Flash grew up in a very weird time where nobody cared about hardware acceleration at all. Go back just a few years and even basic multimedia tasks like playing music or decoding a JPEG require some amount of accelerator support. Go forward a few years and hardware accelerators are suddenly crucial to energy efficiency. Ergo, everything in Flash Player is done in software. Vector rendering & compositing? Software. Video decoding & playback? Software. This wasn't at all exclusive to Flash, of course, but Adobe was uniquely unsuited to realize this problem.

Apple realized very early on that you needed hardware acceleration for common computing tasks in order to have laptops that last more than an hour on a single charge. It took Adobe several years after the launch of the iPhone to actually support some amount of hardware accelerated video decode, and as far as I'm aware vector rendering (the core of the platform) was never meaningfully accelerated. As far as I'm aware, pre-iPhone efforts to get onto phones involved a special cut-down Flash runtime that was perpetually out-of-date and was only really popular on early-2000s Japanese handsets. This wasn't at all built for the "computer in your pocket" that Jobs wanted.

The Flash runtime was not power hungry. It was the terrible code that was written that ran on it that was power hungry.

As HTML5 was emerging someone posted a HTML 5 demo on hacker news. It put 1 core of my machine to 80%. I wrote an equivalent version in Flash and it used 5%.

All the people writing terrible code in Flash simply started writing terrible code in Java script instead.

I never liked Flash, but the browsers were very far behind initially. Animation was slow and stuttering.

At some point the browser vendors started addressing that, and things got better.

But I think the other part of Flash is the tools used to create it - I never understood why they didn't port those to HTML5 and worked with the browser vendors to get kinks ironed out, instead of doubling down on - what was the name - Adobe Air? I think they still had some market power they could have wielded.

Abobe's failure to switch the flash tools to targeting HTML5 is one of the most inexplicable decisions of all time.

In late 2000s they owned the Web App space ( what was called Rich Internet Applications in their speak). Flex (their business GUI components library and markup language) was absolutely dominating corporate Web app development.

And they just abandoned it.

In an alternative reality we are all building HTML5 Web apps with Flex Builder right now.

Sorry I don't understand what is the connection between HTML5 and Flash? Isn't flash an object that runs inside HTML5? What would you like Adobe to have done exactly?

Instead of outputting a flash object file the Flash tools could have output actual HTML.

The Flash Player is, at the end of the day, a proprietary Canvas widget with a ECMAScript based VM powering it. With HTML5 they could have targetted the actual real HTML5 Canvas and completely eliminated the flash player plug in whilst still retaining the tools.

> All the people writing terrible code in Flash simply started writing terrible code in Java script instead.

And then some genius decided "What if we ran JavaScript on the server?" and Node was born.

Then came the node_modules black hole and the left-pad debacle.

Sometimes I think JavaScript was a mistake.

The things that were trying to replace it (i.e. web standards) were even more power hungry to run or didn't work.

Plenty of Android smartphones ran Flash. I remember browsing the desktop (Flash) version of Youtube on my LG phone in 2009. Flash support continued for at least a few years, but once HTML5 video became common, it dropped off.

For most of Flash's lifespan, laptops and smartphones were not really a thing.

Smartphones maybe but laptops?

Flash came out in the mid 90s. I'd say there was a decade before they became practical and cheap enough to outnumber desktops