These days, our web browsers—whether on mobile or desktop—are highly functional and can do all sorts of things that we could only dream of a decade prior.
But despite that, one could argue that the web has actually gotten less creative over time, not more. This interpretation of events is a key underpinning of Web Design: The Evolution of the Digital World 1990-Today (Taschen, $50), a new visual-heavy book from author Rob Ford and editor Julius Wiedemann that does something that hasn’t been done on the broader internet in quite a long time: It praises the use of Flash as a creative tool, rather than a bloated malware vessel, and laments the ways that visual convention, technical shifts, and walled gardens have started to rein in much of this unvarnished creativity.
This is a realm where small agencies supporting big brands, creative experimenters with nothing to lose, and teenage hobbyists could stand out simply by being willing to try something risky. It was a canvas with a built-in distribution model. What wasn’t to like, besides a whole host of malware?
I don’t think you can argue that the the Flash era yielded more creativity than, say, the whole of YouTube, but if you restrict the internet to just actual websites, there may be something to be said for this. I remember so many cool and amazing – at the time – Flash projects that you’d stumble across back when Flash was a normal, accepted thing, and those things have gone away, replaced not by cool HTML5 equivalents – as was promised – but by bland samey-samey websites, with far less creativity.
I surely don’t mourn the loss of Flash, but it also wasn’t all bad.
Every week I have to fill out a timecard. It’s a simple web form. Nothing special, right?
It’s implemented in Flash. Without having Flash installed, I won’t get paid.
Creativity? Not! it has spawned a generation of idiots.
The only idiot is the time recording provider, for not updating the app.
Either that, or your employer for not updating their setup.
The only idiot is the time recording provider, for using flash in the first place for a simple web form.
Fixed that for you.
As someone who had his name in the about box in Flash CC once (as a top beta tester), I can tell you, there is nothing out there as easy to get into, or as good at actually teaching you how to write programs as Flash and the old Flash community. Those were the days.
I’d say it’s a complexity level problem. Browser tech has 3 different technologies you have to address (HTML/XML, CSS and JS) and multiple different engines to stay compatible with, along with lots of different form factors you might target. So all the effort goes in to learning and supporting all that. There is some lower level alternatives – Canvas for 2D stuff, and WebGL, but these are lower level than Flash, and much much harder to learn.
Add to that there is no great GUI for any of this. In the Flash days, you could do so much by moving things around in some graphics programs, Photoshop and Illustrator, and then importing that to Flash Pro (now called Animate) with a really slick display list based API and timeline metaphor and script it all with Actionscript (which was really Javascript 4 – if you ever wondered why ecmascript went from 3.0 to 5.0, Actionscript was 4.0).
Even today there are many projects I could probably do in half the time, where I’d end up with a “SWF” that was 1/2 or less the size of a similar JS project, and ran much faster (assuming careful GPU content construction). But alas, Flash is dead, and all we have left is the browser.
BTW, Animate is almost as easy to use as Flash was back in the day, and it can publish to “HTML5” canvas. I wonder why more students in particular aren’t exposed to that – maybe because it’s marketing from Adobe is not as targeted as Flash once was. Adobe positions it as a sprite sheet generator more than anything, rather than a applet engine. That’s a shame.
I don’t know anything about Flash but your understanding of “HTML5” is just wrong. The standard APIs are low level, of course, but there are many frameworks that build on them to provide the same ease of use of Flash.
Overall the experience of developing and deploying an app or partial content isn’t as smooth, maybe, but nobody who went through the learning curve seems to think it is worth investing into building a newbie-friendly tool for that purpose. (Of course because maintaining one with all the rapidly changing libraries would be impossible.)
I think it depends on the type of content. I agree that Flash is/was easier to develop with for static/standalone content, or using off-the-shelf Flash apps where loading dynamic content was just a matter of popping the URL of the XML data into a variable in the… component inspector? (it’s been a while since I worked with flash).
For dynamic content, though, I find it much easier to work with HTML/CSS/JS. The simplest reason is that there are fewer layers to deal with: query the DB > send the content to the browser – vs query the DB > output the content in XML for input the Flash app > send the content to the browser. It also doesn’t/didn’t help that Flash is more of a hassle to maintain. Lost the FLA file or simply don’t have it? You’re pretty much out of luck.
The best thing about Flash (for those who didn’t actually use it) was that it was separate from built-in browser functionality. Back when video ads all used Flash, it was easy to stop the things auto-playing. How many *years* has it taken for browser developers to finally allow users to prevent auto-play of HTML5 video?
gld59,
So true!
Did they finally fix that? I’ve had so many problems with firefox and unwanted autoplaying that I’ve simply stopped visiting certain websites. I’ve tried many plugins that didn’t quite work in part because mozilla kept breaking the APIs. I’ll have to try it again and see what happens now.
