Ask HN: Abandoned/dead projects you think died before their time and why?

Adobe Flash / Shockwave. After all these decades, I've yet to see a tool that makes it as easy to make games or multimedia as Flash did. One of many reminders recently (many others in politics) that humanity doesn't just inevitably or linearly move forward in any domain, or even 2 steps forward 1 step back. Some things are just lost to time - maybe rediscovered in a century, maybe never.

Those tools were awesome. But as formats go, they were awful due to bad performance and more security holes than anything else.

I still miss Macromedia Fireworks.

Flash performance is still better than current web stack's. Probably will always be - you could write non trivial games that would work on 128MB memory machine. Currently single browser tab with simple page can take more than that.

Macromedia Fireworks was an outstanding piece of software.

The 20 most common things you’d do with the tool were there for you in obvious toolbars. It had a lot of advanced features for image editing. It had a scripting language, so you could do bulk editing operations. It supported just about every file extension you could think of.

Most useful feature of all was that it’d load instantly. You’d click the icon on the desktop, and there’d be the Fireworks UI before you could finish blinking. Compared to 2025 Adobe apps, where you click the desktop icon and make a coffee while it starts, it’s phenomenal performance.

Yes. I never used flash personally, but I loved those little games people created with them. There was the whole scene of non developers creating little games of all kinds and it just ceased to exist.

So much college years time spent (wasted?) on Addicting Games.

Even if Adobe had gotten their act together and fixed all security holes, Apple would have still killed it. It was always a threat as a popular design tool. And decades later, with the HTML canvas hype faded, there's still no replacement to what Adobe Flash could do - any designer could create stellar, interactive design that can be embedded into any website...without a monthly subscription.

Personal pet peeve, but as someone who still makes gifs, Image Ready. Adobe kind of absorbed Image Ready into Photoshop and it's just never lived up to how easy it was to make simple gifs in Image Ready

Performance was way better than what we have now with modern web stacks, we just have more powerful computers.

I agree on security and bugs, but bugs can be fixed. It just shows neglect by Adobe, which was, I think, the real problem. I think that if Adobe seriously wanted to, it could have been a web standard.

Kids now create games in Roblox. More constrained, more commercial, more exploitative- but there is still a huge scene of non-developers creating games if you care to look.

There is still a way to run flash apps via https://ruffle.rs/ You can probably still make flash games and run them via ruffle.

True, I do think Godot is on the right path, I haven’t had time to look into it in detail, but their HTML5 export seems solid from the videos I saw.

Enabling novice normies to make games was excellent, and I believe the whole game industry benefited from this resulting injection of fresh ideas. A lot of indy developers with fresh takes on what games could be got started this way. Zachtronics is one example of many that comes to mind right now.

On the other hand, for every flash game made there were about ten thousands flash-based ads, and nearly as many websites that used flash poorly for things like basic navigation (remember flash based website dropdown menus?). And for a few years it seemed like every single restaurant with a website was using flash for the entire thing, the results were borderline unusable in the best cases. And let's not forget that as long as flash was dominant, it was choking out the demand to get proper video support into browsers. Flash based video players performed like dog shit and made life on Linux a real chore.

> more security holes than anything else.

yeah it wasn't secure

but;

> bad performance

I don't think thats the case. For the longest while flash was faster than js at doing anything vaguely graphic based. The issue for apple was that the CPU in the iphone wasn't fast enough to do flash and anything else. Moreover Adobe didn't get on with jobs when they were talking about custom versions.

You have to remember that "apps" were never meant to be a thing on the iphone, it was all about "desktop" like web performance.

> more security holes than anything else.

Adobe was never known for its security or quality.

Eh... it's very hit or miss. It keeps getting better though!

Godot is pretty awesome. Easy to learn, can do 2D or 3D, and can export to HTML5/webasm that works across all major OSes and browsers including mobile.

It’s far from perfect but I’ve been enjoying playing with it even for things that aren’t games and it has come a long way just in the last year or two. I feel like it’s close to (or is currently) having its Blender moment.

Flash was the HyperCard of the 90s/early 2000s.

There hasn’t been a replacement, yet.

Ruffle is amazing. I launched a 20+ year old game yesterday with zero compatibility issues. Even better than the original Flash because of superior security isolation mechanisms.

Are there any ways that I can make games or something

Like I want to make websites about me similar to those in neocities right, those flashy nice (good?) artistic UI

I suck at css. I don't know but I never really got a feedback attention loop and heck even AI can make it better than me

But I want to show the world what I myself can make as well and not just what I prompt or get back.

I want a good feedback loop, can flash be useful for this purpose? Like maybe I want a website like uh something early browser times. I am kinda interested in building something like netscape navigator esque thing even though I wasn't born in that era or maybe windows xp style.

I have mixed opinions about AI tbh. I genuinely just want to learn things right now, it might take me more time, I have been beating myself over using AI and not feeling equal to if writing things by hand. So I want to prove to myself that I can write things/learn things by hand as well. Like I tried using it to study but the lure to make things right away and then trapping you later is definitely there, it feels easy in the start imo and that's the lure and I kinda want to stay away with that lure to develop my skills, maybe not right now, then later.

I wish Flash would have died sooner.

It was a plague on the web, you couldn't zoom, select text, go back, just a black box ignoring everything about your web browser.

Killing it was probably the best thing Jobs ever did.

Lots of people say performance was good, but that seems to be through the nostalgic lens of a handful of cool games.

Those did sometimes run really great, but most implementations were indeed very slow.

