To be fair, flash was garbage proprietary tech fully under control of fucking Adobe. All the shit people hate about JavaScript now, the spying, the adtech, was done in flash first.
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Iirc, wasn’t flash deprecated because of unpatchable bugs that created a gaping hole in your browser security?
maybe that too, but mainly it was the move from desktops to smartphones and tablets, which Flash was (at minimum) not very suited for if it was supported at all
This may be the only good thing caused by the existence of iOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
There’s plenty of criticisms to be made against Apple, iOS, etc, but “the only good thing” is a super generic and reductive statement. Proper sandboxing, app review by humans for people just hitting “install” the A chips leading to the M chips which are forcing competition, are all good things, and there’s more. Apple is overpriced, molds the market, fights against being a monopoly, takes advantage of international supply chains and people, that’s where they deserve the most criticism rather than their engineering specifically which has caused a bunch of really good tech things, not perfect, and not binary
Ironically I believe flash mostly died for that as a founding moment on why apple would not support it on iPhones. Adobe only finally killed it after safari decided it wouldn’t support it
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All the shit people hate about JavaScript now, the spying, the adtech, was done in flash first.
And the shitty slow overly complicated 'web app' pages that could've presented the same content in a hundred lines of HTML. That was done in Flash before it was done in JavaScript.
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Who the fuck celebrated? I remembered many pissed off millennials and Gen x
The people mistakenly claiming html5 was going to be the next Flash, I guess
It... Is? Check out itch.io and there's still.shitloads of browser games around.
Well ok, I guess it eventually got there, but at the time Flash was getting shut down there wasn't any equivalent self contained game engine IDE that compared, it was a big setback.
Also some of them are high quality porn games. This is both a warning and an advertisement depending on ones temperament.
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I did, flash was a pile of garbage especially on anything not windows
Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170615060422/https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash
I'm not a fan of Steve Jobs but here he was just laying down facts
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We absolutely didn't celebrate its downfall. Flash had issues, but the culture of flash games was awesome.
That said, indie games are way better these days
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You can still do this. There're loads of free and basic (i.e. easy-to-learn) game engines and you can make games of much better quality with the same effort. itch.io is full of free games made by amateurs.
When people celebrate the downfall of Flash, it's not because of the games. It's because the entire internet was replete with unnecessary Flash-heavy bullshit that required constantly updating your browser's Flash plugins (and all browsers had their own version you had to install and update), and how it was completely unsuited to any sort of UI/UX (e.g. you couldn't even copy and paste text in Flash pages most of the time). And all that is to say nothing of the gaping goatse of a security hole that it was.
It was cancer. Just because the cancer got you down to your goal weight, it doesn't mean you should lament the success of your chemotherapy.
Metaphor game on point.
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We celebrated the downfall of Flash because every other week, some horrible vulnerability was found. And because of the ease of distribution in games, it was super easy to jack people's computers.
What killed the prevalence of all these wonderful free games was developers' ability to make money on Steam and Roblox.
Plus those of us on Linux desktops didn't love the workarounds we had to do with gnash or whatever. The rise of the mobile device cemented the need to have open web standards not tied to proprietary formats and proprietary software.
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The amateur game dev community is thriving like never before. Itch.io has become Newgrounds on steroids, full of incredibly creative, fun and free games.
People like to complain about what has been lost on the modern internet, without spending any time actually looking and trying out the new niches.
How are you finding decent free games on itch? Every time I go it's a flood of visual novels, shit "horror" games, or whatever the latest streamer bait is but poorly copied 1000 times. And the filtering tools are just limited enough that I can't seem to get a good "feed" going.
Newgrounds was far from a neverending fountain of pure quality, but I feel like finding quality stuff on it is an order of magnitude harder than it used to be in the days of flash. Used to be curated lists and sites with new quality stuff like every week.
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However, consider: if Flash was still popular, by this point Adobe would have enshittified it to hell and back to milk its customers. It would no longer be the thing you miss.
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Nothing except for the use of Flash has changed... There are still tons of free to play games without MTX or other greedy bullshit made by passionate people, and just like back in the day, 90% of them are straight doodoo.
FFS, Newgrounds is still around and gets new stuff posted daily. Anon should leave 4chan and check out the rest of the internet.