“Did they finally fix that? I’ve had so many problems with firefox and unwanted autoplaying”
Fixed in Firefox 69 (second “New” item in changelog). Edge has allowed the user to disable autoplay for a while now, too. The Blink family seem to be dragging the chain here.
gld59,
Ok I see it, unfortunately firefox esr (needed to disable plugin restrictions) lags significantly behind the mainline versions and these features aren’t there yet. I hate mozilla doing that, but that’s a different topic.
I am glad they finally added the ability to block auto play video and not just audio under about:preferences#privacy|AutoPlay. For me blocking audio was never the primary motivation for stopping autoplay, it was the unwanted media and bandwidth consumption especially on metered connections. However I’m still seeing some autoplay videos getting through on some websites, I believe because they’re using javascript to autoplay the video.
Testing with firefox 69.0.3 for windows on none other than youtube.com starts videos right away without any interaction. Granted, it’s less bad on youtube because I do expect to play videos whenever I visit youtube, but as a test case for disabling autoplay it’s technically a failure. Youtube is not listed as having any exceptions in the autoplay list. So it appears they’re still not enforcing the autoplay setting everywhere.
“Testing with firefox 69.0.3 for windows on none other than youtube.com”
YouTube has an autoplay switch on the web page, though (useful for preventing follow-on to the next video), so perhaps if you have that enabled it over-rides the browser setting? My browser settings are all over the place at the moment, so I haven’t done any actual testing.
gld59,
You are right that youtube provides it’s own switch, which is nice of them, however it’s not persistent when you delete cookies for privacy.
And in any case firefox itself remains broken for not respecting the user’s autoplay settings on all sites. Under no conditions should any website be able to autoplay when autoplay has explicitly been disabled!!! I never had this trouble with flash. I wish mozilla would fix this bug because as it stands the ability to disable autoplay is broken/incomplete in firefox.
I’ll take lack of creativity over flash any day.
I did work for a company that did have a very impressive flash UI for a professional application however (Actix, radio optimization software for mobile networks). I have to say I haven’t seen anything as advanced yet with other technologies.
I never did much with flash, but even so I do observe a trend towards less creativity. Flash websites fell by the wayside and it seems everyone turned to wordpress as a kind of successor. As a web developer I used to take some pride in my creativity with custom websites. But that was years ago, budgets have gone way down, creativity has gone down, demand for wordpress sites has gone up… even osnews 🙁 I know it’s what the market wants, but IMHO there’s a lot of talent going to waste.
Under the hood, SQL websites used to be a pleasure to work with. WordPress databases are the exact opposite. The over-reliance on foreign keys for just about everything and cramming everything into the WP_POST tables is a mess. Pages, articles, comments, Images, products, …it all goes in the same table and the attributes (like image width or product cost) for all these have to be joined individually from the hodge podge which is the WP_POSTMETA table. Sounds slow? It is. And to make things worse, it’s not even indexed properly. Performing SQL queries and especially inserts/updates on this mess has become a hair-pulling experience. They want us to use wordpress APIs, but using PHP is not always an option and accessing objects one by one is so much slower than bulk loading!!! For one client I needed to update 60k products twice an hour,. Using the API it was taking 10+minutes with the database pegging the CPU at 100%.. I wrote my own bulk loading code and it runs in less than 2 seconds. Databases are very fast unless you throw bad designs at them. Instead of fixing the slow designs, badly performing CMS websites will usually resort to caching to improve performance. However caches are often added naively without concern for proper cache eviction and can result in stale pages. One can see this on osnews by clearing cookies after posting new comments, updates disappear for a while and the counts don’t always match.
There’s at least one good reason to be happy with cookie-cutter websites: then they can be had cheaper today than ever before. But if you are into creativity then I agree with the author, there’s been a regression.
“replaced not by cool HTML5 equivalents – as was promised – but by bland samey-samey websites, with far less creativity”
The main reason that happened, and why Flash died as well, was the proliferation of mobile browsing.
Suddenly, starting with Apple, and then with Android, Flash was banned due to being buggy and power-hungry, and people had to make interactive, plugin-less, adaptable websites that fit on a gazillion resolutions, interfaces and devices.
And given time and maintainability are paramount in today’s web development, and given a lot of these problems will end up converging on the same solutions, people stick to the tried and true methods, aka “stick a updatable framework/template that does all that for you”
Even OSnews had to adopt this pragmatism, and was forced to adopt a generic WordPress theme, since updating their old PHP codebase would have been a monumental task, and even if successful, would have likely still ended up more insecure and difficult to maintain than simply transitioning.
The reason OSNews was updated was purely because of a security breach in the original CMS software. A WordPress theme then had to be cobbled together quite rapidly in order to bring the site back online, which meant there wasn’t enough time to make a custom theme that blended in with the old style of website.
Quite often it’s the same with HTML 5. Either people use the tried-and-tested Flash interface, or the devs have to learn HTML 5 from scratch, which means their new implementation will be different, and likely simplistic, compared to the flash version
Let’s be real here. Flash was banned from smartphones due to being an existential threat to app stores, which make 90% of their profits from game sales. The other issues are fixable. The old flash game websites have been in major decline while all the developers have switched to making mobile apps.
