If it weren't for Adobe's crappy support of the player, I would agree, but they did much more harm than good with it. It was a massive attack surface and they didn't care about closing their zero-day drive-by exploits in a sensible timeframe.
Also they were basically the founders of persistent fingerprinting via Flash cookies.
So no, thank you, I'm more than happy it didn't thrive more than it already did.
SWF was simultaneously brilliant and a festering wound that required amputation, and I would have welcomed a replacement that wasn't the biggest attack surface on the internet. I too love Homestar Runner.
IMO the fact that it belonged to Adobe was the biggest problem, if SWF had been managed by a more capable software org it could have been maintained in a way that kept it from getting banned from the internet. And remember, that's how bad it was - it got banned from the internet because it was absolutely indefensible to leave it around. SWF getting cancelled magically stopped every single family member I have from calling me with weird viruses and corruption they managed to stumble into. I saw more malicious code execution through SWF than I saw from my dumb little cousins torrenting sus ROMs and photoshop crackers. I'd rather not have it than have those problems persist.
absolutely. really is strange that you used to be able to download a music video in less than 2-3mb with lossless video quality, but now that's not really a thing anymore. I feel like if Adobe didn't get greedy and encourage its use for absolutely everything (and/or web standards got up to speed faster) people wouldn't wouldn't approach talking about Flash with the 10-foot pole they often do today (as a platform—not how everyone talks about how much they loved flash games)
What do you mean by “HD music video”? If you mean a literal video, then today’s video and audio codecs are more efficient than what Flash used, not less. If the music videos were that small then they must have given up a lot in quality. If you mean a Flash vector animation, then that’s different of course, but that doesn’t describe a typical music video.
Conventional video codecs are also pretty good at compressing animations. I once made a multi-minute animation of a plane taking off and H.264 compresses it to hundreds of kilobytes.
People loved the games, but not the super custom flash based menu that requires a loading bar and works totally different and slightly janky on each website.
yes stuff like that & the IOSYS MVs. you technically can do stuff like that today theres nothing stopping you from doing it with svgs but i meant more the social part of it. its just interesting that if you want to do the same thing (put an animated video on the inernet) the usual way its now 10x bigger yet looks worse.
also i dont think theres anything like Flash (the authoring software) but for SVGs. i hope there is one but for now I wouldnt say inkscape + a text editor counts
What else was wildly cool about Flash was that the player itself was a shockingly tiny download -- even on 56K it was an incredibly fast download, and because we were all using MSIE then, the installation of this ActiveX thing that was the Flash Player required like one quick click and it was installed, and in 5 seconds you were seeing the Flash content.
Obviously the fact that it was that low-friction to install any non-sandboxed application code was a very naïve thing to allow, but I still have to hand it to the Macromedia developers for packing the whole player into such a tiny download and making it so frictionless. I'm pretty sure that had a HUGE impact on its adoption over say, Java applets. Java took a lot more time and effort to install, and while it had decent penetration (many "chat room" services and in-browser games like Yahoo Games used Java) it was never taken for granted that 'everyone has it' the way Flash was (until Steve Jobs singlehandedly burned that assumption to the ground with fire).
That's because people have more bandwidth today and therefore videos online are higher quality now. You can easily transcode a music video to 3MB using modern codecs (and even not so modern ones like H.264), and it will look somewhat worse than typical online video sites but still pretty good.
Honestly, we can have that today. The real power of Flash was the fully integrated development environment. It was one of the first programming experiences I had, and all I needed to do amazing stuff was a book and a copy of Flash MX.
One of my own first programming experiences was when my dad bought me a copy of Dreamweaver and a book about it. To this day I still ponder what might have happened if I was instead given a copy of Flash instead.
Adobe needed to take Flash seriously as a platform. Instead they neglected it, making it synonymous with crashes and security problems, and they milked developers as much as possible.
I bought Flash once. I found a crashing bug and jumped through hoops reporting it. A year or so later, they updated the ticket to suggest I drop $800 for the privilege of seeing whether it had been fixed. I did not make the mistake of giving them money ever again.
They had such an opportunity to take advantage of a platform with a pre-iPhone deployment in the high 90% range, and they just skimped it into oblivion. What a disgrace for everyone who actually cared.
Yes seriously. At that time Steve Jobs was harping on HTML5 and CSS3 being open standards but Flash not. Adobe could have ensured Flash's survival by making Flash an open standard (much like it has made PDF an open standard where the specification is free to everyone) and making Adobe Flash only one of the possible authoring tools, and the Flash Player only one of the player tools. Basically they should have invited the community and other companies to make more Flash tooling while continuing to sell their own. Given how often I see people still paying for Acrobat Pro today, I think this is a good business strategy too.
