<story><title>When SVG almost got network support for raw sockets</title><url>https://leonidasv.com/til-svg-specs-almost-got-raw-socket-support/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lmm</author><text>&amp;gt; it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure.&lt;p&gt;Surely lack of hardware acceleration and poor implementation are incidental, not fundamental issues. Just as browsers eventually got their own PDF implementations because Adobe&amp;#x27;s sucked, I expect the same would have happened for Flash eventually.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor.&lt;p&gt;We have WebKit and Gecko, and the latter barely exists on mobile. I&amp;#x27;m not convinced we&amp;#x27;re a lot better off in practice.</text></item><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>As someone that helped a little bit in bringing Flash to WebOS, it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure. Adobe was caught really off guard by mobile and never prioritized flash. If little else, the modern web is infinitely more secure than the flash player and Adobe would never have prioritized it. We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor. So structurally things are also infinitely healthier. That the web is a cesspool in turns of content is an orthogonal problem that would have always been the case (but also a flash laden website are up way more RAM and CPU than the equivalent html)</text></item><item><author>lmm</author><text>Have they? I would say the subsequent ~10 years of the web have vindicated Flash. HTML5 video hasn&amp;#x27;t made websites lighter or less annoying - quite the opposite (indeed video ads are a worse problem than Flash ads ever were). Meanwhile creativity and innovation on the web have taken a hit. 10+ years on there&amp;#x27;s still nothing that allows a lone auteur to produce a web experience as easily and effectively as you could with Flash (it seems to be &lt;i&gt;possible&lt;/i&gt; to match Flash, a la the NYT&amp;#x27;s Snow Fall or the previous Madogatari intro, but not at a level that&amp;#x27;s accessible to an individual creator), and we&amp;#x27;re all worse off for it.</text></item><item><author>nntwozz</author><text>Flashback to Steve Jobs&amp;#x27; famous &amp;quot;Thoughts on Flash&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;newslang.ch&amp;#x2F;wp-content&amp;#x2F;uploads&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;Thoughts-on-Flash.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;newslang.ch&amp;#x2F;wp-content&amp;#x2F;uploads&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;Thoughts-on-F...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was not well received at the time. Oh how things have changed.</text></item><item><author>Gigachad</author><text>Good summary, only thing I&amp;#x27;d add is that the iPhone didn&amp;#x27;t drop support for flash, they never had it to begin with and made it clear they never would. Android vendors at the time used to use flash support as selling point until they too dropped it.&lt;p&gt;Being the first to call the death on something seems to be an ongoing trend with Apple.</text></item><item><author>hadlock</author><text>You have to remember the background for this era. Shockwave (not yet even Adobe), Shockwave Flash was the overwhelming interactive media on the internet. Kids in middle school and high school watched episodes of .flv videos of South park, we played &amp;quot;stick figure skiing&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;stick figure fighting&amp;quot; games, there were stick figure sledding games, all sorts of &amp;quot;multimedia&amp;quot; apps existed inside the &amp;quot;flash&amp;quot; container&amp;#x2F;spec. Some of them (multiplayer) also had network support of some sort, if only for supporting ads. A big part of flash was that it was not bitmap, it was... scalable vectors, which allowed it to shrink traditionally &amp;quot;large&amp;quot; (500kb+, easily 10 minutes on dialup) spritemap heavy games, down into 45-100kb (less than 7 minute download) packages that could be played on nearly any desktop&lt;p&gt;SVG had the same base layer functionality but network support would have been a big step towards making an open standard version of Flash. The iPhone was famously one of the last devices to drop support for Flash (due to both wild and regular security holes), and when they did, Flash (the predominant consumer web technology of the early-mid 2000s) finally died. It was a big deal. Had SVG gotten flash-like capability, it could have been a real game changer (although with giant security holes). Security back then was &amp;quot;somebody elses&amp;#x27; problem&amp;quot; so while raw sockets seems wholly irresponsible by modern standards, back then it was the norm, partly because less than 10 million people worldwide really had any kind of risk exposure, plus the fact that the internet was still mostly decentralized, AOL was still considered a major force back then. Facebook and others with billions of users didn&amp;#x27;t exist yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>geocar</author><text>&amp;gt; Surely lack of hardware acceleration and poor implementation are incidental, not fundamental issues.&lt;p&gt;Of course not. These are just some of the many many needles of crap that broke Flash.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; I expect the same would have happened for Flash eventually.&lt;p&gt;Perhaps you underestimate just how complicated &amp;quot;Flash&amp;quot; is: It&amp;#x27;s 2023 and despite everything you can do in a modern Web browser with HTML5, SVG, JavaScript, Video and so on, we still don&amp;#x27;t have a second full reimplementation of Flash. No emulator or converter that preserves all of the authors intentions, not even with a server-side-helper to cover the differences in networking policies between the web and Flash. I still think it would take serious cash&amp;#x2F;time to do this.&lt;p&gt;And for a large company to do it would risk being sued by Adobe. They promised. I think if Adobe couldn&amp;#x27;t fix the crap-needles for whatever reason, nobody else could either. Adobe made sure of that. And nobody wants to pay the Adobe tax when Flash hurts users so bad.&lt;p&gt;PDF on the other hand, is easy enough to implement on screens in a month or less, spec-in-hand. Users who use Adobe&amp;#x27;s PDF reader deserve what they get.