I remember vividly because it was part of my job back then to help with web performance and when we measured page speed and user interface responsiveness flash was almost always the worst.

Which made it much easier to block ads than it is now.

Right. But that doesn't mean the performance of Flash was bad for what it was doing. Or that it was worse than the performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS now.

The default, and by far the most common, output from Flash had significantly slower click-to-response and for network latency and for rendering than HTML+CSS is today.

You remembering a few optimised instances does not change the reality that Flash was bad.

This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.

You're still comparing Flash on twenty year old hardware to HTML+CSS on modern hardware.

I dunno, a whole subtree of the internet died and I’m not sure it really came back. It was a beautiful Galápagos Islands.

Flash players had zoom built in. And I believe there were textareas that allowed people to copy and paste text if they wanted, though it wasn't very common

Flash was the last thing that got people excited for the Web generally

Try Roblox! Unless you haven't yet. I was SO impressed. Everything works as expected. 5 minutes after starting the game making kit I totally understood why Roblox is worth billions. It just works. It's magic. All can be scripted, but also any 6y.o. can use it.

For the most part, people are talking about games and animation, not text based websites.

I am not and have never compared them in the way you say I did. You literally wrote ”Or that it was worse than the performance of doing the same thing in modern HTML+CSS now.” so I had to somehow repsond to that strange claim.

Of course modern computers are orders of magnitude more powerful! But Flash was definitely generally worse compared on the same hardware and network stack compared to vanilla (non-plugin based) web tech.

I remember well. I earned my living for a few years around 2010 porting slow Flash sites to regular web tech. It was hard to translate some functionality, but Flash was definitely slow compared to the equivalent regular website done without the plugin.

Did you ever try one of those Flash-based room escape games? It was really amazing to lose yourself in the challenges and puzzles.

It was both awful when it showed up in the enterprise and amazing at unleashing creativity for many. Most young non-technical people I knew during its rise had regularly made Flash creations or even games, and deeply enjoyed the Cambrian explosion of games and animations for a few years.

Flash was the original web Excel (also Lotus 1-2-3) -- a simultaneous design + data + programming tool.

These are terrible for maintainability, but excellent for usability.

On the whole, I'd say it was easily a loss for the greater web that web programming left the citizen-programmer behind. (By requiring them all to turn into hamfisted front-end javascript programmers...)

Many of the centralized evils of the current web might have been avoided if there had remained an onramp for the neophyte to really create for the web.

I.e. Facebook et al. might have instead been replaced by a hosted, better-indexed Macromedia create + edit + host platform

Or the amount of shit code produced by inexperienced front-end devs throwing spaghetti at IE might have been reduced

It was really meant for animation and games but got misused as a web GUI tool. I think it would've been fine to allow it anyway, and anyone who wants to build a GUI can just not use Flash.

I was even fine with Flash being misused for web GUIs, just to pressure the open web to get its act together. At least devs got to pick 2 between [fancy, fast, easy]. If you want something better, make it instead of hobbling the competition.

Time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted.

Flash is kind of dead now, i don't think the tools to create new Flash software are even released anymore. I would recommend learning Godot to make a game. There's some great tutorials like here - https://www.gdquest.com/library/first_2d_game_godot4_vampire...

it's called Roblox and it's bigger than Flash ever was

This post reminded me about the good time I had watching Salad Fingers and Happy Tree Friends. "Na, na, nanana na".

Well, I miss Director which I used a lot for demos/prototyping.

The big issue with Flash was how overused it was.

When Flash was on its way out one app made at the place I worked still said they needed it, and I couldn't figure out why... it was a Java app. After some digging, I found it, some horizontal dividers on the page. They could have, and should have, just been images. They didn't do anything. Yet someone made them in Flash.

I'd also say all the drop-down menu systems were an overuse. Splash screens on every car company's home page. It was out of hand.

I guess you could call it a victim of it's own success, where once it was time for it to die (due to mobile), very few people were sad to see it go.

Maybe at rendering menus and documents, but flash had graphic routines written in optimized assembly that simply weren't possible with JavaScript on that era of hardware.

I feel like people are talking past each other a bit here. FlashScript was never very fast, and rendering a document as a giant collection of bezier curves was not fast, but the people doing animations with it were getting the equivalent of modern day CSS3 animations + SVG, and it ran nicely on hardware two orders of magnitude slower than what we need for CSS3+SVG

Yes I understand but godot wasm takes a genuinely longer time to load a game than as compared to ruffle but yeah I have tinkered with godot, maybe I will play with that. Thank you.

Thankfully now we have WebAssembly/WebGL/WebGPU for that.

It was actually fantastic even for creating websites. To think that 20 years later we still don't have tools to make similar stuff with similar ease is mindblowing.

I agree.

My transcripts, on the other hand, have a different opinion.

> Flash players had zoom built in

The zoom was limited to the frame that the flash player sat in, so you'd end up with different parts of the website at different zoom levels.

Also flash wasn't responsive and couldn't flow like real website content can.

> Flash was the last thing that got people excited for the Web generally

That's only because all the capabilities were new, now they're built into the web itself. See:

- https://ciechanow.ski/airfoil/

- https://slowroads.io/

- https://photopea.com

- https://superspl.at/view?id=1eacd61c

- https://itch.io/games/platform-web

- https://alche.studio/

- https://ruinergame.com/ (scroll down)

- etc...

> even for things that aren’t games

This is a slept-on feature of Godot, IMO. It's been my go-to native UI library for all my C# projects since I tried making a game with it 2 years ago. It perfectly straddles the line between drag-and-drop WYSIWYG and software defined layout.