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

358 points ofalkaed | 2 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source

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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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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1. 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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2. 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.