Flash the thing to make websites and games.
In: 46
Before the mid 2000s, web pages could not change. If you were on a website like Ebay, you’d tell the website “I want to search for a used pink bathrobe,” and the website’s server would build a unique webpage filled with pink bathrobes and send it to you, similar to how a web designer might manually add a new webpage to a site.
As you can imagine, user’s wanted more interactivity. Things like interactive maps, games, and anything that needed to constantly react to user input was basically impossible. This is where Flash comes in, it allowed websites to add interactivity that fit a lot of these use cases, and more importantly made it pretty easy to do.
Why is it not used anymore? Better things replaced it. Web standards started to include interactivity out of the box (Javascript got more fleshed out, HTML Canvas became a thing and allowed dynamic 2D graphics, and WebSockets allowed constant updates), and thus Flash being a 3rd party app that needed constant updating (which lets face it, a lot of users aren’t going to do) meant it was deemed a security flaw and phased out.
Before the mid 2000s, web pages could not change. If you were on a website like Ebay, you’d tell the website “I want to search for a used pink bathrobe,” and the website’s server would build a unique webpage filled with pink bathrobes and send it to you, similar to how a web designer might manually add a new webpage to a site.
As you can imagine, user’s wanted more interactivity. Things like interactive maps, games, and anything that needed to constantly react to user input was basically impossible. This is where Flash comes in, it allowed websites to add interactivity that fit a lot of these use cases, and more importantly made it pretty easy to do.
Why is it not used anymore? Better things replaced it. Web standards started to include interactivity out of the box (Javascript got more fleshed out, HTML Canvas became a thing and allowed dynamic 2D graphics, and WebSockets allowed constant updates), and thus Flash being a 3rd party app that needed constant updating (which lets face it, a lot of users aren’t going to do) meant it was deemed a security flaw and phased out.
Fun fact, a company I used to work for ended up paying 200k+ for a new website, completely rebuilt in flash around 2016…. Right after it was widely known flash sites were bad, they tech was going away. Contracts were signed and it was too late to change course.
Fun fact, a company I used to work for ended up paying 200k+ for a new website, completely rebuilt in flash around 2016…. Right after it was widely known flash sites were bad, they tech was going away. Contracts were signed and it was too late to change course.
Fun fact, a company I used to work for ended up paying 200k+ for a new website, completely rebuilt in flash around 2016…. Right after it was widely known flash sites were bad, they tech was going away. Contracts were signed and it was too late to change course.
When the world wide web came out in the 90’s, it was mostly documents similar to wikipedia articles. The main way you interacted with them was to click from link to link. If you wanted something like a video game you had to install an executable file, usually from a CD rom or floppy disk. In addition to web document standards being simple, computers were much less powerful then so that created major limits to what could be shown or experienced on a web page. Movie content for example couldn’t be shown inline on a web page and there was no youtube. Then they released java and internet browsers started to support java applications which could run apps such as video games in a browser. Around the same time the company Macromedia introduced the Shockwave platform which did the same thing. While java was free to build, Shockwave had to be built with Macromedia’s software, but tended to be more professional. Both java and shockwave required a plugin to run. Over the years Shockwave became Flash and was bought by Adobe. Both java and flash became prone to security flaws over the years and with better performing computers, the HTML5 standard could ultimately do everything that flash and java apps could so for security reasons and to stop the hassle of updating plugins constantly, browser platforms stopped supporting java apps a long time ago and flash more recently. Youtube was actually still using the flash app well in to the 2010s and flash was ultimately phased out completely just a few years ago.
It got superseded by HTML5.
Adobe Animate is basically the old Flash IDE but pumping out HTML5. Seems to be mostly used for banner ads, which was one of the things Flash was previously used for.
When the world wide web came out in the 90’s, it was mostly documents similar to wikipedia articles. The main way you interacted with them was to click from link to link. If you wanted something like a video game you had to install an executable file, usually from a CD rom or floppy disk. In addition to web document standards being simple, computers were much less powerful then so that created major limits to what could be shown or experienced on a web page. Movie content for example couldn’t be shown inline on a web page and there was no youtube. Then they released java and internet browsers started to support java applications which could run apps such as video games in a browser. Around the same time the company Macromedia introduced the Shockwave platform which did the same thing. While java was free to build, Shockwave had to be built with Macromedia’s software, but tended to be more professional. Both java and shockwave required a plugin to run. Over the years Shockwave became Flash and was bought by Adobe. Both java and flash became prone to security flaws over the years and with better performing computers, the HTML5 standard could ultimately do everything that flash and java apps could so for security reasons and to stop the hassle of updating plugins constantly, browser platforms stopped supporting java apps a long time ago and flash more recently. Youtube was actually still using the flash app well in to the 2010s and flash was ultimately phased out completely just a few years ago.
It got superseded by HTML5.
Adobe Animate is basically the old Flash IDE but pumping out HTML5. Seems to be mostly used for banner ads, which was one of the things Flash was previously used for.
When the world wide web came out in the 90’s, it was mostly documents similar to wikipedia articles. The main way you interacted with them was to click from link to link. If you wanted something like a video game you had to install an executable file, usually from a CD rom or floppy disk. In addition to web document standards being simple, computers were much less powerful then so that created major limits to what could be shown or experienced on a web page. Movie content for example couldn’t be shown inline on a web page and there was no youtube. Then they released java and internet browsers started to support java applications which could run apps such as video games in a browser. Around the same time the company Macromedia introduced the Shockwave platform which did the same thing. While java was free to build, Shockwave had to be built with Macromedia’s software, but tended to be more professional. Both java and shockwave required a plugin to run. Over the years Shockwave became Flash and was bought by Adobe. Both java and flash became prone to security flaws over the years and with better performing computers, the HTML5 standard could ultimately do everything that flash and java apps could so for security reasons and to stop the hassle of updating plugins constantly, browser platforms stopped supporting java apps a long time ago and flash more recently. Youtube was actually still using the flash app well in to the 2010s and flash was ultimately phased out completely just a few years ago.
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