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

358 points ofalkaed | 1 comments | 11 Oct 25 22:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | 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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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.

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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

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1. 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...