I miss the days when all the cool websites used Flash. I think Macromedia killed it for some reason. Probably because it had security flaws, back then it was pretty bandwidth-intensive too, but it made for some dynamic web designs.
Comment on PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation
apfelwoiSchoppen@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I could have sworn animated pngs were a thing in the Fireworks days. Really dating myself with that ref.
Substance_P@lemmy.world 3 days ago
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Flash had a myriad of problems. Web devs celebrated its death.
CompactFlax@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
The current situation with megabytes of JavaScript is pretty bad, but at the time, there was still a fair bit of dialup active, and mobile web was just starting to be a thing - on EDGE and barely 3G. It would take minutes to load.
Also, Steve Jobs had it in for Flash and that’s what ultimately killed it off, I think.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yes, the iPhone did not and never has supported Flash. At least not officially from Apple. There was support, albeit not quite 100% complete, on Windows CE/PocketPC at the time, though. That was one of the things that let me lord it over early iPhone adopters back in the day — my pocket nerd computer could play Homestar Runner videos, and their stupid expensive bauble couldn’t. So there.
TrenchcoatFullofBats@belfry.rip 3 days ago
I still miss using my iPAQ h4350. It still works; might be time to fire up Doom4CE…
sykaster@feddit.nl 3 days ago
And the crawling of flash websites is awful
cley_faye@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Flash was a security nightmare all round, not counting the security flaws. It was just designed without any security features. It was also terribly inefficient at its core job, that was supposedly vector animation. It filled a gap in a time where browser and standards where not that advanced.
Over time, Flash issues where never resolved, but the bloatness of the software kept increasing. Along the way, HTML got better specs, JavaScript got vast improvement, especially in everyone adhering to roughly the same standard (thanks microsoft for finally caving in…), and so the flash interpreter was highly redundant with the browser itself.
For a while flash editors could export in HTML5 and you’d get roughly the same result, but with a fraction of the resources requirements, so naturally there was little incentive to keep the flash player around.
I’m not sure if “killing flash” could be attributed to their author, or to the loss of interest.
Also note that alternative flash players exists to still play older swf files, and some sites uses them alongside with plain video conversion for flash animations that weren’t dynamic.
tonytins@pawb.social 3 days ago
Sigh, I miss Macromedia. Anyway, I do remember that being a thing as well. Guess it was never officially part of the spec.
MrScottyTay@sh.itjust.works 3 days ago
I miss fireworks. For me that was the best. I’ve never jived with Photoshop or is alternatives.
I have since landed on krita, aseprite and inkscape. But i still miss the workflow I got used to with fireworks.
nyan@lemmy.cafe 3 days ago
There were two different animated PNG extensions, MNG and APNG. Neither of them ever really caught on. I guess they’re hoping to do better by baking it into the core spec.
Deebster@infosec.pub 3 days ago
APNG is what they’re using in v3, so all many libraries need to do* is update that code for HDR.
* surely that’s easy, right?
jonne@infosec.pub 3 days ago
I mean, on a Linux system that’s not riddled with flatpak / snap / … You’d basically only need to update libpng and you’d be good.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yes. But if you live in the future, you have to wait for dozens of dozens of intermediate to do so! Great!