A very good article.
I have switched over to Unity and other options over 10 years ago, too, as i saw Adobe’s mis management was making flash worse and worse.
But yes, it still makes me bummed and said when i see some uninformed hipster wannabe trolls bragging about how flash is the bane of everything and it should just die, when such comments show nothing more than how ignorant and uninformed such people are and nothing more than sheep who bash what they were told to bash. Makes me sad about the state of mankind in general a bit each time.
Many uninformed ones saw flash as mostly used for annoying ads before html/js/css caught up enough to allow making them in those.
But what Flash did was it accelerated the progression of the web further over 10 years, on many ends.
That it became so popular and used so widely for such a long time was for very good reasons.
It kicked off most of the things we take for granted on the web in one form or the other.
For example it allowed fullscreen smooth animations and crisp text in any font at any dimensions in tiny filesize and doing all sorts of cool things with video many many years before any other option. If it wasn’t for flash we wouldn’t have things like youtube on the level we have them at now, and it would have come many years later.
There was an incredibly vibrant community making very cool things in a time before the web got focussed more on streamlined templage made (boring) websites and rapid sharing and disregarding of content thanks to the ever growing unmanageable flood of our social and news streams.
Yes, that time has passed, and for the better on some ends, but on other ends something very cool, charming, creative, fascinating, and amazing was lost, too.
To this day some of flash’s features are still not matched by any other technology. Like for example most game engines, while having very nice 3d rendering and what not all, still to this day can’t display large text crisply in small filesize and low ram usage.
Or the aspect that one could have tweened vector aniamtions also with photoshop like filters applied and also raster image sequence animations using many file types like jpg or full color png and have all jpg and zip compressed. To this day the best alternative is basically using max 256 color bloated gifs or video (which is way bigger), nowadays our connections are just so fast that most don’t think about how wasteful it is to put up a small animation in a few MB extra. We then hear html/js/css meanwhile fully caught up, while in many aspects, it still hasn’t.
Adobe’s biggest fail (next to many smaller ones) was basically that they couldn’t get the vector renderer and filter, drawing and bitmapdata apis and hence actionscript 1 and 2 stuff hardware accelerated and hence then tried to force the user base to make everything new from scratch in worse new apis to get some hardware acceleration, basically forcing the user base to throw out all of flash’s advantages. That was the main culprit most don’t consider why flash was meant to die out, not that Steve Job’s started a public burning propaganda wave.
I wish and hope Adobe open sources it all (with fair open license) so some of it could be added in hardware accelerated form to browsers and game engines.
