Some of you might remember when a 3mb flash animation could pack in some 5 minutes of animation, with the more advanced ones even having chapter/scene selectors, which could also include clickable easter eggs and other kinds of interactions during the scenes.
That’s not really true. You can do animation in HTML5 just like you could in flash. In fact, there are even quite a few ways you can acomplish the same.
All of that allows for animation, games and interactivity, no problem.
There are dozens of tools that allow you to build flash-like animation and package it easily. Tons of game engines allow to export to HTML5, just at the press of a button. And there are still websites hosting browser games that fill that spot. There’s even HTML5 browser games that run in VR.
But there are two big caveats:
Sorry if this sounds a bit defensive, it’s frustrating when someone writes a novel telling you’re wrong but didn’t spend the time to read what you wrote first.
I didn’t say it’s not possible.
I said that back when flash functionally died, it wasn’t feasible.
HTML 5 was barely supported by browsers. HTML 5 canvas had no support at all. WASM didn’t have any support. Having flash animators and flash game devs manually code the JavaScript and HTML just wasn’t realistic, and no tools existed at the time to span the gap.
Now it is a little easier with things like canvas, and more importantly now there are tools that animators can use and export as a webpage.
But in the intervening years, all the flash hosting websites died. Even newgrounds is a ghost of what it was. So even if the tools are there, the communities are all gone. Animators just export to video now, because that’s where the viewers are.
You mean in 2021 HTML5 was barely supported by browsers? Adobe ended support for Flash Player on 31th December 2020.
For comparison, the original HTML5 W3C recommendation was retired in 2018 and even Version 5.3 was retired less than a month after Flash Player was retired.
Functionally. Functionally. I said functionally for a reason. I didn’t just add that word in because I liked how it looked.
When was the last time you actually saw flash content?
Browser extension support deteriorated. It never worked on iOS. People stopped making flash content because folks couldn’t view it long before it officially became unsupported.
Again: HTML5 was supported way, way before flash disappeared.
https://caniuse.com/?search=canvas
That’s way before flash was discontinued. Except of on iOS, but smartphones were never the main platform for flash games/animation.
Flash-style skeletal animation was a result of technical limitations, not a deliberate art choice. The thing that killed flash-style animation was (a) the availability of better things like full-motion rasterized video and (b) the internet moving away from personal websites and towards big platforms, and almost all big platforms restricted the kind of content you can post to text, images and video.
Idk how old you are but it feels like you’re just looking up dates without really understanding what it was like.
I did flash animation.
I am a developer (I prefer backend but we all have to do some web).
I was an adult during that time.
The textbook dates don’t tell the story. I’m telling you that flash died long before support ended. I’m telling you that replacement tools didn’t exist yet. I’m telling you that getting flash artists to try to animation using JavaScript was not feasible. It’s crazy to me that you think that the existence of a basic canvas support means that artists had an realistic path to making their art.
Smartphones weren’t the main platform for flash, and that’s why it died early.
You’ve got a skewed view of what flash was used to animate. People made absolutely beautiful flash. Just like all art, there is good and bad. Flash made it accessible enough that bad amateurs could produce reasonable animations.
Rasterized video was not better. What a crazy thing to say.
Personal websites? You think that people mostly consumed flash animation and games from personal websites??? Where did you get this from?
It feels like you’re reading this from a timeline of major events instead of having lived it.
Dude, I’be been developing HTML apps from 2008 on. Early HTML5 browser support was literally my job at that time.
You seem to have totally ignored the next gen tech at that time and now you can’t remember what happened back then.
And now you are basing your whole argumentation on “you must be a kid”.
Kiddo, I’m likely pretty much the same age as you.
You were the one who brought up canvas support. By 2015 you could export full 3D games made in Unity to HTML5. And that was certainly not the first, there were literally dozens of other engines that allowed export to HTML5/WebGL at that time.
If you are too young to remember, that’s not my problem, little child.