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To those asking "who celebrated"...Linux was not always well supported by Flash. The promise of HTML5, with first class Linux support, was very appealing.
https://shallowsky.com/blog/linux/flash-installer-confusion.html
I only celebrated the downfall of flash because it was an insecure piece of shit software. It just happened to have people make a ton of fun and interesting content on it.
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Who? Who celebrated?
Who celebrated? Everyone at the time who wasn't trying to write flash exploits did
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It wasn't about the technology, it was the zeitgeist of that era. If HTML 5 was available at the time, people would code in that
People who have no clue what they're talking about be like:
I mean, seriously... Celebrating FLASH of all things? And complaining that there are no more free amateur games? MF, never heard of Unity? Godot? O3DE? Defold? GDevelop? OGRE? renpy? pygame? stride?
The worst of these still being infinitely better than Flash. And then you can publish your work at Itch.io.
I think they are just celebrating the era. The Internet was completely different then. A lot of those flash games later turned into microtransation shit as well on new engines.
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It never died though? The Devs just pivoted to different platforms. Itch, Newgrounds, and even the major app stores have endless content from indie devs.
Flash games were just never mainstream enough. And let's not forget that the most popular flash games were those shitty FB games, like FarmVille and Candy Crush, or that the shitty mobile games all started off as clones/ports of already popular flash games, like Angry Birds/Crush the Castle.
I don't remember a single person being happy with Flash going away
Flash had a ton of vulnerabilities. It felt like one zero-day RCE per year.
Flash never had a good FOSS implementation until years after Flash Player was discontinued.
I was very happy about the death of Flash Player, but neutral on the death of the Flash format.
I didn't celebrate per se, but Flash was incredibly insecure and HTML5 was good enough for most of these simple games and it came out in... 2008, so 13 years before Flash went EOL.
What I did celebrate was finding out that Ruffle is a thing and most of your old favourite Flash games websites use it now so you can play your old favourites again! It's also open source and written in Rust so everything necessary to give the programmer nerd in me a boner.
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Funny that Club Penguin made it into the picture. It's one of the earliest games I can remember that pushed subscriptions and micro transactions and was aimed heavily at young children.
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I don't know anyone who celebrated except maybe the shitstains at adobe who planted the timebomb in Flash Player. Though that was pretty short lived because people found a way around it, either out or necessity (in china) or because they wanted to keep using the Flash projector to play games on Desktop.
For anyone not aware of the workarounds it was likely pretty shitty for people who needed or want to use software that depends on Flash Player.
Of course now we have ruffle.rs but it still isn't perfect, and there is still software that relies on unimplemented functions. Hopefully those get resolved soon.
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I heard somewhere that Flash itself is garbage (not the games in it)
Celebrated? That's not how I remember it at all. From what I recall, everyone pretty much immediately understood what was about to be lost and mourned it when it was gone. There was a huge effort to archive all the flash content people could find, so many people obviously felt flash content was worth preserving. I've got a flash emulator that natively has pretty much every flash game and animation I remember from when I was a kid. I might have to boot it up for a bit tonight for old time's sake.
Flash was so good, I'm sad it's gone. The HTML5 era has been a massive let down.
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yeah it was fine to play games on or see neat websites but it was absolute garbage to build and maintain with.
fresh out of college one of my first jobs was a web master for an ad agency whose site was purely built in flash/actionscript. It was the absolute worst to update. I hated it. I was one of those that celebrated flash and actionscripts downfall.
Adobe went from "You should implement your entire website in flash, see how modern and unique you can make it!" to "We're terminating flash in a year"
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nostalgia has made these crap games great. they never were good in the first place. you had a good laugh as a 12 year old at tech class, but thats it.
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Who celebrated?
I did, it was a horrible medium littered with security issues and most of them were hot garbage in the first place.
The best fun was being asked to modify the menu on a website only to find the "webmaster" who built the site used Flash for that, and having to figure out how to reverse engineer it.
It was way past time for it to die when it was finally forced off the Internet... One of the few things I thank Apple for doing
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https://ruffle.rs/ webasm OSS impl of flash. But yeah the world has changed in a less fun way. At least many of those flash game devs became game devs for pay
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