Tedium - Thoughts on Flash 🖌

Today in Tedium: Flash had to die. It had too many knocks against it years before it finally met its maker this week, and the internet moved forward without it. But the groundbreaking internet plugin’s death in many ways reflects a win in favor of a more technical, more methodical internet, one where systems are built to work efficiently, rather than experimental playthings that kind of sit in their own space. In a world where the conventions of user experience win out more times than not, Flash was simply about being creative at the start. And that made it divisive. Today’s Tedium, the first of 2021, ponders the departure of an old friend from our digital lives—and what we might have lost in the process. — Ernie @ Tedium

Today’s GIF is from the famed “Badger, Badger, Badger” Flash animation by Jonti Picking.

Before we get going, be sure to check out or sponsor below:

A screenshot of Macromedia Flash. (via WinWorldPC)

The problem that led to Flash’s long-term demise was that usability mattered too much

A couple of years ago, I was hired by Vice to write a profile about a coffee-table book about web design. It was a relatively brief story, about 600 words, but for some reason it carried a lot more weight than those 600 words might have suggested.

And the reason comes down to what I found in the book—and the headline the piece got as a result: “Flash Is Responsible for the Internet's Most Creative Era.”

Digging through the years of old designs in Web Design. The Evolution of the Digital World 1990–Today, I had found that Favourite Web Awards (FWA) mastermind Rob Ford and his editor, Julius Wiedemann, had made a compelling case for Flash-based sites as being a compelling, powerful medium for creation, and that the modern web, while having some of these elements, had failed to maintain it to quite the same degree.

The book did not focus on websites that simply laid out content efficiently. Jakob Nielsen would most assuredly hate what this book represented for the web. Instead, it emphasized sites that went all-out—for advertisers, for marketers, or even just for creative projects created by college students in their dorm rooms. And when that advertising money went to social media instead in its historical arc, the book lamented what was lost as those once-wide creative parameters were winnowed in.

And somehow, the story became perhaps my most talked about piece during my entire time writing for Vice, despite it effectively being a book profile.

I’ve always wondered why that might be—and I think I have something of an answer. To put it as succinctly as possible: Jakob Nielsen won.

Nielsen, as I pointed out above, is legendarily laser-focused on usability over all other considerations. He has tons of patents to his name, and he was needling others about bad design conventions years before large companies realized that they needed to take UX seriously.

Usability means a few things in this context—simplicity, ease of use, convention, and accessibility. Flash was none of those things. It took the blank-canvas approach to creativity—which was great for the artists and illustrators that originally made up its target audience, but morphed into numerous other forms that it wasn’t necessarily designed for. It fell into overuse and quickly became abused by others.

This is something Nielsen warned about early, even before Flash had gained popularity, when he wrote about HotJava in comparison to the late, lamented Mac tool HyperCard. He predicted exactly what would happen with Flash before it even existed. Just read this:

HyperCard had one unfortunate aspect that will probably repeat itself with HotJava: the profusion of new work included huge amounts of complete junk when people went overboard with inappropriate use of animated transition techniques, mixed weird fonts, and drew plain ugly background bitmaps. The specific attributes of bad user interface design employed by newly unleashed designers with no UI expertise will probably be different for HotJava, but rest assured that there will be some. Caution is recommended in picking up Java design ideas as long as there is no considered user interface styleguide available for appropriate use of the new technology in ways that will help users rather than hinder them.

He wrote that in 1995, about a completely different technology that was being used in much the same way Flash would be. Love him or hate him, he called it years before everyone else had caught up.

In the early years of the web, the costs of going with this approach—which couldn’t be viewed in search engines properly, which left out entire groups of people who couldn’t access these tools, and which was often the one proprietary part of an otherwise open-source stack—were worth it because they were significantly better than HTML was on its own. The browser wars did a lot of damage to the consistency of the web; Flash was able to step in and offer a bridge to interactivity at a time when the web just wasn’t good enough for that on its own.

But that eventually changed, and when standardization came into play, putting an entire company in charge of a key element of how the internet works was perhaps too dangerous. Flash became a vector for many things beyond its original mission—much of the ad-tracking junk we malign as spyware today is a part of this, and it was also a key vector for malware over the last decade as well.

Adobe had standards that came to life in similar ways that were eventually spun off in open ways, most notably PDF, but Flash was acquired from another developer and was seen as a strategic tool for the company’s future growth in cross-platform development. Its mission had diverged from its original goals.

The web—most effectively built around consistency, convention, and usability—eventually no longer had a place for Flash. But Flash was still ready to shove its way in.

Flash was a mainstay of “For Dummies” books. (via Amazon)

The problem the modern web never solved that Flash did: an ease of getting started

In many ways, the story of YouTube accidentally using Flash almost as a Trojan horse of sorts really highlights the way that the social network, quickly purchased by Google, has replaced Flash for many of the types of users that might have used it back in the day.

For boundless creatives, video has always been a little bit more accessible as a way for capturing creative ideas. But it is by no means 100 percent equivalent, and that means that other mediums have had to do a lot to pick up the weight of an overburdened Flash.

In many ways, Flash sat at the center of a tension between programming and design in how the web was to be shaped. HTML was built as a methodical tool, with concepts borrowed from a standardized markup language. It wasn’t a complicated language, but it did require you to get your hands dirty, and that made it less appealing for visual learners.

(Microsoft FrontPage exists as something of a reaction to this.)

Flash came from the same world as desktop publishing and illustration tools, and as a result, carries less of the technical feel to it. And while it has programming elements, like ActionScript, it ultimately appealed to audiences beyond programmers.

I am not writing a long-as-heck piece about Flash without including a Neil Cicierega animutation. It would just be wrong.

As a creative tool, it pulls you in. In the wrong hands, you can create a huge mess. But in the right hands, it can lead to create some really great stuff.

For the latter audience, the last decade has forced some serious rethinking of the path forward—the animators and game developers went to alternative tools, most notably the game development tool Unity, to do the things they might have once used Flash for.

But Flash’s perch in the market was changing during the latter half of the 2000s, as new formats for computing, particularly mobile, became more important. Adobe attempted to reinvent Flash as AIR, an application development tool with a programming runtime. But that meant carrying nearly two decades of cruft around in areas that didn’t need it.

Flash was a drawing tool that became an animation tool that became a programming language that became an interactivity layer over the web. And now Adobe wanted to make it an application development tool.

This level of contortion would be like turning Photoshop into Excel. Flash, as great as it was, simply was not flexible or light enough on its feet for such acrobatics. In fact, it grew belabored because of all the extra stuff that was added.

The signs were already there as early as 2009. One developer, Matmi, said during a keynote around that time that “Unity could well be the new platform to replace Flash.”

And that was before Flash suffered a body blow: An open letter, written by Steve Jobs in April of 2010, that methodically ripped apart Flash’s role in the modern web and pushed for the use of modern technologies to replace it, while also discouraging its use for mobile apps.

In just under 1,700 words, Jobs told Adobe that the proprietary, outdated Flash technology would not be touching iOS.

“New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too),” Jobs wrote. “Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.”