The demise of Flash didn't bring any big HTML5/JS equivalent for watching animations; fast internet and better video compression made those types of animations become raster videos as well

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.

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

https://ruffle.rs/downloads
- I'll check that out. I thought that a .fla is the project file, and .swf would be the game.
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

I miss Flash

Homestar wya?

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.

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...

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.

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.

Microsoft Silverlight: "Hold my beer"
- That name brings up repressed memories. Curse you for making me remember that abominable software
Like zombo com where you can do anything. The only limit is yourself.

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.
- You aren't appealing much inter-intra-frame compressions are famous with conspiracy theories doubt you can keep up with that shit if you are harping on 3mb in 2025
- Those last things you listed were all true of Flash too:
  Back forward buttons, working in a flash site?
  Scroll bars? Same thing.
  CPU usage? Same thing. (See: phone performance.)
  Crashes? It was the number one cause of crashes as reported by Apple when looking at their Safari crash logs. This was true of many plugins of that style from back in the day (being unstable).
Even today CSS/HTML is replacing Javascript in their area simply because people realize it has gotten that good.
As an example, this is made entirely with HTML + CSS; no JavaScript involved.
You are wrong. You probably never used it. There is no such tools to develop apps like was possible with flash.
The argument that you can do with x technology today the same thing makes no sense. Today you have to be a skilled programer to do the same stuff and it might still work worse today as it did back then.
HTML5 is nowhere near as capable. Webgl . Is there a graphical tool to use it? JavaScript tool? Dumbass Lottie files tools that cost 20$ per month and suck.
And if you were a good programer in flash/flex, you could build apps just as stable as you can today.
It's stupid that tech like this doesn't exist. Except for dumbass Rive - again 45$ per month and it sucks
- I specifically stated 'modern web tech you don't bother with' for a reason. These ecosystems are bigger than random assholes with random asshole opinions.
- HTML5 is nowhere near as capable. Webgl . Is there a graphical tool to use it? JavaScript tool?
  How about p5.js..?

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.

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.

What about Lottie and Rive?

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). Although I do believe that's just reverse chronological order of individual animations so not exactly the original experience.
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.
This reminds me that I need to bug my wife to touch up my Trogdor tattoo (she was a professional artist before the economy went tits up)
- Gotta get that tat freshly burninated!
I vaguely remember one of the animations had Homestar pouring soda in the ending screen. After a while (30s?) he'd comment on how it had a lot more soda than it looked. The closest equivalent is a post-credit gags, but it's not the same thing
- 🎶The never ending sooooooddaaaaaa...🎵

People could use SVG animations + JS to accomplish the same thing. It just never took off for some reason

My guess is because there's no "easy to use" program that allows them to make the whole thing then export for easy web visualization, most of the people who'd make animations won't want to write down keyframe positions and code for the animation proper
- They actually did, Flash is still around (now called Animate), and can export to a HTML+JS bundle you can include on your own website.
  Problem is nobody uses their own websites these days, and you can't upload stuff like that to Twitter/Facebook/YouTube.
- This is a great idea for a project honestly.

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.

At the beginning it was. Later you could write it in code it was oop. Later there was an offshoot called flex that was even more capable.

I have see a lot implementation of interactive html5, that I think is similar to flash.

Nowhere near as capable. It's more difficult and time consuming to develop for worse performance even today.

There is still no animation software that can match flash brush style / color or animation techniques.

I built websites and apps in flash. It was awesome. You could do a lot, especially in the later years, 3d games, anything was possible.

It was so easy and clean to create smooth animations, transformations, it was limitless. It's a travesty that we got no replacement. You could do more quicker in the year 2005, than you can do today.

All of that is possible with modern JS and WebGL
Really I think a lot of this stems from a toolset designed for programmers, and not one designed for artists.
- Sure it's possible, but you can't actually do it. Because you need a dedicated programer and you need to convey as a designer what to do, so it's time consuming and expensive. Elaborate scifi UIs are extremely rare now.
  After flash was killed, a big portion of creativity died with it. Every webpage started to look the same. I know I'm romanticizing it, but there is truth in that.

The absurd amount of security issues flash has lead to its demise.

Did it really though? Ruffle is a reimplantation of Flash in Rust, and is available as a browser extension. Anything short of malicious swf files will play. So it seems that any "security issues" were clearly mitigatable.
- They were, but it was up to Adobe to fix them, which they didn't
Not true. It was not about that.
- Then what was it?
We wish the security issues were what killed flash, but it had more than twenty years of security issues failing to kill flash. Flash died because it was replaced by newer technology.
- I wouldn't say it died, I remember years of people calling it dead but it still seemed to have communities up until support was forcibly removed in 2021. I'd say it was killed, in a very "bring out your dead" ("I'm getting better!") fashion.
  Like OP is saying, it wasn't really replaced. If vector video was in HTML5 spec to the point you could watch (non-prerastered) vector animations on Youtube (or former Flash sites similar to what Ruffle does, but with less overhead) that would still be abandoning the interactivity but I'd at least see the argument that there was some attempt to replace it.
  Needing a local server and the lack of container format also makes preservation messier.
  sure, a subset of it was replaced for popular usage and even some of it is still technically possible, but good luck with that. I'm pretty sure communities around that are more dead than Flash was before the end, and maybe even still (for instance, NG with Flash Forward jams).

It's also surprising that Newgrounds survived post-Flash.

But i think i prefer point and click game like from TellTale better, it's an interactive movie.

Interactive Vector Animations as a web standard are technically possible, but it'd be best implemented as animation software that compiles a file/archive that's usable by a standard browser based client that renders things locally using a canvas element.

In-fact its so possible flash has been re-impmenented this way using an action script interpreter compiled to web assembly.

They didn't give you the entire kit because that wasn't the W3C's job, it was to give you the tools necessary to build the kit.

I blame Adobe.

They acquired Macromesia and just let Flash stagnate and renamed it Animate.

FrogBlender2000.swf