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by jinushaun 4182 days ago
There is way more to Flash than video. You see a lot of Flash silently running invisible in the background to enable modern web app features that aren't yet possible or easily achieved with standard HTML and JS. For example, Flash was used for web sockets before web sockets was a thing. Flash was also used to facilitate uploads.
2 comments

This is definitely true, given how often I've had my keyboard become unresponsive, only to find out that some little Flash widget had the focus and completely bypassed the browser, requiring me to use the pointer to click on some (hopefully) empty area of the page.

I will say that Flash isn't usually required for most of these uses; just like Javascript it should degrade gracefully to a fallback (eg. a POST form for uploads). Except for web sockets, if they're powering something fundamental (which is the same for JS).

The only time I've added a Flash widget to a page without a fallback has been "copy to clipboard" buttons, which didn't have a decent alternative. In those cases the button just doesn't show at all.

There's also way more to Flash than websites. Using Adobe AIR, developers can take their content created in Flash, and package it into apps for iOS, Android, and also for Windows and Mac.