30% of their revenue.
> The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash and made Apple look weak
No. Flash was too resource intensive to work on any mobile devices. Flash on Android was an utter disaster. It ate through your battery life, was unusably slow and couldn't even properly format Flash content for mobile, touch-based devices. As the world moved to a primarily mobile-based computing environment, Flash's death was all but inevitable unless Adobe could do something to rectify these issues.
"No. Flash was too resource intensive to work on any mobile devices"
No, flash in itself was quite efficient. But many flash games were just badly programmed.
(as the IDE made game making easy, even for very beginner programmers)
> The iPhone wasn't powerful enough to play Flash…
No, Flash Lite ran on significantly-less-powerful feature phones. (Remember, in the early days of the iPhone, Flash was desktop-only.[1])
> Jobs' hit job was a calculated sucker punch, leveraging an exciting new platform to lock out competition.
You speak as if Jobs instigated this when in reality, this was a response to Adobe holding Jobs' platforms hostage for a long time, and in many ways. Flash's ongoing instability and inefficiency on MacOS was just the straw that broke the camel's back.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2010/04/adobe-flash-jobs/: "Flash was designed for the desktop world, for web and large screens, not the user experiences you want to create in these new devices with touch, accelerometers and GPS," Luh said. "It wasn't designed with that in mind at all."
I spent a year of my life trying to get Flash Lite working well as a browser plugin on an unreleased Palm phone around 2007-2008. Flash Lite wasn't anywhere ready for handling the Internet Flash content of the day; it performed terribly on the chips that mobile phones had then and wasn't a well behaved plugin. This was when the Intel XScale and early TI OMAP SOCs were the primary choice for mobile phones.
I'd love to have someone with firsthand knowledge fill me in here, but:
I've seen Flash-based feature phones do all kinds of things that desktop Flash struggled to do on (then-contemporary) desktop PCs. I can only conclude that Flash Lite had a significantly different codebase than desktop Flash, with very different performance characteristics.
Just because "Flash could do it on a feature phone" doesn't mean that a smartphone could keep up with the full Flash plugin. Look at the performance disaster that Flash on Android was.
I remember installing Opera and Flash Lite in my Windows Mobile smartphone and it being able to run Flash content. Was it a sluggish hand warmer? Sure, but then it was a 300 MHz TI OMAP (overclocked, of course!) and at most 128 MB of RAM, probably even less.
"With the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, Apple declared war against mobile Flash. Apple is supporting HTML5 and its efforts have influenced the online video landscape significantly. Many major websites are starting to use HTML5, and video players such as Brightcove are serving up HTML5 videos for devices not compliant with Flash. Separately, Apple has worked with companies like YouTube to produce iPhone-compatible versions of their sites."
"Instigate" would mean that Jobs started this fight, but this action was one of Jobs' last salvos in a rivalry that started long before iPhone.
To over-simplify, Jobs never forgot Adobe's threats to abandon the Mac when times were tough and Apple needed them most. IMO, it was that relationship which taught Apple that it must control as much of their technology stack as possible. In that context, finally being able to kick Flash off of their platforms must've been both a great joy, and a great relief.
It was a calculated sucker punch at a piece of software which was not designed with mobile or touch experiences in mind and was so tremendously buggy and unstable that it caused all sorts of issues on normal desktop browsers. A lot of people used Flash at the time, but a lot of people were also extremely frustrated with Adobe's apparent disinterest in making it a truly great piece of software. Steve Jobs wanted that mess kept as far away from Apple's shiny new platform as possible -- a completely justifiable stance.
Yep. I remember jailbreaking the original iPhone (or maybe the 3G) and installing some version of Flash on it for games. My friends all had Sony-Ericssons with some type of mobile Flash player. On the iPhone, Flash content sucked the battery to 0% in about 30 minutes, the phone would get super hot.
I was a Flash developer at the time and this is exactly what happened. Flash development went from being highly in demand and the highest paying to basically dead with this announcement.
I felt that if the rug could be pulled out that quickly, I'd just focus on design and that's where I've been ever since.
Sounds just like all the current front-end stack stuff, just faster that time. If you focus on the new shiny (even if you don't recognize it as the new shiny) you're susceptible to a newer shinier obsoleting some of your skill set.
In that case, it makes sense to move either farther up the stack to design (or even out of the "stack", to more pure design) or down the stack to where it's more stable, at the systems level.
Flash was a resource hog in any platform. And worse: It made resource intensive something that should have been very efficient from the start.