(It observes that this feature raises certain security risks, but promises to figure out by the next draft how to fix them. This of course never happened.)
I recall Hixie had a funny rant about this, but I can't find it.
Thank fuck it didn't. I can't fathom how quickly the obnoxious advertiser industrial complex would've grabbed hold of that and invented whole new genres of shoving products in our collective face.
That first link doesn't work in Safari, and I'm really wondering what's missing. Clicking the button works, but clicking the warheads does nothing. I also don't get the crosshairs cursors that I see when I try this in Firefox.
After reading the headline and before reading the article, I thought it'd be something like a visual hash of readme files, as an easy way to see if anything had changed between releases.
I was thinking that might be a useful thing for people to spot when a ToS, EULA, etc. changed since those are long documents that frequently get sneaky revisions.
I have an animated SVG on my README that is rebuilt once a day to include the weather and day of the week. Built during jury duty a few years ago :P https://github.com/jasonlong
The nice thing about videos is the play/pause/slider UI. Some platforms do add play/pause explicitly to GIFs, using some JS, but as far as I know (and you would know more), that's not built into browsers yet. That's been one of the reasons I often end up using videos instead.
When I've personally animated SVGs for use in RevealJS presentations, I tend to use CSS animations that I could control with JS if I wanted.
An animated GIF is essentially a video with a large number of restrictions and poor compression compared to an actual video. Often sites convert animated GIFs to videos because the result is smaller and works better.
If you're going this route of adding a straight up video (which isn't bad!) it helps to edit the readme directly on GitHub. That way they're uploaded to githubusercontent (or whatever the domain is) and not taking up space in your repository.
The idea of committing a video to your repository for a PR seems silly. Every PR adds a new video to the codebase? Do you make a PR to prune them every once in a while?
Git commits only differences with the precedent commit, not the entire repository. Therefore the video is only committed once as long as that video doesn’t change.
SVG can be color responsive (change color based on the user's dark/light prefs). It can also be size responsive (change based on max width or aspect). Video can't
The SVG trick is less usable for screen captures IMO, since you lose controls.
I think it's best for embedding a motion demo of a feature your software provides, no more than 5 seconds. Even then, a video option may be useful to some people.
Same, or start/stop/back/forward support. I like those neat Github gifs, but hate that I sometimes have to download it and open it frame by frame to see / copy executed commands in certain projs.
A word of caution: There are SVGs which can freeze a page, so make sure that you do not link to any third party SVGs. This is a known bug, but both the Google Chrome and Mozilla team do not want to fix it.
Here is an evil example SVG for demonstration.
DON'T CLICK THIS LINK UNLESS YOU WANT TO RISK CRASHING YOUR BROWSER!
Crash a single page or even the whole browser isn't really a security problem though. In fact, there are so many ways to freeze the whole tab or even browser ui with build-in function if you apply it way too many times. (For example, a long chain of blur filters will make the chrome ui non responsive because the render time will skyrocket.)
Although if the affect area does escape the tab, the issue will have higher priority because that would be annoying to user.
It's recursive, but not XXE. It is 20 layers of nested SVG groups, where the first group contains 10 blue circles, and every subsequent group contains 10 of the previous group. This would render as around 10^20 blue circles.
Yes, SVGs are XML-based and may be vulnerable to generic XML-based XML external entity (XXE) or exponential entity expansion attacks, but this particular malicious SVG is using SVG-specific features to create the resource exhaustion.
"SVG is inherently animated" is new to me, and now I'm going to spend my time on the bus thinking what might be done with that. Does it support infinite loop?
Yes, by setting the repeatCount or repeatDur attribute of the <animate> tag to "indefinite". Notably, since <animation> tags effect individual attributes and not the image as a whole, different parts of the image can be on different animation cycles and don't have to add up to some small common multiple.
I like little TIL posts like this, introducing new tools and sharing first-hand experiences with them. Working around restrictions (like using animations in Github Markdown) leads to this kind of creative stuff.
I looked at the resulting SVG https://koaning.io/posts/svg-gifs/parrot.svg and realised that a lot of inline SVG elements are used within inline SVG within..the SVG. I've never seen that before. So thank you very much for sharing.
Once upon a time, Flash, Java, Silverlight, ActiveX, etc. ruled the web.
I think the world is _much_ better off today, with a common language and platform. I don't think those big third party runtimes could survive in the browser in today's threat environment.
Unfortunately "common" means being what Google wants, and they abuse their market position to push whatever through (advertising support in an HTML client... what?)
> From there, the developer can choose whatever model he wants to display a "page", no longer be limited to the Document Object Model.
