Here for Team Flash. That was an incredible era during its peak. Apple brought on its demise not because it wasn’t competition and Steve Jobs penned the famous criticism which marked the downfall. Flash was ahead of its time.
Steve put the nail in the coffin but the downfall started and was primarily caused by Macromedia being purchased by Adobe, IMHO. All the problems of Flash were solvable had it continued to been driven by a team and leadership that understood and cared about product quality. IMO this is one of the clearest cases of tech acquisition making the world worse.
Flash was great but it was from an era that brought a ton of baggage that wouldn’t have scaled without a full rethink.
From energy use, to security and accessibility, it was very problematic.
We need a long documentary about that era. We had video, audio, animation in a web app without the friction of the Netscape browser. There was a burgeoning ecosystem of content producers. Major networks were broadcasting news live in Flash. There was also RealNetworks with real-time audio streaming. This was in late 90’s early 00’s. It was exciting, then http-based everything took over and it felt like media took a ten-year step backwards.
I've worked with RealNetworks tech in the 90s and think it is much better now with open source techology and HLS.
I think you’re viewing that era with significantly rose tinted glasses.
Yes, people were using that Flash for that but it came at a great expense. Flash was a massive battery drain, and to get better performance it required punching massive security holes in the browsers.
Flash is only really great as a content creator/developer who doesn’t care about the specifics of delivery.
But it would have phased out anyway regardless of the iPhone. HLS would have killed it for streaming video, advancing JavaScript and web standards would have killed it for more advanced websites.
The only thing we took a step back on was web game delivery.
Eh. I was on dialup in the age you describe and none of that stuff ever worked for me anyway, even for low-bitrate radio the jitter was a killer. HTTP as transport coincided with wide democratization of access, and I don't think that is at all coincidental; by the time bandwidth penetration made broad access to packet-switched ~realtime (ie broadcast equivalent) streaming feasible, HTTP had achieved the required penetration to represent a local minimum.