Flash died because people moved to a better, more future-proof stack. And you claiming that little 2D animations in Flash were technically much, much better than full 3D rendering with GPU support is honestly wild.
(If you want to get offensive because you don’t have arguments, fine, I can get offensive too, little child.)
You keep saying ‘better’ like if heavier solutions have no downsides, like saying raytracing or gaussian splatting make all older rendering tech obsolete.
For individual animations sure data doesn’t seem to matter, but if you want to binge/download something like Homestar Runner at 1080p+ that data adds up when pre-rastered. The internet in the US isn’t always great (esp. rural, cost), even worse with upload speed.
Flash also had frame animation, with bezier curves and vector blob drawing… both of which are the big thing missing from modern solutions. Alternatives in modern engines aren’t quite the same and must be intentionally sought out, and also I don’t think that’d even be well supported by platforms (itch doesn’t even have an animation section) unless you’re fine with it being in a games section.
Newgrounds also still does Flash Forward jams. I wouldn’t say “better” things killed Flash, just that support was ripped away. There isn’t much of a choice. If you want Flash-style animation (and I don’t mean skeletal-only), it’s just Ruffle or maybe Wick Editor.
I see this as an implementation failure.
WebGL doesn’t have a container format, and a vector video format could exist (on Youtube, or played with an HTML5 video player) but doesn’t. The internet “moved away” because the key players who killed Flash didn’t implement things that would bring HTML5 to closer parity with what Flash did.
I could also see parallels made to other parts of life where the choice has been made for you many years ago.
A vector video format does exist: animated SVG. It has all the features you claim are missing.
But nobody uses it because it is much more complicated to do than rasterized video and has no relevant advantages.
You keep claiming that features don’t exist even though every single one of these features do exist but are just not used a lot because they are more complicated and have no relevant benefits.
A video has sound, can be exported from the animation software to a single file, and it can be played in a standard video player.
Animated SVG does not sound like it does that, and needing new paid* software isn’t great for adoption either. And honestly, I’ve never even heard of animated SVG (I’m well aware of SVG and that it probably could be animated with CSS or JS but that alone does not make it a thing).
The fact that vector works at resolutions (even if they don’t exist yet!) without the author even needing to think about it (let alone re-export) is an advantage. It can be great for many 2D aesthetics (many cartoons even used it!), the biggest complication is Adobe (and whoever is selling a subscription to what you mentioned).
Also that people are still developing things with Flash (even if it has to be ran via Ruffle) tells me again that the issue isn’t vector, it’s that replacing a format with ingredients is not an effective strategy if you actually want people to use it.
* yeah I know Flash was expensive as well (except y’know… other ways), but communities were already using it
That’s why I was talking about meaningful advantages. Today, stuff gets exported in 4k and that’s it. No need for anything more.
That nobody uses animated SVG should give you a clue about how many people value vector graphics over rasterization. It has uses (mostly when you expect stuff to get zoomed a lot) but only in quite specific use cases.
There’s ton of free software that exports to HTML5, including most major game engines. And people use that a lot. In fact, you can make VR games that fully run in a browser.
Browser games still exist. They run on HTML5 now, not on Flash. Web video still exists. It runs on HTML5 players, not on Flash. Little animations in websites still exist. They run on HTML5/SVG/CSS, not on Flash. Flash really was just replaced by HTML5, because it’s plain better on every front.
Spoken like someone who has never animated something in flash.
Go ahead and try to make an animated music video in SVG. Tell me how easy it was. It’s it something a middle schooler could pick up easily after a couple hours?
Ok, tell me: How many people make animated music videos and publish them on Youtube, versus how many people make animated music videos and publish them as Flash videos in 2025?
How many people did that in 2015 in Youtube vs Flash videos?
Nobody cares about Flash because it sucks. Even back in 2012 Flash sucked. It was a really bad tech and by 2015 it was mostly used by people to dumb to learn real programming languages and frameworks.