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We have WebKit and Gecko, and the latter barely exists on mobile. I&amp;#x27;m not convinced we&amp;#x27;re a lot better off in practice.&lt;p&gt;I do feel a little better off. I remember a time when every flash bug was an opportunity to airdrop malware, just buy an ad and get on every desktop PC in the world for chump change. I had to browse the Web in a VM, back when VM&amp;#x27;s on workstation PC&amp;#x27;s were still painfully slow, because I needed the ability to rewind state so often. I really don&amp;#x27;t miss that.&lt;p&gt;A small number of players working (largely) openly (i.e. we have webkit and gecko&amp;#x27;s source code!) allowed features to the Web be deployed relatively quickly, and problems fixed fast and usually with the smallest-possible harm. And I think people are sufficiently suspicious of closed-source infrastructure that people (mainly purchasing VPs at big enterprises) will be able to resist any attempts to change that.</text></comment>
<story><title>When SVG almost got network support for raw sockets</title><url>https://leonidasv.com/til-svg-specs-almost-got-raw-socket-support/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lmm</author><text>&amp;gt; it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure.&lt;p&gt;Surely lack of hardware acceleration and poor implementation are incidental, not fundamental issues. Just as browsers eventually got their own PDF implementations because Adobe&amp;#x27;s sucked, I expect the same would have happened for Flash eventually.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor.&lt;p&gt;We have WebKit and Gecko, and the latter barely exists on mobile. I&amp;#x27;m not convinced we&amp;#x27;re a lot better off in practice.</text></item><item><author>vlovich123</author><text>As someone that helped a little bit in bringing Flash to WebOS, it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure. Adobe was caught really off guard by mobile and never prioritized flash. If little else, the modern web is infinitely more secure than the flash player and Adobe would never have prioritized it. We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor. So structurally things are also infinitely healthier. That the web is a cesspool in turns of content is an orthogonal problem that would have always been the case (but also a flash laden website are up way more RAM and CPU than the equivalent html)</text></item><item><author>lmm</author><text>Have they? I would say the subsequent ~10 years of the web have vindicated Flash. HTML5 video hasn&amp;#x27;t made websites lighter or less annoying - quite the opposite (indeed video ads are a worse problem than Flash ads ever were). Meanwhile creativity and innovation on the web have taken a hit. 10+ years on there&amp;#x27;s still nothing that allows a lone auteur to produce a web experience as easily and effectively as you could with Flash (it seems to be &lt;i&gt;possible&lt;/i&gt; to match Flash, a la the NYT&amp;#x27;s Snow Fall or the previous Madogatari intro, but not at a level that&amp;#x27;s accessible to an individual creator), and we&amp;#x27;re all worse off for it.</text></item><item><author>nntwozz</author><text>Flashback to Steve Jobs&amp;#x27; famous &amp;quot;Thoughts on Flash&amp;quot; &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;newslang.ch&amp;#x2F;wp-content&amp;#x2F;uploads&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;Thoughts-on-Flash.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;newslang.ch&amp;#x2F;wp-content&amp;#x2F;uploads&amp;#x2F;2022&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;Thoughts-on-F...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It was not well received at the time. Oh how things have changed.</text></item><item><author>Gigachad</author><text>Good summary, only thing I&amp;#x27;d add is that the iPhone didn&amp;#x27;t drop support for flash, they never had it to begin with and made it clear they never would. Android vendors at the time used to use flash support as selling point until they too dropped it.&lt;p&gt;Being the first to call the death on something seems to be an ongoing trend with Apple.</text></item><item><author>hadlock</author><text>You have to remember the background for this era. Shockwave (not yet even Adobe), Shockwave Flash was the overwhelming interactive media on the internet. Kids in middle school and high school watched episodes of .flv videos of South park, we played &amp;quot;stick figure skiing&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;stick figure fighting&amp;quot; games, there were stick figure sledding games, all sorts of &amp;quot;multimedia&amp;quot; apps existed inside the &amp;quot;flash&amp;quot; container&amp;#x2F;spec. Some of them (multiplayer) also had network support of some sort, if only for supporting ads. A big part of flash was that it was not bitmap, it was... scalable vectors, which allowed it to shrink traditionally &amp;quot;large&amp;quot; (500kb+, easily 10 minutes on dialup) spritemap heavy games, down into 45-100kb (less than 7 minute download) packages that could be played on nearly any desktop&lt;p&gt;SVG had the same base layer functionality but network support would have been a big step towards making an open standard version of Flash. The iPhone was famously one of the last devices to drop support for Flash (due to both wild and regular security holes), and when they did, Flash (the predominant consumer web technology of the early-mid 2000s) finally died. It was a big deal. Had SVG gotten flash-like capability, it could have been a real game changer (although with giant security holes). Security back then was &amp;quot;somebody elses&amp;#x27; problem&amp;quot; so while raw sockets seems wholly irresponsible by modern standards, back then it was the norm, partly because less than 10 million people worldwide really had any kind of risk exposure, plus the fact that the internet was still mostly decentralized, AOL was still considered a major force back then. Facebook and others with billions of users didn&amp;#x27;t exist yet.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>eyelidlessness</author><text>Blink (Chrome&amp;#x2F;Chromium-derived browsers) is a fork of WebKit but has diverged for &lt;i&gt;many years&lt;/i&gt;. To treat them as the same, you should call them KHTML as that’s their common lineage. But that would be obviously absurd.&lt;p&gt;WebKit and Blink are not the same browser engine.</text></comment>