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A drawing of a person laying on the ground, seen from the side. There is text on the image, “We still talk about you”. Deep in the ground, there is the Adobe Flash logo.
A drawing of a person laying on the ground, seen from the side. There is text on the image, “We still talk about you”. Deep in the ground, there is the Adobe Flash logo.
In it’s heyday nerds like us fucking hated it because it was a proprietary plugin that broke sites on an otherwise open web. We remember it fondly because it made animation accessible for young creatives. In Winter 08/09 I was interning on the first season of Ugly Americans and they were still animating in an old version of Flash MX, even though like CS6 was out by that point. Today though there are creative apps where you can still do Flash-style vector animation, and the modern internet has no problem serving up rendered videos of the final output without the need for a plugin.
And simple games, too. But yes, I agree with you; what people remember fondly isn’t Flash itself, it’s what it enabled.
…and a Major Slovakian bank Tatra Banka used it for internet banking until 2019.
Nowadays this would be seen as insanity. (Back then, too.) Like, Flash wasn’t exactly the safest platform out there, specially not to handle money.
i think you’re right. the technology itself was arguably garbage, i’ve heard from many people i have no reason to distruss that it was a security nightmare, and i don’t especially miss going on any random website and seeing “you need to install the adobe flash player extension!”
still, the modern web feels different. even if HTML5 and WASM can do everything flash could and then some, it’s not the same… you don’t really see websites filled with amateur web games anymore.
I guess the tools are better but the passion is gone. The whole web was amateur back then; now it’s all… you know.