How are apps like AutoCAD Web, Photopea, Figma, Google Docs, Google Earth Web, and Flutter for Web apps (CanvasKit) different than what you're asking for? AFAIK developers aren't forced to use the DOM for applications where it's not the best choice.
For some sick reason now I really want to convert some SVG architecture diagrams to movies which reveal the nodes in a dramatic anime battle style with zoom-ins, freeze frames, pulsating lines around, etc.
Well, this is cool. I'll have to see how it handles the sorts of effects I show in the README at https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects. I don't know much about SVG but anything that attempts to actually store the text is going to create a very large amount of data. I'll try it for fun.
But it’s just an image link to some SVG file. No HTML involved, only a Markdown image link that GitHub will render as an HTML <img src="…"/> element. The actual SVG file linked to isn’t even necessarily hosted by GitHub.
If the SVG being linked to is hosted by GitHub, they could make arbitrary changes before serving it to the browser.
IIRC, I uploaded an SVG in a GitHub comment and the resulting image had some of its interactive functionality removed. Of course, that situation is slightly different since the file was uploaded in a comment and not as part of a Git repo... but still.
This is nonsense. The actual file at the URL could change at any time. No system is doing something like that if it isn’t serving the file itself.
And, getting back to the original point, you wouldn’t be worrying that GitHub doesn’t “support” a URL that happens to point to a file of a particular subformat that the URL itself doesn’t disclose.
Fun fact: since an SVG is technically code and not a binary image file, LLMs are capable of writing them! I tested this with Claude Sonnet 4 and within 7 minutes I was able to describe what I wanted the animated logo to do, and it delivered the SVG faithfully. Even embedded it into the README.md
I can’t comment on this one specifically, but SVG animations take notably more CPU usage to render/animate in Chromium browsers compared to GIF or WAAPI. And they block the main thread for at least some animations.
That's pretty typical. Every element of an SVG is an object with a bunch of properties that can be manipulated and scripted and whatnot. It's great for a lot of things, but it's a lot more resource intensive than "dump this set of pixels onto the screen here" like GIF does or even "perform this set of drawing commands" like HTML canvas does.
Using SVG for Demos is much better than GIFs or Videos due to the lightweight nature. We have created a tool to make the recording and sharing CLI tool demos much easier: https://github.com/DeepGuide-Ai/dg . Simply call `dg capture` and it generates the svg and content ready to paste to README. An added benefit is it can be used for CI validations. It utilizes termsvg under the hood. Would love your comments.
I think some have only heard bad things about SVG exploits but perhaps aren't familiar that IMG embedded SVGs (like those used in Github readmes) don't carry those risks as they're restricted from running Javascript, external content or videos.
there's also an apng standard that almost noone makes use of despite not being patent uncumbered like gif is and it does a good job compressing more "pixel art" or line drawings in the way gif does. (tends to be a bit less efficient with actual photographs)
I find it interesting that GIFs went from being implied to be bad quality to being a market of good quality despite little actually changing except for bandwidth.
I'm pretty sure no one has ever considered GIFs to be high quality. Unless you're a soft-G GIF person describing it to a confused person who thinks you mean the peanut butter :)
Obligatory mention of Sarah Drasner's fantastic (and somehow still valid and eye-opening in 2025) "SVGs Can Do That?" talk from 2017:
https://slides.com/sdrasner/svg-can-do-that
anyone knows if it's possible to convert gif to svg or mp4? for instance, I'd like to share a screen recording in svg. It might sound like a dumb idea, maybe it is
it does, however I use it to send short demos when needed. GIF is perfect, small size, resolution isn't critical, it's a perfect choice for me. I don't like sending 300Mb of video every time I have a small thing to demonstrate, GIFs on the other hand work like a charm. Which is why I am shopping for alternatives
I don't think it's a big reason not to allow it, since they allow webm with AV1 video which shouldn't be any better than AVIF in practice for compatibility purposes.
You're confusing language and runtime environment. SVG lets you use ecmascript of some version in its <script> tags, it obviously doesn't provide browser api available to you from javascript in a browser.
Even though you are just showing off your big brain, animation is totally different thing. GIFs is more understandable as it is a collection of repeating photos.
Last commit ~6 years ago. Does not appear to be any viable forks either.
Fortunately, I use nix to manage my system which sort of forces me to inspect the maintenance history of projects. Better than blindly installing `npm` packages in global namespace.
asciinema on the other hand is very interesting. Seems I can do without the svg aspect here, but something to keep in mind (svg animations).
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/SMIL_mis... missile command clone
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/13/London_U... tube map
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Rolling_... rolling shutter animation
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