Comment by thisislife2
14 hours ago
Those downvoting you have no idea of what you are talking about. Flash was what truly brought multimedia to the internet. You could make complex vector animations so easily in it, and it would only take a few minutes to load on a dialup or ISDN because of its small size (10's or 100's of KB). At one point, it used to power the whole of Youtube (and many other video sites). "Web applications" in this era actually meant something built with Flash. And it did all this on ancient hardware. Flash used to run on 90+ % of internet connected PCs at one point if I remember right. And because of that, you could count on Flash player more than the browsers they ran in. Adobe 100% screwed it up.
I have less rosy memories of self-indulgent Flash loading pages which took forever over dialup and contributed nothing. And a lot of weird-for-the-sake-of-it UI experiments.
There were also fun sites and games and generally silliness, but there was a lot of Flash slop.
Was it a more interesting web? It was more experimental and colourful. The Flash/Kai's Power Tools/Fireworks maximalist period was more inventive, but the UX wasn't necessarily friendlier.
It was a great time to be running a design agency, but not always a great time to be an ordinary user.
What actually killed Flash? Social media. That took the user interest, siloed it, and cut off the oxygen of individual attention.
Which is why even if someone reinvented a simple animation -> js etc tool it wouldn't make a difference. The attention isn't there to support a culture where creative sites become memes in their own right and search engines make them easy to find.