They was so over controlling so there was whole game development industry where literally every company used Flash for UI for decade, but with 3rd-party proprietary runtime simply because Adobe ignored that market completely.
If they only moved Flash into open source when it was on peak of it's popularity they would probably still sell their proprietary tools to so much larger audience.
Adobe's idea at the time of the HTML5 transition was that they were going to completely replace Flash with the Edge Suite, while Flash Player became an expensive-to-license compilation target for Unity. Hence, the whole "premium licensing" debacle that smacked of "we don't know who our customers are, but some of them aren't using Creative Suite, so let's try and charge them lots of money for things the web can already do".
In my opinion it all was just too little too late. They should been investing heavily into open source as soon as Google started their crusade on web with Chrome. By the time WebGL and other APIs became mature everything was over for Flash.
Adobes evangelists really started running in circles after that.
And adobe itself made one stupid management decision after the other. And after they realised they will not get back on the ipads, they abondoned flash.
And this, after AIR ((flash for desktop) and Flex (UI Libary) were on its way to become established. Flex was really powerful. I would have loved to still use it, with a open-source flashplayer as its base. But adobe could not get themself waging to do that, so they just let it die.
There would be causalities - accessibility, responsive design, ad block (cosmetic and network), personalization (stylus). Yet with still unmatched creativity, maybe with stronger case against native applications (like today fuchsia). World would be different and we would never know exactly how.
The most important thing Adobe completely failed at. The Flash community was a fantastic thing that will never have any equivalent, ever. Macromedia understood the idea of ecosystem.
But what business survived being "Eloped"?
I know browsers have appeared to make enormous technical progress with all the new features - until you read stuff like this and realize most of it was already possible 20 years ago via Flash (Type-safe javascript as well, btw) - and partially in better quality and with less programming knowledge required than now.
So did we eventually come full circle?
That said, the Flash client was closed-source, buggy, security-challenged, intrusive, and a memory/battery hog. All that contributed to its demise.
It also helped that it was denied access to what would become the world's largest consumer compute marketplace: the Apple App Store.
Why is it that with all our computer power, we somehow can't create authoring tools as good as we had in the past?
HyperCard, DreamWeaver, Visual Basic 6, etc. all seem to be dramatically better for common people (read: not career programmers) than any modern equivalent we have.
A 1.0 would need to address a large enough surface area of the web to be useful. There's also a discordance between hand-coding "friendly" HTML/CSS and what would be exposed in a WYSIWYG tool. Further complications are all the new and old bugs in browsers.
That said, every day I was working on Hype 1.0 in early 2011, I would nervously check Hacker News for a "Show HN" post for a HTML5 animation app that would steal the thunder; luckily none came. This is even more surprising given Hype exports were mostly compatible with Internet Explorer 6 -- such an app could have been written long ago.
Another side is that programming and web is no longer novelty so common people prefer to just pay for someone else for their time rather than learn anything on their own.
Most people prefer to pay their auto mechanic, plumber or electrician even though most of people are capable of fixing many of their problems just by following simple tutorial and common sense. Programming is no different here: it's just easier or more time efficient to pay to someone else.
I absolutely don't buy this.
My father, a high school English teacher, could barely run a spreadsheet that I set up for his grades--something that basically everyone can do today without blinking.
And even he could use Hypercard.
It's the tools, not the people.
Likewise I rather spend my time in Unreal and Unity, than trying to feel superior while doing everything from scratch with SDL.
Dealing with the modern web is like reading an infinite run-on sentence because it absolutely overwhelms you with shit and it doesn't let up. It's not hard to go to any random site and find 75% of the above all at once.
Flash was bad. Somehow web developers took its demise as a challenge to make the web worse.
I detest the modern web, and I find myself using it less and less.
The other day I was researching how to add simple procedural animations to some web-based interactive content for a museum.
This would have been a breeze with Flash. You just passed the .fla to the animator/illustrator and they would create the item in the library for you. Then you could simply animate that display object in your code and the artist would be able to modify it without breaking anything.
I came up with this solution using DragonBones[1] so that the artists could work on their own. And then I could render those animations with Pixi[3].
I agree an all-in-one solution would be much nicer but not sure there is a market for it.
[1] http://dragonbones.com/en/index.html
[2] https://pixijs.io/examples/#/plugin-dragonbones/eyetracking....
Though in either case, you lose the web platform, with its accessibility (aria, screen readers) and forward compatibility (like the one we had with the move to smartphones, etc).
I haven't really benchmarked the size, but there are a few demos floating around. Not entirely sure how to measure it, but that one seems to come down to less than 10kB? https://obersprengmeister.frozenfractal.com/
For simple games or single animations Pixi is plenty. In fact Phaser.js is built on top of Pixi.
If anyone knows anything current similar to the flash IDE, I’d be curious to hear about it.
1/ Its IDE which made creating creative and interactive content mixing video/vector graphics sounds and code easier
2/ it's API that provided things that were not possible when browsers had none of these API (video streaming, socket programming...). At some point you could even write 2D shaders or inject C/C++ code with something called Alchemy.
Point 2 is now largely covered by browser web API, although one might argue that the performances might not be always as good as they were in flash, especially when it comes to vector graphics or realtime audio processing. But 3D and webgl are more performant than flash in the browser.
Point 1: well there isn't really an equivalent, and even Adobe Animate isn't really doing exactly what flash did when it comes to authoring content for browsers. So there is still a potential market here. I'd like to see something node based when it comes to coding. Artists love their nodes.
The real problem is obviously running old flash content like games. Some of these games were really good. I remember playing one which was a hotel management simulator and it was really really fun. But it's a bit like a these jar games in the 2000' one cannot run on modern mobile phones anymore. Without an effort to preserve these, they will all be lost.