This is possible in HTML because it's trivial to determine whether or not a :hover changes display or visibility properties of other elements. As you've supposed, Flash did not afford browsers with that sort of ability.
TBF one thing Flash did manage to achieve was the proliferation of web sites and apps that were as hard to use for people without protected disabilities as for people who did have them.
Whether this increased empathy for people with disabilities is an open question
Apple used to ship a dev app called "Spin Control" that would log stack traces whenever an app failed to drain its event queue in a timely manner (i.e. beachball). One time I accidentally left this open for an entire week, went about a bunch of assorted business, and when I came back every single stack trace had to do with flash, and there were many. Either flash in a browser or flash in a browser embedded in something else (ads embedded in 404 pages for broken help pages that were never even displayed, lol). At first I thought it had to be a mistake, a filter I had forgotten about or something, so I triggered a spin in Mail.app by asking it to reindex and sure enough that showed up as the first non-Flash entry in Spin Control.
As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.
https://www.cnet.com/culture/steve-jobs-letter-explaining-ap...
As hard as it was to believe: Flash had been responsible for every single beachball that week. Yikes.
Funny how one could and maybe should point the same criticism towards electron.
Even in OS X it was still a bad plugin, one of Snow Leopard's headline features was that plugins were moved to separate processes so that Safari could keep running instead of bringing down the whole browser when a plugin had a problem.
But Flash also allowed many games to be easily developed and played in the browser. Lots of fun cartoons were made (the Metallica cartoons "fire bad" on Newgrounds come to my mind now).
It's a shame Flash sucked so much on Mac, since the developer behind Flash [0] did create some nice games on the Mac early in his career, namely Airborne! and Dark Castle.
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I guess Flash had to die because of how outdated, insecure, and proprietary it was. It did seem like a nightmare to support well on mobile. Just wish someone made something strictly better.
Not sure how ActiveX's sandboxing worked, but I'll bet it was even less than Flash, since it was running actual x86 code.
Turns out nearly every extension had gaping security holes.
> We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.
Ah, the dev page for these: https://hoyois.github.io/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/
People also don't remember the huge number of CVEs that Flash had: https://www.cvedetails.com/version-list/53/6761/1/Adobe-Flas...
Was it just Flash or low skilled web developers using Flash the wrong way, adding 10 Flash advertisements on a page and so on?
Since Flash was so ubiquitous on the web, this made Macs a lot slower for many tasks than Windows computers. No matter how much Steve Jobs touted the power of the G4, and boasted about the speed of Final Cut, nobody would believe it when their Mac couldn't even run a space invaders clone in IE4 fluently.
Adobe ignored performance on Apple devices for years. There was no way in hell Apple would allow Adobe to do the same to iOS.
There were some 3rd party things that sorta worked a bit, but they were not good either.
Flash was bad on touchscreens for sure, but we’d have seen content adapt eventually anyhow, if it had actually ever worked in the first place.
I'm pretty sure he always knew they'd end up with apps on it, they just didn't pull that together for the first release, thus the HTML song and dance. But if they supported flash, that would reduce a lot of the demand for apps later, and worse - it would be cross platform.
So he used the other (still good) reasons - battery life, security, etc. to obscure the real reason - Apple was not yet ready to compete with it on their own terms, so they banned it.
It's more about control and all the other reasons.
Mousovers is a dead herring. They could still give Flash not to run existing stuff, but new apps, that would take iOS into account.
And legacy flash movies and animations and games that just needed click and not mousovers would still work. To be frank, mouseover interaction weren't really that big in many (most?) Flash games anyway.
Another poster mentioned the hangs - which is very true - and I can say that the desktop Macs I supported had a high 90% of the crash logs show Flash as the culprit, not to mention almost every CPU / battery life issue.
There were some great artists who produced neat work despite it but the only company to blame for Flash’s demise is Adobe. As a thought exercise, ask why Flash on Android consistently sucked – if they were trying to make the case that Apple should reconsider, they could have put at least one intern on making that seem appealing.
This is par for the course for Adobe. The other day I had occasion to try to fill out a PDF form using Acrobat Pro. I made it through about a page (painfully slowly) until I unwisely saved my work. Then I cursed for a bit, tried quitting and reloading, and eventually gave up and started over in PDF.js. Superior in every way.
I remember when a major selling point of Acrobat was that you could save a filled out form, whereas third party apps couldn’t. Apparently doing so still breaks the form, and third party apps have gotten it right for many years now.
Adobe seems to pretty much never care about their platform once they have market share.
Literally never heard back until a year later when they closed the tickets saying it might be fixed in the next release and we should buy licenses to find out (spoiler: no).
I always wondered why that feature didn't continue - I remember it working quite well, but IIRC it only worked in Chrome browser.
Skipping Flash wasn't so much an ideological decision as a practical one.
At the time Steve Jobs listed a ton of reasons that they didn't implement Flash. Listed among them were concerns about it not being an open standard, inferiority to H.264, security and performance issues, etc. However, all of these things could've been ignored or overcome.
The principal problem was that a huge proportion of Flash applications, games, and websites used mouseovers as crucial methods of interactions, and Apple simply had no way to allow users to mouseover an element on a touchscreen.