> then why doesn't one already exist?

I think that's the big question that these threads need to be asking, because it's not just that it doesn't exist for the web. It doesn't exist anywhere for any platform.

Coming in and just saying, 'HTML5 can't replicate Flash' -- not only is that inaccurate, it's unhelpful. We need to ask what modern developers need and why we seem to be unable to supply that. What are our modern tools missing? Would Flash still be relevant for indie development today? Do we need something more extensive or powerful? Do we need to rethink developer workflows? Is the problem funding, or finding a way to monetize, or is it a community problem where we just can't get indie devs to standardize on one tool?

Every thread where people complain about the loss of Flash could be a really productive conversation about what a modern animation engine would need and how we could build one. But instead it's just people re-litigating a 15-20 year old fight for no reason.

Because the APIs are there. Any company could build an animation engine today that output to any low-level language: C, Rust, whatever. And the output could be compiled to WASM and the pixel buffers could be rendered to a canvas. We could even do smart updates and partial re-renders and cache large operations on separate canvases. Or that frame compilation could happen behind the scenes in WASM and the image data could be spit out as a single array of pixels. We could do all of the optimizations we need.

But that tool doesn't exist. It doesn't exist for the web, or for iOS, or for Android, or for Windows, or for any modern console. Why? That's the productive question to ask, that's the question that will actually help us make progress towards replacing Flash. The only thing the web can provide is APIs and technology, at some point game devs need to stop complaining about the web in specific and start asking why our game dev tools in general aren't up to snuff.

>Why? That's the productive question to ask, that's the question that will actually help us make progress towards replacing Flash.

There are basically two camp of people. Those who use Flash, and stating HTML5 not as good as Flash are coming from a user, designer, creative point of view. Its ease of use, from coding to authoring. The simplicity of getting something done. Like HyperCard.

The other camp are programmers, software and web developers who just saw Flash and HTML from a technical perspective. Of course you can replicate 99% of Flash capability, but that was not the point. Since the first camp sort of rely on the 2nd camp to provide tooling. And the 2nd camp doesn't understand or care what they are missing. Nothing is being done.

Classic Software consultant and development problem.

Again, if Flash no longer provide any value to Adobe, may be they could open source it?

I used Flash, and I'm a programmer.

HTML5 is fine. The problem is the lack of tooling. That's what's letting me down as a user, designer, creative person. Not the web, the lack of tools.

But HTML5 can not fix that problem. Only the games industry can fix that problem. HTML5 is never going to be a game creation IDE, it's just an API and a set of technologies. Companies like Epic, Adobe, Unity, etc... have to step in and develop game IDEs that are comparable to Flash.

And they just haven't. I don't know why they haven't, people should ask them that question.

There's this idea that web advocates don't understand that web tooling for games is bad, and that's just not the case. As web advocates we do understand the problem, but Mozilla is not in a realistic position to build everyone a game engine. It's not something that browser-manufactures can do. It's something the games industry has to decide to tackle. Calling out the web is counterproductive, we are doing everything that we can do to help with replacing Flash.

> Again, if Flash no longer provide any value to Adobe, may be they could open source it?

That would be great, but I wouldn't bet on it. The hope was originally that Adobe would migrate Flash to HTML5 canvas output. They never did until Flash was mostly dead, and from everything I've heard their new engines are kind of terrible to work with anyway.

The secondary hope was that they'd Open Source Flash, or at least help with emulating SWFs so people could continue to use old versions of Flash to publish to the web. That never happened either because... I don't know why. Maybe licensing issues, maybe Adobe just doesn't care about anyone in their user communities at all.

To see people giving tearful salutes to a company that literally just sat there and watched its product rot rather than do anything at all to help the community... it's just very frustrating. I was a Flash developer too. But I'm not mad at Open web advocates, there are plenty of other people/businesses for me to be mad at.

>But that tool doesn't exist. It doesn't exist for the web, or for iOS, or for Android, or for Windows, or for any modern console. Why?

My 2 cents: the market for animation on the web collapsed due to changes in Youtube's algorithm, and Flash itself has been more or less superseded by game engines that can export to the web, 3d tools like MMD and game mods.

But Flash collapsed before YouTube really became popular. It was the iPhone and the iPad coming out without flash support that really killed flash. YouTube didn’t have anything to do with it. If anything, YouTube got popular because of the death of Flash - it filled the void.

OK fair enough, although there was a big animation community on Youtube and it did get wiped by the algorithm, I'm probably misremembering the timeline.

In my opinion, someone just needs to rebuild Flash, but based on modern web standards. We don’t need “productive conversations”. We already had the ideal tool - Flash. Just make a feature by feature duplication of what Flash was.

That already exists - it's flash's creative suite from adobe, and it exports to html5/canvas. Now of course, it's harder to pirate since it's a subscription service now-a-days (like photoshop).

I don't think the problem is a lack of tools. It's more fundamental.

> I don't think the problem is a lack of tools. It's more fundamental.

It's very hard for us to admit that something could just be a string of pure luck, like the brief moment where Flash, Newgrounds, and fighting stickmen were at the cultural epicenter.

In fact, we as engineers seem biased in the complete opposite direction when it comes to understanding social phenomena. Technical advantages and disadvantages do very little to explain the world and why people do things and why things catch on.

Whether or not HTML5 replicates "what mattered" about Flash does nothing to understand how Flash fell out of cultural hegemony because it's not what mattered about Flash. HTML5 can't do anything to roll back the clock and recreate the perfect storm responsible Flash culture.

I think Flash, like Javascript and Wordpress, was simply at the right place at the right time to take advantage of unique characteristics of the early internet that are very hard to quantify with confidence much less replicate or predict.

Adobe Animate claims to be this, but it's really, really not in practice.

Probably the same reason that Adobe let flash die on the vine-making a robust flash like authoring tool and targeting broke teenagers as your market isn't profitable.