I've seen quite a few kids embed Scratch projects into their websites, which I guess is actually a pretty close approximation of Flash. Stupid easy to use, vector based, customizable with forks, tiny file size(negated by the fact that you also need to embed the entire vm once for every project to get it to run). Kind of ironic that it was originally built in Flash itself though.
this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2025
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Now that's interesting
Recently found an old .fla of a game I made in highschool, and I have no idea how to turn it into a playable file. Would love to recover it
I'll check that out. I thought that a .fla is the project file, and .swf would be the game.
ah you're right, ruffle documentation isn't clear if it can open fla file instead of the compiled
You can find Adobe Flash Player still (just maybe not directly from Adobe) and just run the .FLA through it. No conversion needed unless you wanted to put it back on a website.
Ultra bad advice, flash player was installed at system level and it opens a huge security gap on the system (although I think it would not install at all in modern systems)
Plus when it calls the adobe servers, it downloads the "final" update which automatically disables/uninstalls it
Alternative interpreter: https://ruffle.rs/downloads
edit: i misunderstood, yes adobe flash, the editor app, can still be cracked (they don't rent it anymore) and run on modern systems
The problem isn't animation - as you said there is raster video and also animated SVGs.
The problem is that there is no way to package interactive content like there was. Flash wasn't just animation, it was also games. And even flash animations often had interactive bits, like homestar runner Easter eggs.
You can technically do it with JavaScript and HTML, but it's difficult now and unfeasible back when flash died. Not only did the tools not exist, but html didn't even have things like canvas yet for the tools to use.
That's not really true. You can do animation in HTML5 just like you could in flash. In fact, there are even quite a few ways you can acomplish the same.
- HTML5 + JS
- CSS + JS
- There are multiple flash player projects running in WASM or JS
- Animated SVG + JS
All of that allows for animation, games and interactivity, no problem.
There are dozens of tools that allow you to build flash-like animation and package it easily. Tons of game engines allow to export to HTML5, just at the press of a button. And there are still websites hosting browser games that fill that spot. There's even HTML5 browser games that run in VR.
But there are two big caveats:
- With much more performance, storage and internet bandwidth, there's no reason to go for flash-style skeletal animations. That's not because it's not possible, but because we have better alternatives.
- Nobody hosts their own websites anymore and most platforms (large ones like Youtube, Facebook or Reddit, but also small ones like Lemmy) don't allow you to just upload whatever HTML5 code you want. So if you want to reach more people, you'll just upload a video instead.
Sorry if this sounds a bit defensive, it's frustrating when someone writes a novel telling you're wrong but didn't spend the time to read what you wrote first.
I didn't say it's not possible.
I said that back when flash functionally died, it wasn't feasible.
HTML 5 was barely supported by browsers. HTML 5 canvas had no support at all. WASM didn't have any support. Having flash animators and flash game devs manually code the JavaScript and HTML just wasn't realistic, and no tools existed at the time to span the gap.
Now it is a little easier with things like canvas, and more importantly now there are tools that animators can use and export as a webpage.
But in the intervening years, all the flash hosting websites died. Even newgrounds is a ghost of what it was. So even if the tools are there, the communities are all gone. Animators just export to video now, because that's where the viewers are.
You mean in 2021 HTML5 was barely supported by browsers? Adobe ended support for Flash Player on 31th December 2020.
For comparison, the original HTML5 W3C recommendation was retired in 2018 and even Version 5.3 was retired less than a month after Flash Player was retired.
I miss Flash
Homestar wya?
I actually use Flash nearly every day at work. Legacy support is no joke. We have a multi-million dollar system that is all controlled by a computer that is dual-booting Win11 and WinXP. Because the control program is coded in Flash. It’s coded in Flash because there are a lot of moving parts, and the program displays their current positions. And dynamically moving objects is like the one thing that Flash does really really well. Instead of trying to re-program it in a new language, the manufacturer just fucking ships WinXP. Win11 is on another partition, and is only booted when you need to connect to the internet to run firmware updates on the various motors.
Even in 2004 using adobe flash to control some industrial system was an ugly hacks
When the developer cares way more design than function
I saw some ultra fancy quotation tool that was simply a PDF with JavaScript, and it would just open adobe reader in full screen. Yes, you made it so fancy because you could use complex vectors in the background and multiple pages, and by doing this the fancy UI part was done way faster, but good luck maintaining that mess over the years
Hey, if it ain't broke
Flash was always broken, as any Adobe software...
Except they weren't always Adobe.
