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

358 points ofalkaed | 13 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.502s | source | bottom

Just curious and who knows, maybe someone will adopt it or develop something new based on its ideas.
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zaptheimpaler ◴[12 Oct 25 08:20 UTC] No.45556394[source]▶
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.
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1. Y-bar ◴[12 Oct 25 08:33 UTC] No.45556456[source]▶
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.

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2. Sankozi ◴[12 Oct 25 08:44 UTC] No.45556521[source]▶
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.
3. OtherShrezzing ◴[12 Oct 25 08:47 UTC] No.45556539[source]▶
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.

4. GuB-42 ◴[12 Oct 25 10:00 UTC] No.45556917[source]▶
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.

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5. KaiserPro ◴[12 Oct 25 10:42 UTC] No.45557127[source]▶
> 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.

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6. hulitu ◴[12 Oct 25 11:44 UTC] No.45557469[source]▶
> more security holes than anything else.

Adobe was never known for its security or quality.

7. Y-bar ◴[12 Oct 25 14:33 UTC] No.45558509[source]▶
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.

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8. masfuerte ◴[12 Oct 25 14:58 UTC] No.45558666{3}[source]▶
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.
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9. Y-bar ◴[12 Oct 25 15:11 UTC] No.45558752{4}[source]▶
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.

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10. masfuerte ◴[12 Oct 25 15:18 UTC] No.45558803{5}[source]▶
You're still comparing Flash on twenty year old hardware to HTML+CSS on modern hardware.
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11. Y-bar ◴[12 Oct 25 16:37 UTC] No.45559531{6}[source]▶
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.

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12. Y-bar ◴[12 Oct 25 16:40 UTC] No.45559554[source]▶
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.
13. nrdvana ◴[12 Oct 25 22:48 UTC] No.45562763{7}[source]▶
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