How is that I could play videos smoothly in Windows 95 but ten years later the same video at a lower resolution made a newer computer crawl? The answer is Flash.
I don't care if other people wanted Flash games. I hated Flash video and celebrated every little bit of its demise.
Its a lot easier for Apple to fix security issues within the Apple ecosystem than it is for Apple to pressure Adobe to fix the problem, port it over to the suite iOS/iPadOS/macOS, and distribute the fix to whoever needs it, as well as communicating the gravity of the issue, post mortem, adjacent attack vectors and surface area, etc.
I'm not saying you are entirely wrong about consumer lock down, but for various reasons, consumer lock down can be objectively better for the developer and user experience, and it is easier to move fast when you have fewer dependencies at play.
I hadn't used flash on linux, my primary environment at work and home, for years at that point. Flash was already hated and widely criticized in developer circles. It was already on the way out. Apple jumped on the trend early, but they didn't start it.
I didn't think the developers' community had the power to get rid of flash at the time. Too many people wanted it. When Apple made that announcement I wasn't even sure it would work out for them.
Performance was the big issue. Not just on Apple devices but on all devices. Same laptop running Windows, same video from Youtube if you play and pause on both (SWF and HTML). The Flash video will keep the fans running at high speed. Remember the first few phones with Flash could play through a 2 hour movie without a charger. To optimize Flash, Adobe needed to cut off compatibility and they knew if they do that then why would anyone continue with Flash when HTML/JS was getting feature parity.
Did Flash video ever get to hardware accelerated video? Because what eventually made these videos power efficient is that we now have dedicated hardware for it. It's not perfect though. Even today one of the most common browser issues you can run into is hardware acceleration.
No, because the primary use case was where the video was encrypted and you would have to unencrypt it to pass to the hardware acceleration.
This broadly went away when graphics cards started integrating PlayReady in the chipset, though we did eventually power through it for software encrypted video like EME protected videos in Chrome for Windows.
Flash wasn't just for video, it was for animated ads, or whole sites because it made cool transitions easy. I remember dumping flash sites others had made in the bin because they were not seo friendly (completely rendered as images, no actual text). And it was everywhere.
As an AS3-focused developer in the years around 2010, this is too heavy-handed. The Apple announcement followed a youtube announcement in Jan 2010 of an experimental HTML5 video player. It took years for that player to become the standard. Apple may well have seen the writing on the wall, but to say "everyone hated or was avoiding flash" is objectively false.
This comports well with my memory of the time. I remember there being a lot of "Flash sucks" sentiment online, but no decent alternatives. The days of entire UIs done in Flash was largely over by 2010, IIRC, but there were still things like video playback that couldn't be handled easily without Flash. I remember explicitly installing Flash on Linux, simply so I could watch Youtube with relatively little friction. In my mind, by that time, that was the main purpose of having Flash around at all.
I am really glad HTML 5 has matured to the point that it has. Not having to have an entirely separate runtime environment running in the browser window makes things so much more stable than before. Now, if only we could figure out a way to make having lots of tabs not be painful, and maybe get a bit of a handle on memory usage, I think I might very well be out of things to complain about in terms of basic browser usability. ;)
Interesting that we now find ourselves in a battle over Native vs Electron/ReactNative, when that was essentially SJ's answer to Flash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1304329
The problem is that both web applications and native applications are "applications." The rest are either implementation details or politics of the platform owners (Apple) and 3rd party app developers. I say this as someone who enjoys writing Swift.
Going back to the original comment, "Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point", I think you have to look at as being a broader concern than HN, a subculture that doesn't reflect "everyone".
I don't think by "everyone" they meant people who weren't aware of what flash was and users. Just the people who could conceivably be trying to avoid it -- creative types and developers.
I distinctly remember a general dislike by people who didn't know the name of the technology, because parts of my highschool's homepage were implemented in Flash, and it didn't load right. In 2005-2006. They recognized it primarily because it was slow and messed with the right-click context menu.
If you were a laptop used then you hated flash. Except for a few times where the heat in the building was down and playing a flash video will transform your laptop to a desk space heater.
Yup, in 2012 I was writing web video players and ad-serving platforms for a video streaming company. It was all Flash, because there were no real alternatives. HTML5 was just kind of starting but HTML5+Video+JS did not allow to develop logic as complex as what AS3 provided.
> Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point.
"Everyone"? I loved it. Kids loved it. The people who hated and killed it were programmers, and to this day they haven't created any alternative that kids would love as much.
It's similar to the murder of Dreamweaver. Actual designers who draw pixels on the screen loved it. Programmers hated it, pushed CSS instead, and visual editing of the web died.
