Re:Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
by windsurfer on Thursday November 19, 2020 @11:09PM
(#25157225)
> (HTML+JS+CSS is even less efficient, but have somehow taken over thanks to Google and the like.)
Adobe themselves pushed for using open web tech. I was working at Adobe in AS3/Flex during the transition and they were going to great lengths to promote and encourage development of open standards.
They did open it up...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Published_specifications
Until May 1, 2008, implementing software that plays SWF was disallowed by the specification's license.[35] On that date, as part of its Open Screen Project, Adobe dropped all such restrictions on the SWF and FLV formats.
https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil...
If Flash had been in decent shape at the time smart phones arrived, they might have been a required feature.
...but the feature bloat that Adobe created with the platform was part of the problem, introducing not only security issues but inefficiency. SWF started out as a small and efficient vector format, and then accrued far more features than were really necessary for its core purpose.
(HTML+JS+CSS is even less efficient, but have somehow taken over thanks to Google and the like.)