Adobe Flash
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
Why people recommend it
“I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash.”
“Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day”
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“This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities.”
“i absolutely adored adobe flash”
Caveats and dissent
“Flash on mobile was a battery killer.”
“The concept was very cool, the execution was not.”
Show 2 more
“wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling”
“Java applets, Flash, and Shockwave were bad for the web”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
From the makers not counted in the ranking
Yes, Computers in the 90s were rare in India and even rarer in the North-Eastern region. I took every opportunity to be around computers during school and college days, mostly helping out pro bono. I might have visited and helped almost every commercial establishment with computers in my town. Fortunately, I also had a weird cousin, much older than me, who reads and talks about some of the weirdest things in the worl
Threads where it came up
- Building a New Flash 7 mentions
- Your ePub Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe 3 mentions
- Adobe Animate (formerly Flash) will be discontinued on March 1st 3 mentions
- Adobe Animate will be discontinued effective March 1, 2026 2 mentions
- The Browser Is the Sandbox 2 mentions
- Macromedia Flash, from an Animator's Standpoint 2 mentions
Also written as Flash, Adobe Flash Player, Macromedia Flash, Flash Player. Data: adobe-flash.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 40
It was quite surprising some of the things folks did w/ Flash --- notably including a full-fledged 2.5D CAM tool: https://github.com/Jack000/PartKAM
“Flash on mobile was a battery killer.”
“I still have not found a development platform that I enjoyed as much as Flash.”
“Right now I use either Opus (for smart stuff) or Flash without thinking (for fast stuff).”
“we used to create buttons for navigation in flash”
“Give me some insane pixelated flash website over this bland trash any day”
“The concept was very cool, the execution was not.”
Apple didn't even have an AppStore in mind until people started hacking apps onto it. Remember back in 2007 when Apple first told developers that to develop for the iPhone, they’d need to build WebApps for Safari? Well, that really was the plan. At the time, Jobs said: The full Safari engine is inside of iPhone. And so, you can write amazing Web 2.0 and Ajax apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the
“install the original Flash player plug-in in it”
“going all the way back to Flash which I worked with professionally”
“wrestle with flash or java applets reinstalling”
“Java applets, Flash, and Shockwave were bad for the web”
“most people don't realize what we lost with Flash”
“This is called Flash technology, which has amazing capabilities.”
“The proprietary and insecure parts were real problems too.”
“i absolutely adored adobe flash”
Yeah we all converge to the same workflow, in my ai coding agent I'm working on now, I've added an "index" tool that uses tree-sitter to compress and show the AI a skeleton of a code file. Here's the implementation for the interested: https://github.com/tontinton/maki/blob/main/maki-code-index%2Fsrc%2Flib.rs
“the important thing about Flash wasn't the vector rendering but the vector art authoring tools”
From what I recall part of https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386224/ was animated in flash, if not all.
“Flash was great.”
“it barely ran then and killed the battery”
“Unfortunately, the Flash IDE was a sloth.”
“I love Flash more than nearly any other piece of software that has ever been on the computer”
“One thing Flash had that nothing else has really seemed to replicate as well since”
“Flash was probably unmatched in that regard”
“For all its flaws, it was our best hope.”
“Flash completely missed the most important point of HyperCard”
“It's inspired mainly by Macromedia Flash, Apple GarageBand, and Kdenlive.”
If you weren't aware previously, you'll be pleased to learn that you can still program in Flash if you really want to, and distribute your programs on the web. https://ruffle.rs
“Flash with its constant stream of security vulnerabilities was ripe for exploits”
Macromedia Flash MX was also the first version released after Adobe started running scared and fighting dirty with a look-and-feel lawsuit against Macromedia Flash 5 for its use of tabbed UI palettes: https://web.archive.org/web/20010516014855/http://www.adobefacts.com/ “Adobe's tabbed palette, used throughout Adobe's products, are being copied by Macromedia® in many of its products, including Macromedia® Flash™ 5, D
“Sounds like too many big institutional websites depend on Flash.”
“I made games with Flash and Actionscript until ~2015.”
“They still maintain it for China actually”
“the experience was poor”
“it was very easy to write things that leaked memory in Flash”
“put Flash inside their renderer sandbox”
“But the web ecosystem moved away from those things for a reason.”
“Flash was great”
“Flash provided a ready-to-go authoring solution for UI and 2D animation”