Ain’t that the truth. I actually side loaded the Android version of Flash Plugin in to Safari back in the day, and it was incredibly fast and quite compatible. Strangely, the Adobe engineers made some terrible choices about how to scale the content on mobile devices, making the default experience on Android quite terrible. The hacked plugin on iOS actually worked better and fast than it did on Android.
I actually wrote a blog post about this back in 2010 with screenshots! All running on my iPhone 3GS. http://www.unfocus.com/2010/08/11/frash-shows-flash-on-iphone-can-be-great-with-screenshots/
CaptainN-,
Quoted from your link…
You and dark2 are right, steve jobs lied a lot to justify his banning of flash/java/emulators/other browsers/etc. To anyone reading between the lines, it was clear that apple was banning these things to stop them competing. He could have left the app store’s success to merit, but he opted to ban all the competing technologies instead. That decision to deprive owners of the right to choose their own apps and sources was anticompetitive and has created repercussions on society to this day (like how IOS restrictions are now being used to help regimes censor apps), but who cares when you can laugh all the way to the bank, right? /s
They were so zealous to kill Flash, that they even for a while banned AIR apps (AIR on iOS is really just Flash assets, precompiled into a native app, and delivered through the app store). That literally made no sense given their stated rationale for disallowing Flash, but it did clearly demonstrate their real motivations.
Nemerian,
I mostly agree with those points, however I think gld59’s point can be applied here: it wasn’t necessarily flash itself that was a problem, but how it was used by developers…bad code can and does kill HTML5 websites too, it’s just that in the days of flash, the overhead was largely relegated to flash, now we see more of it happening in javascript and it’s harder to turn off.
WordPress websites sometimes get exploited and they still need to be (or should be) audited. WordPress is fairly limited out of the box, so there are so many themes, extensions, and code snippets that users rely on, but all these things can potentially open up attack vectors, there’s nothing miraculous about wordpress that makes it safer than other website code, it mostly comes down to the skill and experience of developers. I’ve personally witnessed several web attacks over the years, and every single one of them involved a compromised 3rd party CMS. As always, YMMV. While normal users don’t necessarily have a way to know this, CMS solution providers often have cheap/inexperienced/incompetent developers themselves and ultimately their clients judge them based exclusively on how the website looks rather than how well it functions. There are so many things I want to say about this, but I’ll leave it at that.
it’s very possible to be more robust than wordpress, but as with anything it comes down to time, money, and resources. Like so many of my clients, osnews just doesn’t have the money. When money becomes the predominant factor, custom development goes out the window. I’d have preferred for osnews to take a more creative path, but I completely understand why they didn’t/couldn’t.
Flash website “Creativity” is just a euphemism for ” Terrible UX” . Homestar runner was the only good flash based site. Also, the only one that made the UX decent.
Almost all the contemporary UX on mobile devices like iPhone and Apple Watches started out as experiments in Flash 10+ years ago (even patented interactions like overscroll rubber banding). If you think those UX experiences are crap, well okay then, but it’s not accurate to pretend it didn’t go that way.
I’m in an odd position of completely agreeing and disagreeing at the same time!
Flash sites often had bad UX, but were called out very quickly. The trial and error meant that good UX standards were quickly brought to the fore. Remember, at the time all sites were a mash of tables that would render differently in IE or Opera or Netscape. Flash, always the same.
Adurbe,
I hadn’t thought of that, but you are right. Flash was much more consistent especially considering how incompatible and incomplete HTML implementations were. I still recall flash having the most reliable video playback. Even HTML 5 video designed to replace it suffered a very rough start and it performed so badly on my machines that I needed to install plugins to revert to the better performing and more robust flash player. It was a dilemma though because I didn’t like flash on account of it being proprietary, haha.
I am not sure if i agree, early flash video was not very good at all in my experience, early sites that streamed video like Comedy central usually used “Real Media” since it was a lot better suited for video at that time.
NaGERST,
To clarify, I was referring to the transition from flash to HTML5 as in-browser players. Did real player ever play in the browser or did it force you to open in separate software?
Anyways, realplayer…hey that’s old school 🙂 I wasn’t able to use any video streaming that far back when they were popular because I didn’t have broadband until later, by which time realplayer wasn’t really a significant player and there was a lot more MOV/WMV/MP4/DIVX content.
I did try it at one point, but at that time they were notorious for ad-riddled nagware even making it’s way to #5 on most annoying product polls.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/130638/article.html?page=2
I have no idea how they stack up today. What are their selling points? Their own website uses an MP4 video. I don’t imagine they’ll ever pick up critical mass again, but then I’m not really watching this industry that closely.
JoeCartoon w00t!
Losing Flash didn’t kill anything, the creative folks just moved to Android and iOS and got buried under the myriad of competing innovations and biased search algorithms.