Ask HN: Are there things that Flash did that we still can’t do with today’s web?
A lot of answers already boil down to, basically, superior developer experience. But there&#x27;s an aspect of this that I want to highlight: resource efficiency.<p>Around the latter half of the 00s, I had a Windows XP machine with 256MB of RAM and a Pentium 4 processor, with a matching spinning metal-disk hard drive. I could make decent Flash animations and games with it. I could view entire websites in Flash with Internet Explorer 8.<p>Today, my <i>personal</i> machine is a laptop I bought from 2016. Core i7 (4 cores), AMD graphics card, 16GB of RAM. It&#x27;s not top-of-the-line even when I bought it but I put in ~200 hours of <i>The Witcher 3</i> in it, finishing the main quest and the two paid DLCs. That said, modern web dev is a PITA in this mostly because I&#x27;m too cheap to upgrade to an SSD. Oh, also, the GitHub homepage that showed live commits on the globe makes the fans scream with Chrome unless I enable hardware acceleration. (In fairness that&#x27;s enabled by default, but it so happened I had to turn it off and forgot to turn it back on.)<p>I still can&#x27;t figure out why my personal machine can&#x27;t provide a decent feedback loop on a React&#x2F;Angular+Typescript stack (that&#x27;s not even doing animations!) just because I don&#x27;t have an SSD. In my very opinionated opinion, only a database server needs an SSD.<p>A Phaser+Typescript project (my preferred modern web gaming stack) is just a slightly better experience than React. But, again, I wonder why it needs hardware acceleration at all to function well and I&#x27;ve only implemented very &quot;static&quot; boardgames so far. Maybe I&#x27;m just a sloppy programmer but I&#x27;m definitely better than when I was making stuff in Flash. This shouldn&#x27;t be eating that much resources, right?