[hemdawgz]

That market was Flash, which has an absolutely huge content base of now-aging vector animations and games. I'm still not sure what the general rationale was for flash support becoming uncool, technical or otherwise.

edit: I suppose it was widely used for web applications or even entire websites, which is now an obviously inappropriate use case, but I've still yet to see any new web technology properly replace it for polished vector-rendered animations or games.

[josteink]

> I'm still not sure what the general rationale was for flash support becoming uncool, technical or otherwise.

Flash became a pseudo web-standard, and a closed one so. This meant Flash-support could only be implemented on devices and platforms Adobe decided to support.

And Adobe's history when it comes to fixing bugs, problems and providing adequate support for anything but their #1 platform (Windows) was appalling.

When Apple launched the iPhone, they decided that they didn't want their platform dependant on other's people code and limited to whatever effort Adobe would bother to put in.

At the time it was a ballsy move, as flash was surely king. In retrospect, I think it worked out (mostly) fine and I'm glad they were willing to foot the risk.

I say "mostly", because with Flash going away, people have been asking for the open HTML-standard to include closed elements which they earlier would typically do in Flash: DRM and friends.

The result is that the open HTML standard is no longer open and that open-source software can no longer fully implement a standards-comliant web-browser, meaning you can only get "working" browsers from the big guys like Apple, Google and Microsoft.

That's a terrible loss for the web and for the future.

[silvestrov]

Adobe never provided a usable non-dog-slow version of Flash for iPhone.

So Apple only had the choice between no Flash and a really bad version. Flash ran really slow on OSX compared to Windows, so it was unrealistic to expect Adobe to suddenly provide a good implementation of Flash for the iPhone. Adobe painted them into the corner by not properly supporting small platforms.

[Animats]

Flash became unpopular partly because the authoring tools were very expensive and closed-source. They were, however, usable by real animators. People could, and did, do cartoons, not just spinning triangles. The bandwidth required was very low.

Flash's approach to animation, with an object stream and a timeline stream, was a good one; display could start without reading the entire stream, something the SVG/CSS/Javascript mess can't do.

Shockwave was even more advanced, with full 3D. For a year, Shockwave even had the Havok physics engine in the player, allowing full 3D games with physics, but Adobe didn't keep up the payments and it had to be removed.

[Decade]

I take it you didn’t read Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash (2010)[0], then.

In short: Not a vendor-neutral standard nor an especially good standard, bad for security, bad for performance, bad for battery life, bad for touch, and promoting a lowest-common-denominator experience.

I’m not sure I agree with all those reasons, but the killing blow for Flash was that all those iOS and Android devices don’t run it.

[0] http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

[adamredwoods]

I was a big Flash designer back in the day. Now I use a tool that converts auto-magically to HTML5 and creates nice, compact files. That tool is.... Flash Creative Cloud! Yes, Flash the app, not the player. The latest version works very, very well as an HTML5 animator, and allows javascript code injection.

[christinecha]

I always kind of ignored the Flash Creative Cloud download link when I was updating Adobe, but that's because I didn't know this. Thanks for the tip! :)