A lot of comments on here saying "but X is better". Y'all are missing the point though. These "better technologies" are not being used in the creative and fun ways that flash was - not to the scale that we saw in peak Newgrounds/HomestarRunner era. It goes to show that no one company should ever control tools and the stuff our works are built upon. A lesson we, as a society, sure struggle to learn.
Don't get me wrong, my rose tinted glasses aren't all the way on. I remember critical infrastructure systems developed in flash of all fucking things.
But a very real piece of the creative internet died with flash. Maybe it's a coincidence, and it's the corpo-sites we all congregate around now to blame. I don't know. Peak internet was 2000-2010 and I'll stake my flag on that hill - don't @ me.
@
k~~c~~ongregate
Streaming video killed whatever Flash was.
Flash took the binary categories of animation and video game and made it into a spectrum. Even when they were mostly animations, there would be some interactive elements. It was apparently a technical horror show, but it was used to create unique pieces of art that define a narrow era.
As a desktop Linux use, Flash was a pain in my existence.
That shitty plugin that never worked right in Linux because fuck Linux users, amiright?
Then whole sites were written in Flash, hurting web interoperability and degrading standards. Of course many public services, banks, followed the trend because shiny.
Fuck those dark ages. The day that shit died was a good day indeed.
I harbor hate for not many things, but Flash is one of them.
I had some (but not much) issue back when I used Chrome (although IIRC just as much was a mime-type issue not letting them play in the browser) and still use the standalone player without issue.
I don't think anyone is defending Flash used for websites, aside from some personal blog or portfolio maybe.
Microsoft Silverlight: "Hold my beer"
That name brings up repressed memories. Curse you for making me remember that abominable software
I actually had some hope for that because we needed something to break the Flash monopoly, and I trusted Microsoft slightly more than I trust Adobe.
However, it never went anywhere because everyone expected Microsoft was just going to kill it, and of course Microsoft killed it, and that was that.
That's true, but there is a project called "ruffle" now, which is written in Rust and can play .swf files. So if you really want, you can still build Flash animations and share them online.
Ruffle also runs in browsers, thanks to wasm.
Nostalgia goggles in effect. Flash was crap while every other tech caught up and surpassed it. Even today CSS/HTML is replacing Javascript in their area simply because people realize it has gotten that good. People acting like there is no alternatives but in reality people just gave up on that stuff as everything became reddit, twitter, youtube and facebook. The HTML5 stack has always surpassed Flash there is no excuse for the dickheads in this thread acting otherwise. WebGL2 WebASM? I recently made a tool that uses the Web Bluetooth API thingy. Javascript frameworks compare to Flash. You cannot compare the modern web tech you don't bother with to Flash but you could compare it to Phaser.js.
Flash the tech sucked.
Flash content editors and communities sharing info about how to use it is where it was at. That was what was driving the creativity.
My nostalgic sigh is about animations that became rasterized videos, thus losing any chance at being interactive or hiding easter eggs.
I am glad we no longer have sites made in pure flash, but now we have different stupid shit that also blocks back/forward navigation, fucks up scroll bars, hogs the CPU and crashes the browser for no good reason.
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There is, SVG with <animate>. It's just not that common.
There's a lot more tooling for creating rasterized videos than SVG. Flash had a whole development environment around it. SVG is comparatively rubbing sticks together to make fire.
Web 2.0 and the stiffling of the indie web is the issue to me.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, etc aren't built to cool web pages in front of people as those could leave people off of the site.
There are some crazy cool html5 stuff out there.
Watching Homestar Runner on YouTube doesn't hit the same
They do have Ruffle on their site (a bit slower to load IME, but functional) even for new animations (click on the HR icon, not the Youtube icon).
There are the orginal .SWFs for that, disjointed in their own way. I wish they (or someone) would've merged things so the old menus actually worked, if not further like each file being a season.
EDIT: they did make the games linked together on the website. And now I do see one of the main pages that links too, though the loading screens make it a bit cumbersome (it seems to be tweaked for Ruffle, or at least only the main page seems to work when the .SWF url is loaded in the standalone player ...unless it just can't do linked swfs).
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Wasn't it also proprietary, and you needed Adobe software to create it?
Flash animations have a rather specific usecase imho, as your example proves. It's not a game, it's not a movie, it's (usually) more than a simple animated loop.
There's no exact equivalent for that, but the www has developed way beyond it in all aspects.
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People could use SVG animations + JS to accomplish the same thing. It just never took off for some reason
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