[velcro]

My experience with Flash is completely opposite to yours - I'd say we're for the most part pretending that by letting Flash die we're better off today.

My fans spinning up every time I open a random website definitely disagree with you. Wasn't that the #1 argument for getting rid of Flash?

I started developing Flash websites in Flash 3 in school, transitioned into Actionscript 2/3 and did some complex projects over the years. Can't vouch for Linux but on my Mac and on Windows it was definitely great, it DID just work and it was cross-platform. People have short memories - but cross-platform back then was also mostly referring to huge JS/website inconsistencies between different browsers. I mean - when you say cross-platform, what are you even comparing it to?

I had a huge offline collection of different SWF files/websites for inspiration and that I could just start up from the filesystem and they also just worked (if it was a single-file project of course). I'd wager that 95+% of the people also had the full Flash Player installed.

Today I do some complex JS/React/webGL stuff - and let me tell you it takes like 10x as much (money, time, knowledge, effort) to develop stuff that's comparable to what I did 10 years ago in Flash. And this comes with more or just as many cross-browser and performance problems.

Blaming Flash for "fixing your computer" or saying it somehow had "hosting issues" I can't really understand at all.

The "mobile era" just started when Flash started transitioning into smartphones/apps - first results were not ideal but promising. Were Adobe allowed to have 10 years of iterations on those - I do firmly believe it would have been a #1 app development environment today. There would have been no need for Unity or even cross-platform frameworks like Flutter, etc...

But it is what it is - sorry, but anyone who thinks Flash dying was not primarily about Apple or even Google not wanting to keep their walled gardens for themselves is delusional. Adobe definitely has a good part of the blame for not recognising the potential and fighting for it some more.

[koonsolo]

I can't upvote this enough. Anyone who developed in that ecosystem loved it, including myself.

When you read negative comments, it's always someone who didn't really use it.

It worked for developers, it worked for gamers. My guess is that the haters are just very loud in their hate.

[btilly]

When you read negative comments, it's always someone who didn't really use it.

This is generally true, and for a simple reason. When people don't like something, they avoid it. And therefore they wind up not really using it.

Take me for an example. All that I needed to know about Flash is that someone, somewhere, thought my computer should randomly start flashing and making noise. And the way that they did it really sucked to experience on Linux. (Not that I wanted the intended experience.) The fact that the plugin that I needed to let them do so was a repeated source of security holes was just icing on the cake.

So I avoided Flash. And disabled the plugin at some point. With the happy result that a lot of particularly annoying ads went away.

Now I'm sure that there were a lot of people whose experience was better. It was popular for a reason. But it wasn't a better experience for me.