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Out of context: Reply #12

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  • raf0

    This is actually one of my favourite dead horses to beat. As I wrote recently elsewhere:

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    Flash was a fantastic technology which still hardly can be matched 15 years later. It had to go though because it never overcame its major issues, most stemming from the fact that it was a lump of foreign body in the browser.

    - It never communicated with JS smoothly enough.

    - It broke standard browser UI behaviours — history, back/forward button, escape, save as.

    - It resided within a fixed-size space and while this could be changed, it wasn't cooperating with JS/DOM smoothly enough.

    - It had deep linking problems requiring hash hacks to work (and not smoothly across browsers).

    - It didn't have a clear and simple way of embedding and when people came up with FlashObject they got legal threats from Adobe and had to rename it to SWFObject — which was just a sample of what to expect from them in the future.

    - On top of that, Adobe kept screwing their original customer base — designers — by focusing on making Action Script a "proper" programming language rather than multimedia authoring tool. I know many designers who never even licked AS3.0, dropping Flash entirely instead.

    - SEO incompatibility was a biggie too.

    Add to that, the web was ready to get simpler. I was one of those who believed internet in the 2010's would be like interactive television. I was wrong, it went on to become something simple and text-based, like the "interactive print" it is now.

    If you search QBN from 2006, 2007 you'll see people were doubting Flash had a future in web as it was. Remember the fiasco of Roadrunner, Kontain and other FI sites?

    • "it was a lump of foreign body in the browser."i_was
    • The web is "interactive print". Are you kidding?studderine

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