What’s “back then” to you? Flash grew up in the time of dial up when you could still get AOL install discs with 100 free hours in your typical grocery store PC magazine. I don’t recall people hating Flash a lot until later when it wasn’t a technical necessity anymore.

The first computer I remember using was a Compaq Portable with a green screen and DOS that my dad was allowed to bring home on weekends. I vividly remember going to Circuit City as a family to buy our first windows 3.1 machine.

Flash was very cool, at first, then it got used for WAY too much stuff that had no graceful degradation so you were stuck waiting a few minutes for an animation to load so you could see the content stuck behind flash.

Flash certainly became broadly hated. It had a pretty long stretch of being loved, and enabling content that was loved, though. Up until about 2005 or so, flash was critical tech for the young web. By 2010 it was clearly heading toward an end.

I remember strongly disliking Flash before 2005, and many tech-minded people I talked to agreed. It was an awful install, always needed an updated, was a memory hog, and was a pain in the ass to use without it crashing. Yes, it must have been great to create apps with (I never did), but it was not beloved. Flash games were beloved, not Flash.

> People hated flash. Even non techies.

Billions of people enjoyed using Flash for games, video, music, and animated entertainment.

Enjoying a game, video, or music is different than enjoying the underlying means of delivery.

Do people love Javascript and HTML5, or do they like streaming entertainment?

Do gamers love Unity, or do they love playing fun games, some of which are made with Unity?

I played games on every Windows from 3.1 and up (and MS-DOS before that), but I'm not pining for the days of Windows ME despite how much fun I had on that machine.

People used Internet Explorer to run all their Flash entertainment, but nobody is arguing that IE was loved even though it was part of the flash stack for a huge majority of users.

Notably, Flash is dead, and no one is arguing that we bring it back.

If I never have to sit through a flash loading bar gating an HTML website with a completely unnecessary splash page, you won't find me mourning. (yung'uns: this was a thing. If you wanted to go see a website sometimes you had to sit for a while so a dumb flash animation would show and you could click through to the actual HTML content. Jobs did you a favour)

You're completely (and I think intentionally) missing that flash enabled people to easily create those things... and that creativity and ease of use still hasn't been replicated (your example of Unity - doesn't come close to the ease)

People loved flash for what flash was good for (creative toys) they disliked flash when certain sites started making it the core of the navigation etc.

When people are nostalgic for flash it's for finding random toys from other people who weren't "IT people".

I’m not being intentionally obtuse. I’m just not viewing a dead technology with rose colored glasses.

If you don’t like unity on account of being too powerful pick from the dozen or more easily found projects that do what flash did in the same creator friendly way. Here’s one: https://www.wickeditor.com/

Again, people didn’t love flash. They loved the content that was created. Having to deal with updating flash and all that hassle was something people tolerated to see funny animations that anyone can still make today. The concept was very cool, the execution was not.

Everything flash could do from a creative standpoint is easier and better now, with the added benefit of not being awful ux.

Doesn’t pass the smell test. “Billions” is >2 billion. There weren’t that many people online when iPhone came out with its famous flash ban. https://ourworldindata.org/internet

Your source shows 1.36 billion people using the internet in 2007. In English, when we say "in the billions" it means more than a billion.

or they enjoyed the games despite flash.

what? no? people generally loved, especially with the likes of frog in a blender...

for the younguns https://archive.org/details/joe-cartoon-frog-blender#

People loved flash games.