As Flash dies a little more

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On Wednesday, we learn from Gamasutra that the latest Chrome disables Flash by default, another step towards phasing it out. And you know, it occurs to me there's something about Flash nobody has said in all these years.

Yes, it was a security and performance nightmare, not to mention a horrid design.

Yes, it was still used to create a huge chunk of Internet culture, that will now be lost to time, and that's awful. Another victim of the Digital Dark Ages to come.

But don't you dare blame the people who worked for years to reverse-engineer Adobe's technology. Efforts to clone Flash date from before Macromedia was acquired, and some of them looked promising indeed.

None of them ever got close to providing a replacement, even after parts of Flash were open sourced, and the rest publicly documented. Ask yourself how that's possible when old games whose source code was lost, with assets in ad-hoc formats, regularly get modern replacement engines that run better than the original.

Just how badly was Flash made? Just how complicated is it, really?

And then, how did we ever let ourselves be fooled into building so much on shifting sands, when we knew exactly what would happen? Hello! Old floppies and word processor files? How quickly we forget.

Meanwhile, the humble text files produced by Usenet and BBS culture will remain forever readable, by printing them out and carving them into stone if all else fails. So will anything uploaded to Archive of Our Own. Animated GIFs, too. Remember when people used to say they were obsolete because we had Flash? Guess who's having the last laugh after all.

Too bad none of that can replace an interactive medium. You know, the one thing that can only exist on a computer. And nothing remotely comparable exists today, except arguably Twine. Which also depends on a monstrous pile-up of technologies known as the modern web browser engine. Of which only two endure.

I'm tempted to just make text-based games in Lua or something and be done with it.


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Tags: new media, preservation, technology