It's regrettable that there's no good replacement for it, but Flash had deep by-design security issues that there was no way to fix (in addition to the garden-variety security bugs that Adobe seemed too incompetent or unwilling to fix). Flash had to go.
At the time Flash was used extensively for UI development, and artists were able to pretty easily create animations and author their own screens.
Nowadays the technology has gone to other places and more than ever artists are locked out of the workflow and reliant on programmers to implement even the most trivial of things.
I read the link. Can't tell, if it is meant for real or satire.
Anyway, no. No good programmer needs to make things more complicated on purpose, to earn a living. The bugfilled world of IT is complicated enough as it is and always was like this.
> And yes, it is a spoof, obviously. That is obvious from its content alone, and it follows a long tradition of similar spoofs. However, enough people must have fallen for it, because Bjarne Stroustrup has felt the need to publish a rather irritated disclaimer in his FAQ!
But it enabled non-programmers to create beautiful things and release them on the web. So while it technically is hostile to open web - it did open up the web for many people, who would run away, when you tell them to learn html code first.
"Technically"? This isn't merely a technical point. HTML is an open standard, and Flash isn't and never was. Flash also never "opened up the web"; it opened up a proprietary way to do programming and avoid actually using the Web.
As an aside, Flash is also extraordinarily inefficient and a plague security-wise, and always has been. Steve Jobs pointed this out a decade ago, of course.
Meanwhile, HTML continues to have none of those problems.
I found it totally inaccessible. I knew how to programm in C, C++98 with QT, Python, but I couldnt figure out just how to get started with flash. Somehow i must have missed the easy part of it.
Matches my experience as well. It was a great language for experimenting with UI design (itemrenderers anyone?). It’s a bitter pill for me swallow to have to watch it fade away.
You use Adobe's Flash IDE (now called "Adobe Animate") to compile ActionScript to a .swf binary file, which you then embed in a web page with an <object> or <embed> tag.
Thanks. Does one always have to pay (Adobe Animate is trialware) to do Actionscript programming? Probably thats where I got stuck last time (wasnt looking too hard into paid solutions)
Let's face reality here: Apple didn't care about the HTML5 standard, they just wanted games to go through their own app store instead of being freely available on the web.
To this day iPhone still doesn't fully support HTML5: you cannot put a game canvas into fullscreen mode on iPhone (all other devices, including iPad, do support this).
And when PWA's became available, they were very slow in supporting Add To HomeScreen. And when they did, nobody knew about it.
So yeah, don't think apple did it to support standards. They did it to keep control within their own appstore.
This is completely false. You're forgetting the original iPhone did not have a native SDK - the original plan was for 'apps' to just be web apps. It was only a year later that the SDK was released after the huge demand for one, so claiming that they didn't initially support flash to drive people to an App Store that didn't exist is incorrect.
I just re-read the letter of Apple, and it explicitly states itself: "Another Adobe claim is that Apple devices cannot play Flash games. This is true. Fortunately, there are over 50,000 games and entertainment titles on the App Store, and many of them are free. There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world."
The article is dated 2010. The App Store was opened in 2008. The iPhone was released in 2007.
Flash was not present from the start, and the intention at release in 2007 was that web applications would be how 3rd party developers developed for the iPhone. The decision not to have Flash on the iPhone in 2007 cannot possibly have been to drive downloads from an App Store that did not exist.
So walk me through the narrative you're trying to sell here. Apple launches the iPhone without App Store or Flash in 2007. A year later, they launch an App Store. TWO years later, Steve Jobs writes a piece about why they don't include Flash.
If this was a coordinated attack on Flash in support of the App ecosystem, why wait so long to write that letter? Why launch your phone without an app store in the first place?
I'm not claiming they wanted to kill Flash, I'm claiming that dropping Flash because "we have open standard HTML5" was complete bullshit. And years later this is still pretty obvious. iPhone doesn't fully support HTML5 features, which results in crippled PWA installation on iPhone.
So no, they did not drop Flash because they like to support HTML5.
So if there is no Flash, an no full support of HTML5, it's pretty obvious the only way to get apps on iPhone is through the app store.
I worked at Apple. I don’t remember but I’m pretty sure perf just sucked, and I’m guessing there weren’t enough people to deal with it. Like, you are giving way too much credit to strategic thinking. It wasn’t like that. Nobody had a crystal ball.
