Some of you might remember when a 3mb flash animation could pack in some 5 minutes of animation, with the more advanced ones even having chapter/scene selectors, which could also include clickable easter eggs and other kinds of interactions during the scenes.
You keep saying ‘better’ like if heavier solutions have no downsides, like saying raytracing or gaussian splatting make all older rendering tech obsolete.
For individual animations sure data doesn’t seem to matter, but if you want to binge/download something like Homestar Runner at 1080p+ that data adds up when pre-rastered. The internet in the US isn’t always great (esp. rural, cost), even worse with upload speed.
Flash also had frame animation, with bezier curves and vector blob drawing… both of which are the big thing missing from modern solutions. Alternatives in modern engines aren’t quite the same and must be intentionally sought out, and also I don’t think that’d even be well supported by platforms (itch doesn’t even have an animation section) unless you’re fine with it being in a games section.
Newgrounds also still does Flash Forward jams. I wouldn’t say “better” things killed Flash, just that support was ripped away. There isn’t much of a choice. If you want Flash-style animation (and I don’t mean skeletal-only), it’s just Ruffle or maybe Wick Editor.
I see this as an implementation failure.
WebGL doesn’t have a container format, and a vector video format could exist (on Youtube, or played with an HTML5 video player) but doesn’t. The internet “moved away” because the key players who killed Flash didn’t implement things that would bring HTML5 to closer parity with what Flash did.
I could also see parallels made to other parts of life where the choice has been made for you many years ago.
A vector video format does exist: animated SVG. It has all the features you claim are missing.
But nobody uses it because it is much more complicated to do than rasterized video and has no relevant advantages.
You keep claiming that features don’t exist even though every single one of these features do exist but are just not used a lot because they are more complicated and have no relevant benefits.
A video has sound, can be exported from the animation software to a single file, and it can be played in a standard video player.
Animated SVG does not sound like it does that, and needing new paid* software isn’t great for adoption either. And honestly, I’ve never even heard of animated SVG (I’m well aware of SVG and that it probably could be animated with CSS or JS but that alone does not make it a thing).
The fact that vector works at resolutions (even if they don’t exist yet!) without the author even needing to think about it (let alone re-export) is an advantage. It can be great for many 2D aesthetics (many cartoons even used it!), the biggest complication is Adobe (and whoever is selling a subscription to what you mentioned).
Also that people are still developing things with Flash (even if it has to be ran via Ruffle) tells me again that the issue isn’t vector, it’s that replacing a format with ingredients is not an effective strategy if you actually want people to use it.
* yeah I know Flash was expensive as well (except y’know… other ways), but communities were already using it
That’s why I was talking about meaningful advantages. Today, stuff gets exported in 4k and that’s it. No need for anything more.
That nobody uses animated SVG should give you a clue about how many people value vector graphics over rasterization. It has uses (mostly when you expect stuff to get zoomed a lot) but only in quite specific use cases.
There’s ton of free software that exports to HTML5, including most major game engines. And people use that a lot. In fact, you can make VR games that fully run in a browser.
Browser games still exist. They run on HTML5 now, not on Flash. Web video still exists. It runs on HTML5 players, not on Flash. Little animations in websites still exist. They run on HTML5/SVG/CSS, not on Flash. Flash really was just replaced by HTML5, because it’s plain better on every front.
I don’t think it’s as ubiquitous as you think. 1080p is pretty much standard (aside from old videos), 4K is still high-end and most uploading to that on YT are probably more tech-leaning channels who actually do use it. I even see new stuff from TV corps that’s still only 1080p.
4K if you’re using a full-raster workflow is taxing at every step. Display, CPU/GPU (for software stability, filters/effects), RAM and storage, internet upload speed, also camera (and fast storage there too) where relevant. Also backups, and maybe even higher-res workflow to allow room to crop/re-frame if needed.
I imagine it must be a disappointment to actually buy a 4K monitor for content viewing, stuck watching 1080p on new videos because the creators can’t afford that workflow or just don’t care. Even stuff that is 4K might have issues with encoding quality due to cost-cutting (or requires higher subscription cost).
8K is a thing too (but even more impractical), so the problem is repeated there too.
So yeah, I would say it is a meaningful difference that vector doesn’t have this problem.
Tbh, Vector only marginally solves that issue. If it’s a filmed video, then it doesn’t solve it at all, since it just creates “vector pixels” instead, which don’t scale either. So it would only work for artificially created videos, and there it would only work for 2D content, and only 2D content that doesn’t use bitmaps in it.
It’s quite a limited subset of the videos one might watch. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I watched a 2D purely PC generated video that wasn’t a screen recording from some game (which is, almost per definition, also rasterized).
The other problem there is that vector graphics can be rasterized into however many pixels you want, but the detail from the source material doesn’t improve. Yes, the edges around a flat area are smoother, but it’s still edges around a flat area.
Compare the best flash animation you can find with some random demo video on youtube (or if you want to go to the extreme: with the graphics of some hollywood CGI). The infinite scalability of vector graphics won’t make the flash animation look better than the raster graphics image.
The “infinite scalability” of vector graphics are a mostly academic point unless you are e.g. designing a company logo that needs to look sharp both on a tiny stamp and on the side of the corporate headquarter.
Spoken like someone who has never animated something in flash.
Go ahead and try to make an animated music video in SVG. Tell me how easy it was. It’s it something a middle schooler could pick up easily after a couple hours?
Ok, tell me: How many people make animated music videos and publish them on Youtube, versus how many people make animated music videos and publish them as Flash videos in 2025?
How many people did that in 2015 in Youtube vs Flash videos?
Nobody cares about Flash because it sucks. Even back in 2012 Flash sucked. It was a really bad tech and by 2015 it was mostly used by people to dumb to learn real programming languages and frameworks.
Where do you expect me to get actual numbers from?
But as a proportion of content creators, back in the early 10s a huge proportion of content creators were submitting content to places like newgrounds. And itch.io equivalents all used flash.
And around 2015, the total number dropped, but didn’t have a corresponding increase in non-flash equivalents.
Why? Because what few tools existed to do so had a much much much higher bar for entry. So the content simply never got created.
Flash sucked as a content consumer because the plugins had mediocre support and were full of vulnerabilities.
But as a creator, it was great.
Eww. that’s elitist as fuck.
These people aren’t software devs. They shouldn’t need to learn to code in order to animate a video.
For absolute shame. Wow.