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

    358 points ofalkaed | 11 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.414s | 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.
    replies(14): >>45556456 #>>45556552 #>>45556787 #>>45556840 #>>45557111 #>>45557571 #>>45557593 #>>45558222 #>>45559471 #>>45560431 #>>45560698 #>>45561427 #>>45561684 #>>45567195 #
    1. eloisant ◴[12 Oct 25 13:50 UTC] No.45558222[source]▶
    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.

    replies(4): >>45558778 #>>45559233 #>>45560263 #>>45565878 #
    2. acheron ◴[12 Oct 25 15:14 UTC] No.45558778[source]▶
    This. Flash was awful. I see people defending it and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
    replies(5): >>45559182 #>>45559519 #>>45559678 #>>45559905 #>>45560399 #
    3. big_toast ◴[12 Oct 25 16:00 UTC] No.45559182[source]▶
    I dunno, a whole subtree of the internet died and I’m not sure it really came back. It was a beautiful Galápagos Islands.
    4. Minor49er ◴[12 Oct 25 16:08 UTC] No.45559233[source]▶
    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

    replies(1): >>45574653 #
    5. sarchertech ◴[12 Oct 25 16:35 UTC] No.45559519[source]▶
    For the most part, people are talking about games and animation, not text based websites.
    6. acidburnNSA ◴[12 Oct 25 16:53 UTC] No.45559678[source]▶
    Did you ever try one of those Flash-based room escape games? It was really amazing to lose yourself in the challenges and puzzles.
    7. 9x39 ◴[12 Oct 25 17:17 UTC] No.45559905[source]▶
    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.
    8. ethbr1 ◴[12 Oct 25 17:57 UTC] No.45560263[source]▶
    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

    9. morshu9001 ◴[12 Oct 25 18:13 UTC] No.45560399[source]▶
    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.
    10. pjmlp ◴[13 Oct 25 07:56 UTC] No.45565878[source]▶
    Thankfully now we have WebAssembly/WebGL/WebGPU for that.
    11. spartanatreyu ◴[13 Oct 25 23:54 UTC] No.45574653[source]▶
    > 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...