They certainly saw how profitable iTunes was and saw an opportunity to replicate that success with applications. They may not have predicted web browsers becoming as capable as they are, but I suspect that senior management saw a threat of mobile websites as app replacements. Even free apps generate revenue for Apple.
He said specifically add to home screen. If the “plethora” of PWA features are available for Android, where is the thriving market of web based games on Android?
It was terrible on mobile and I also avoided it, but it seems naive to not consider that Apple were being protective of their new platform and didn't want any alternative application runtimes to take hold.
Remember that the entire reason Adobe bought Macromedia/Flash in the first place (besides sheer market dominance) was to provide themselves a technical path forward from most of their products' classic Mac OS roots into the 64-bit/mobile era we're currently in. It's very obvious when you go back and see that the first version of Photoshop with a Flash-based UI and the first (Windows) 64-bit version of Photoshop were both CS4. Compare that to Photoshop CS3 where you don't have to dig very deeply into the Windows version's files before you start hitting the layers of what are obviously classic-Mac-style Resources.
I think that's rewriting history a bit. Sure, many of us nerds knew that Flash was problematic abandonware and sort of wished it would go away long before Apple launched a nuke at it, but we were the exception. Most people then, as now, didn't really understand or care how damaging flash was to the tech ecosystem. Sure, they saw a few annoying ads and security warnings, but they broadly considered them "worth it" for the content. Apple not only spoke up about Flash being the industry limiting factor regarding device responsiveness, battery performance, and security, but they did something about it in the face of widespread condemnation and resentment that hasn't dissipated to this very day.
I'd argue the point is not how the public felt about about Flash, but how device makers saw it.
Flash didn't make it on any other mobile platform. Serious attempts were being made way earlier than the iPhone, including for Symbian [0], making it available for high end feature phones. But all of them were horribly limited, and none could solve the rift between desktop Flash and low power devices flash.
Jobs saying that Flash won't make it on the iPhone was the equivalent of announcing that the iPhone wouldn't use Intel chips, it was just putting a stake on a dead body so everyone could stop trying to revive it.
1) it offered full web browser experience. No one had done this in a phone yet. They also banned flash from day 1 and favoured development using standard web technologies. The side benefit from all of this is that the data demands crippled our cellular networks and forced major infrastructure upgrades :)
2) Apple took control out of the carriers hands. By standardizing on the web, no more special+favoured applications! Just load a web page :)
Your claim is false. When Apple made the decision to not allow Adobe Flash on iOS, there was no App Store. Apple did not allow third-party apps, and writing HTML5 was the only way for any third party to run anything on iOS.
That changed later, and clearly Apple enjoys the 30% now, but the grandparent comment is 100% accurate, and your first three sentences are 100% false.
This is cherry-picking articles to create a false timeline. The iPhone never supported Flash. There was never a "Flash ban" so much as there was never Flash.
I think that by "Flash ban" Dotnaught means "Apple's ban on third party development tools" which was specifically intended to ban the iOS packager tool Adobe had started shipping.
All of the earlier smartphones had applications. I had a real player app and a better video recorder for my Symbian phone; blackberry, windows (CE), and palm phones all had apps too.
Mobile Safari was certainly a lot better than browsers on the other phones though. And a lack of carrier garbage and interference on updates was also nice.
Yes, but they're just thin wrappers around iOS' WebView; they don't use the Gecko or Blink engines. Apple doesn't allow other browser engines on the App Store.
Wasn't the iPhone in USA exclusive to one carrier for, like, a decade? Meanwhile in the rest of the world carriers never really had any power over how we used our devices or what was on them.
Definitely rewriting history to say they started it, but it was the nail in the coffin for Flash. Many developers hated Flash by then and were advocating against it. Although it was starting to decline, the marketing people and some wannabe UX types were still pushing it. The Steve Jobs essay is when the anti-Flash movement went mainstream and it was awesome. Prior to that, there was a question of whether Apple would support it. Once it was definitive that they wouldn't, the writing was on the wall that Flash would not survive. It validated what many of us had been saying for at least a couple years and made it easy for us to dismiss Flash.
And yet the lack of flash was generally in the top 3 reasons iPhone would never be a success(along with lack of copy/paste).
If apple had rolled out support for flash, the native app boom probably would have looked a lot different as company’s wouldn’t have felt as much pressure to modernize their whole customer facing digital strategy.
Flash became a mobile web non-citizen when the first iPhone released, back in 2008 when Flash was still popular enough for people to complain about it not being on the iPhone rather than to be happy that it was gone. "Thoughts on Flash" was published a few years later, in 2011, when Adobe wanted to add iOS app export to Flash - Apple responded by banning literally all third-party development tools. It was definitely a kick in the teeth to Adobe's attempts to pivot the product.
