Nostalgia goggles in effect. Flash was crap while every other tech caught up and surpassed it. Even today CSS/HTML is replacing Javascript in their area simply because people realize it has gotten that good. People acting like there is no alternatives but in reality people just gave up on that stuff as everything became reddit, twitter, youtube and facebook. The HTML5 stack has always surpassed Flash there is no excuse for the dickheads in this thread acting otherwise. WebGL2 WebASM? I recently made a tool that uses the Web Bluetooth API thingy. Javascript frameworks compare to Flash. You cannot compare the modern web tech you don't bother with to Flash but you could compare it to Phaser.js.

There is, SVG with <animate>. It's just not that common.

There's a lot more tooling for creating rasterized videos than SVG. Flash had a whole development environment around it. SVG is comparatively rubbing sticks together to make fire.

A lot of comments on here saying "but X is better". Y'all are missing the point though. These "better technologies" are not being used in the creative and fun ways that flash was - not to the scale that we saw in peak Newgrounds/HomestarRunner era. It goes to show that no one company should ever control tools and the stuff our works are built upon. A lesson we, as a society, sure struggle to learn.

Don't get me wrong, my rose tinted glasses aren't all the way on. I remember critical infrastructure systems developed in flash of all fucking things.

But a very real piece of the creative internet died with flash. Maybe it's a coincidence, and it's the corpo-sites we all congregate around now to blame. I don't know. Peak internet was 2000-2010 and I'll stake my flag on that hill - don't @ me.

As a desktop Linux use, Flash was a pain in my existence.

That shitty plugin that never worked right in Linux because fuck Linux users, amiright?

Then whole sites were written in Flash, hurting web interoperability and degrading standards. Of course many public services, banks, followed the trend because shiny.

Fuck those dark ages. The day that shit died was a good day indeed.

I harbor hate for not many things, but Flash is one of them.

Watching Homestar Runner on YouTube doesn't hit the same

I actually use Flash nearly every day at work. Legacy support is no joke. We have a multi-million dollar system that is all controlled by a computer that is dual-booting Win11 and WinXP. Because the control program is coded in Flash. It’s coded in Flash because there are a lot of moving parts, and the program displays their current positions. And dynamically moving objects is like the one thing that Flash does really really well. Instead of trying to re-program it in a new language, the manufacturer just fucking ships WinXP. Win11 is on another partition, and is only booted when you need to connect to the internet to run firmware updates on the various motors.

Wasn't it also proprietary, and you needed Adobe software to create it?

Flash animations have a rather specific usecase imho, as your example proves. It's not a game, it's not a movie, it's (usually) more than a simple animated loop.

There's no exact equivalent for that, but the www has developed way beyond it in all aspects.

The absurd amount of security issues flash has lead to its demise.

The problem isn't animation - as you said there is raster video and also animated SVGs.

The problem is that there is no way to package interactive content like there was. Flash wasn't just animation, it was also games. And even flash animations often had interactive bits, like homestar runner Easter eggs.

You can technically do it with JavaScript and HTML, but it's difficult now and unfeasible back when flash died. Not only did the tools not exist, but html didn't even have things like canvas yet for the tools to use.

I built websites and apps in flash. It was awesome. You could do a lot, especially in the later years, 3d games, anything was possible.

It was so easy and clean to create smooth animations, transformations, it was limitless. It's a travesty that we got no replacement. You could do more quicker in the year 2005, than you can do today.

That's true, but there is a project called "ruffle" now, which is written in Rust and can play .swf files. So if you really want, you can still build Flash animations and share them online.

Ruffle also runs in browsers, thanks to wasm.

Streaming video killed whatever Flash was.

Flash took the binary categories of animation and video game and made it into a spectrum. Even when they were mostly animations, there would be some interactive elements. It was apparently a technical horror show, but it was used to create unique pieces of art that define a narrow era.

I have see a lot implementation of interactive html5, that I think is similar to flash.

It's also surprising that Newgrounds survived post-Flash.

But i think i prefer point and click game like from TellTale better, it's an interactive movie.

Web 2.0 and the stiffling of the indie web is the issue to me.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, etc aren't built to cool web pages in front of people as those could leave people off of the site.

There are some crazy cool html5 stuff out there.

People could use SVG animations + JS to accomplish the same thing. It just never took off for some reason

There is still no animation software that can match flash brush style / color or animation techniques.

Interactive Vector Animations as a web standard are technically possible, but it'd be best implemented as animation software that compiles a file/archive that's usable by a standard browser based client that renders things locally using a canvas element.

In-fact its so possible flash has been re-impmenented this way using an action script interpreter compiled to web assembly.

They didn't give you the entire kit because that wasn't the W3C's job, it was to give you the tools necessary to build the kit.

I blame Adobe.

They acquired Macromesia and just let Flash stagnate and renamed it Animate.

FrogBlender2000.swf

I've seen quite a few kids embed Scratch projects into their websites, which I guess is actually a pretty close approximation of Flash. Stupid easy to use, vector based, customizable with forks, tiny file size(negated by the fact that you also need to embed the entire vm once for every project to get it to run). Kind of ironic that it was originally built in Flash itself though.

Recently found an old .fla of a game I made in highschool, and I have no idea how to turn it into a playable file. Would love to recover it