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flash vs html5 on Hacker News

Across 2007–2026 of Hacker News, flash leads flash vs html5 with 102,669 mentions to html5’s 37,017, peaking in Apr 2010.

Mention-over-time for flash vs html5, overlaid across 2007–2026 of Hacker News. Each line is a live date-histogram over ~45M posts and comments, computed with Upstash Redis Search.

flash102,669 mentions, peak Apr 2010html537,017 mentions, peak Feb 2013
2008201120142017202020232026
Open this comparison in the interactive tool — zoom to any date range and read the stories behind each spike →

How the lead changed hands

A textbook changing of the guard: Flash burns hot across 2010–11, then HTML5 climbs past it into 2014–15, the open web eating the plugin alive.

The stories behind each line

Top “flash” stories
  1. Electron is flash for the desktop (2016) 1,519 points · 2017
  2. “We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020” 1,213 points · 2017
  3. Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed 1,098 points · 2025
  4. Gemini 2.5 Flash Image 1,093 points · 2025
Top “html5” stories
  1. Show HN: Airmash – Multiplayer Missile Warfare HTML5 Game 1,535 points · 2017
  2. Bomberman massively multiplayer in HTML5 1,394 points · 2013
  3. YouTube now defaults to HTML5 video 1,035 points · 2015
  4. Show HN: Draw a fish and watch it swim with the others 935 points · 2025

Each term on its own

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