I'm not sure if it's included in your 90%, but an advantage of Flash is that it was not JS or HTML. Meaning that you could block it easily, when it offended your senses (animated ads, autoplaying videos), without affecting the functionality of most web sites.

CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.

> CSS + animations + JS + HTML5 cannot be blocked without destroying the web site as well.

That's a lame excuse. There were enough 'not malicious' sites, there are enough sites now what treat you like a 3rd rate netizen even if you are on a 4k desktop in a landscape orientation.

If anything, Web is destro^W profiling itself for a narrow subset of mobile users for quite some years already, so I can't accept your 'blovk Flash' stance as anything having a substinence.

I'd like to reply, but I'm not sure how to read this comment.

There were always user-unfriendly sites. It used to be possible to easily block the nasty content (Flash), now it's rather hard. It used to be possible to extract the interesting content (Flash) and save it without the junk website. Now it's not. Separation was an advantage.

I agree that the Web is narrowing itself down. One of the symptoms is not having interactive content clearly delineated from the rest.

You seem to come from the same premises but arrive at the opposite conclusion, and I don't understand your reasoning.

yeah I remember that people demonized flash so much for that and turned a blind eye once html and javascript was given that power.

jokes on them now, I guess

not to mention flash content could run on a potato, while javascript is soon to see your processor as fried as a potato chip instead

Oh yeah! We used a plug-in called FlashBlock which would load by default and basically do nothing but show a button to load, and if you clicked the button it would load actual Flash for that single embed. Blocked so many ads but let you play games.

Flash is to web dev as Excel is to desktop applications: it "sucks" but is also arguably the single best tool the entire field has produced. The technologies that might replace Flash are "better" but also so much worse that they aren't even close to actually replacing it, years on—and, yeah, that's mostly about the authoring tools, which were not just excellent, but also de facto free for hobbyists (thanks, piracy) when Flash was in its prime.

not only that, the shovelware scene proved that it was piss easy to use, and powerful (especially in the later years) see as many html5 gaming webpages lately? yeah, no. the 'death' of flash killed the browser game and rapid prototyping that flash offered, and there is nothing on that level in this age.

the problems that html5, css and javascript could in theory 'solve' are a moot point when the switch to those technologies killed any enthusiasm for it.

And so many of the Flash web games could be saved because they were completely self-contained units.

Today? Just forget about saving some web based game someone makes because it's probably streaming its assets from some dynamically computed URLs

that's true. I think a few flash games did a split swf thing for DRM purposes, and yeah. look where that got them... lost media ahoy for html5