It is anticompetive, but it is apparently not prohibited anticompetitive conduct.
All of the major consoles since the NES (except for early revisions of the Genesis) have used technical means to restrict publication of games, and there has been no antitrust action on that. Nintendo was in a price fixing lawsuit and settled that with coupons for games with the Nintendo seal of quality.
If that's not subject to antitrust enforcement, why would the Apple app store criteria be?
Also, the US FTC threatened to investigate Apple over the "no third-party tools" thing they imposed on developers alongside "Thoughts on Flash". That's why they never followed through and removed it from their App Store guidelines.
So there is a limit - somewhere between "technical lockouts" and "we won't approve things made with third-party tools".
And it was, at the time I had a full browser in my pocket and on my tablet that was able to do just about everything I could on my PC, whereas iPhone/iPads of the time were simply unable to do some of the tasks I was able to.
I did not like flash on Android, but I was happy to have it available when things were still transitioning away from it.
There was already a strong decline underway, but there were plenty of people who were convinced it would stick around. Apple's decision was the nail in the coffin.
It absolutely did. I was a Adobe Flex developer when Adobe handed over Flex to Apache and watched the whole thing crumble. Jobs definitely led the way on that.
I agree. Google wasn't really sure how to go about it in Android, we really have to thank Apple for this step. It was historical and the best that could happen to all of us, specially when the Flash cookies are taken into consideration.
There was no decline. I very distinctly remember laughing that iPhone couldn't support flash because so many websites were based on flash.
I was a Blackberry user at the time and the best hope for a standard website was that it had some watered down "mobile website" with the same important info because nearly every local business that had a website with hours/location/contact info had it done in flash.
People said at the time and for years aferwards that it would cause the iphone to fail. Multiple companies made 'supports Flash' a major part of the marketing.
Flash was not hated. It was at its peak during 2008 when Flash games were making millions on Facebook and every media-related site used Flash interfaces. I remember being on Flashkit.com back then, and watching design houses like 2advanced.com release their next project.
Apple's decision was a major factor, along with HTML5 finally being supported by browsers with native functionality for animations and video support that had vastly superior performance. In the next 4 years, mobile took off like crazy beyond anyone's expectations and by the time the legendary iPhone 4 was released, Flash was at the beginning of the end.
Is it? I remember that even a similar pocket device such as PSP was able to play flash at the time, despite it being a huge memory hog. Until iPhone, any similar device that couldn't run flash was perceived as, simply, buggy.
The PSP had a very outdated version of Flash (for the time) that wasn't compatible with a lot of content.
It did work sometimes though, and it was great when it did. The Wii—while not portable—also supported an (outdated) version of Flash that I recall working quite well. There were even some Flash games explicitly designed to be used with the Wii Remote (although they couldn't really do anything special, they only had access to the IR pointer).
> Everyone already hated and was avoiding flash at that point.
Which point do you mean? 2007 or 2010? Flash was more popular than it had ever been when the iPhone was released, and the iPhone had been without Flash for three years when Jobs wrote his letter.
Apple might not have aimed the gun, but they pulled the trigger.
Jobs did this so that Apple could get the 30% cut on apps downloaded from the App Store. Otherwise everyone would just play Flash games that Apple got no cut of. Follow the money!
There was a Flash Player for Android, but the app existed only as a standalone player for playing .swf files. A couple mobile browsers did include it as a plugin so Flash content over the web mostly worked, but performance and user experience were not great.
I remember GPS while driving would drain your battery faster than it could charge; you'd have to make sure your phone was fully charged, then keep it plugged in while driving--and it would still die in under an hour. There's still things you can do on your phone today to drain your battery quite fast; taking video is one such thing--I had my 2yo phone die in me last week because it was recording in my pocket--as is trying to run actual software through termux, playing games for too long, etc.
No, it was literally Steve Jobs in 2010 saying he didn't want flash on mobile. Then it collapsed quite quickly after that as the barriers went up.
10 years later and mobile games still need to be made in Unity or Unreal. The new Meatboy won't come from HTML5, even if development was as easy.
All the 3d engines you have in HTML5 owe a debt to actionscript and flash and still don't perform as well.
People don't realise how liberating and easy the multimedia of the flash years were. You could literally make a animated film and show it globally in an hour.
Nothing comes close, still.
Maybe we'll get a Web Assembly flash tool, when we all have 8Ghz PCs.
