[ynx]

About a decade ago I worked with someone who was on the early Flash team.

One of the tradeoffs of the time was that they had to work very hard to both crunch the binary size down for Flash itself, as well as Flash files, because people everywhere were extremely bandwidth-limited - when dialup was the most common method for connecting to the internet and not even 56k was necessarily ubiquitous at that. And of course, compiler technology hadn't come as far as it has nowadays.

The weight of all the decisions that made Flash able to succeed eventually worked against it, but for its time, it was an extremely good implementation that made the web as a whole more interactive.

I'm happy it's been superseded, but I think that it was the right product for its time.