As for the dev environment around flash, according to them it was a nightmare codebase not for the faint of heart. It isn't surprising that adobe decided not to port it to WASM because it was a spaghetti mess.
There's a reason Flash was often a virus vector back in the day.
It was extremely to do a UI application with Flexbuilder, very similar to using VisualBasic 6.0. Just drag some widget and connect the event to some functions. Also drawing and animating vector graphic with the Flash authoring tool was extremely easy.
Today there is still no software that is this easy to use. You dont see 7 years old kid coding vector gfx animation with javascript and css :)
But back in the day it was not uncommon to see complex flash animation designed by 7 years old kid.
Sad that the best they can do is Swift Playgrounds for iPad; creating what is essentially a JSFiddle/Codepen for apps that can't be deployed without first paying their $99 dev fee toll.
In that spirit, I use Tumult Hype, which truly is Flash, and can be acquired without a pesky subscription.
But an app with vector animations should have been doable (not to hard in theory) if you could have found the investment for it, right?
(Unity do have animations tools for artists (it is partly made for artists) but not so good for vector graphics and not close to flash, and definitely not back then.)
It was definitely what drew the first blood.
But in fairness, a lot of people were crying for blood, flash had issues all over, and it was a complete security disaster. Apple's decision basically gave everyone the OK to dump on it.
It also happened at a time where the idea of open web was ascendent, MSIE was being actively fought against, and the people involved were out to excise proprietary platforms.
Also all mobile platform flash implementations had been absolutely awful, barely usable battery killer even ignoring that the UI affordances were just not adapted for mobile touchscreen devices.
Lack of iOS compatibility was the nail in the coffin. Our web agency already hated Flash because it lacked any SEO capability, and the editor was shit. When the iPhone dropped it we had already been building websites without it for a couple of years. It was just a nice accelerator and allowed us to deny clients who requested Flash much easier.
Fast forward a couple more years and security became the main issue. Many of our clients were infatuated with their Flash websites and didn't want to move on. I just took down a Flash website (replaced with HTML/CSS/JS) in... 2022!
Flash had been on shaky grounds for years. It was obvious that it had a limited lifespan, and that it eventually needed to die. I think even Adobe recognised this. But Apple accelerated it's death massively, and everyone seems to be very thankful for that.
There is a duolingo page that manages to kill my computer to death if I am not fast enough to close it. (Fortunately I only get it ~once a week.) Flash was easily blockable, but javascript, especially something that is compiled to javascript is much harder to catch.
Flash is dead. Autoplaying ads still exist.
For sites that used a Flash component (e.g. YouTube), the plug-in was fussy and flaky and would sometimes not work for any discernible reason, sometimes requiring an update to fix it. HTML5 replacements have been far less cantankerous.
Well...yeah. Flash sites usually make use of graphics, fonts and videos, all of which use bandwidth. They serve an entirely different purpose than regular HTML/CSS/JS pages.
Flash loaded everything at once, so that the experience was instantaneous and fluid, once it loaded. It would continue to work if you disconnected. There wouldn't be any buffering or lag due to network issues.
Where Adobe seems to have royally screwed up is creating an unambiguous specification for SWF format, and also disallowing other implementations of SWF. Instead, they become beholden to a codebase that no one could make heads or tails of, with no way of creating a clean rewrite that was guaranteed to replicate the behavior.
In designing Wasm we were very conscious of this, which is why Wasm has a very, very explicit specification that is simple with only the minimum non-determinism (some NaN issues) and no UB.
LOL, that's far from insider info. Steve Jobs publicly said several times that he was going to kill Flash. And he did.
And the reason for that wasn't "Flash is an insecure platform". Flash was in the way of a thing called the "App Store" which, fast forward to 2022, has made Apple somewhere around a trillion (with a t) dollars.
This is one of the first things which makes me feel old. "heard it from an aquantance" shit we all saw it happen! I wonder if people are to young to remember it, or maybe there are a lot of people who just don't remember it at all.
The problem with Flash was that it was a grossly inefficient runtime for arbitrary code with security issues, an extreme battery hog, and had no affordances for touch (e.g. you couldn't 'hover'). As I recall, battery was the biggest problem, security close second, UX inconsistency third, and runtime for arbitrary code (still disallowed!) as nail in coffin.
Given how difficult it was to maintain a flash codebase well with multiple developers jumping in and out of the project, we pushed that angle pretty hard
Business people never use this as part of the decision making process. If there's a market they will throw programmers at it and ignore their warnings.
I'm sure "we should get flash mobile" was pitched at one point in time and the "we'd have to rewrite everything in Javascript" was ultimately what killed those sorts of notions. Because, business people care that "this will be a multimillion dollar investment"
Our latest demo (PythonFiddle) is discussed here: https://leaningtech.com/pythonfiddle-fully-private-client-si...
Direct link: https://pythonfiddle.leaningtech.com
It is safe to assume that the Flash team has either left the company or moved to other roles in the meantime. The Flash codebase is gigantic, evolved over decades and probably includes IP with non-obvious licensing restriction (RTMP is an example that pops to mind). Porting to Wasm such a big codebase would require assembling a new team and figuring out some legal aspects. Both these things are expensive.
At the same time, FOSS efforts to replace Flash can at best achieve partial support for SWF content in the wild. The API surface is just too massive and poorly documented. I speak from personal experience here, having founded the Lightspark project when I was younger and with a lot of time on my hands.
Our opinion (at LeaningTech) is that Wasm can solve the Flash preservation problem by virtualizing the original, unmodified Flash x86 plugin. We wrote at length about our approach here: https://medium.com/p/eb6838b7e36f
The resulting product (CheerpX for Flash, https://leaningtech.com/cheerpx-for-flash/) is available to companies that needs to use Flash (and particularly, Flex) business applications.
Since the SWF effectively runs using the original Flash plugin the accuracy is optimal. On the hand, licensing the plugin itself is required, which means that the solution is not viable for end-users. As much as we'd like this to be different, it's unfortunately outside of our control.
Full disclosure: I am founder and CTO of Leaning Technologies, and lead developer of CheerpX