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PNG has been updated for the first time in 22 years — new spec supports HDR and animation
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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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I miss the days when all the cool websites used Flash. I think Macromedia killed it for some reason. Probably because it had security flaws, back then it was pretty bandwidth-intensive too, but it made for some dynamic web designs.
Flash was a security nightmare all round, not counting the security flaws. It was just designed without any security features. It was also terribly inefficient at its core job, that was supposedly vector animation. It filled a gap in a time where browser and standards where not that advanced.
Over time, Flash issues where never resolved, but the bloatness of the software kept increasing. Along the way, HTML got better specs, JavaScript got vast improvement, especially in everyone adhering to roughly the same standard (thanks microsoft for finally caving in…), and so the flash interpreter was highly redundant with the browser itself.
For a while flash editors could export in HTML5 and you'd get roughly the same result, but with a fraction of the resources requirements, so naturally there was little incentive to keep the flash player around.
I'm not sure if "killing flash" could be attributed to their author, or to the loss of interest.
Also note that alternative flash players exists to still play older swf files, and some sites uses them alongside with plain video conversion for flash animations that weren't dynamic.
Flash had a myriad of problems. Web devs celebrated its death.
The current situation with megabytes of JavaScript is pretty bad, but at the time, there was still a fair bit of dialup active, and mobile web was just starting to be a thing - on EDGE and barely 3G. It would take minutes to load.
Also, Steve Jobs had it in for Flash and that’s what ultimately killed it off, I think.
Yes, the iPhone did not and never has supported Flash. At least not officially from Apple. There was support, albeit not quite 100% complete, on Windows CE/PocketPC at the time, though. That was one of the things that let me lord it over early iPhone adopters back in the day — my pocket nerd computer could play Homestar Runner videos, and their stupid expensive bauble couldn't. So there.
I still miss using my iPAQ h4350. It still works; might be time to fire up Doom4CE...
I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I'll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it's day.
I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.
The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. "Retina" display, my ass.
I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was... several gigabytes, I don't remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3's, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, "All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck."
But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.
And the crawling of flash websites is awful