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> Mozilla sadly adopted a strategy of blindly following everything Chrome does.

I think Mozilla's incentives for minimizing Flash were relatively aligned with their principles: Flash is a proprietary technology from a single company, not an open standard. I also think that's a valid criticism, and why a lot of other tech enthusiasts didn't mind seeing Flash die, either.

I largely agree with you though—Flash was a good technology, and the clear line in the sand it created between "web pages as documents" and "interactive content" had a lot of advantages. I also don't think it was any more bloated than modern HTML web apps, although it felt heavier at the time due to our more limited hardware capabilities.

Would that the line were as clear as you make it out to be. There were a metric craptonne of essentially all-document sites - the only "interactivity" being links - that were encased in inaccessible SWFs for (a) "pixel-perfect" rendering or (b) someone's idea of copy protection.

Was NSAPI not an open standard?

You mean NPAPI, right?

I think so, yes.

My experience with Flash was that it was a nightmare of crashes and cpu usage on anything but Windows (i.e. Linux desktop, MacOS).

I feel like a lot of people have a very rosy "nothing was wrong" view of Flash that I don't share. Jobs' letter was pretty welcome to anyone using a Mac, for one.

Indeed, and it was always a security disaster delivered as a closed blob. More so than today because there was no sandbox.

I can't say I ever had an issue with Flash on Mac or Linux. It was certainly heavier than normal web content, but so is modern html5 stuff.

The modern web bloat has just been due to huge amounts of JavaScript becoming common - if you compared basic video playback it was normally at least a factor of two worse playing the same video in Flash, which often meant the difference between dropping frames or playing smoothly.

The big win was avoiding all of the crashes: every browser raced to move Flash out of the browser process because it was so common for Flash to crash and take the browser with it, and many of those were exploitable.

> The modern web bloat has just been due to huge amounts of JavaScript becoming common - if you compared basic video playback it was normally at least a factor of two worse playing the same video in Flash

Well, sure, for simple video playback html5 is clearly superior. What I find more interesting though were flash's "interactive" capabilities—if you wanted to make an app that ran in the browser, it used to be you'd almost always use Flash. Now you just use tons of Javascript instead, and I think if anything that was a performance regression.

If you don't use a huge toolkit, a modern browser is massively faster – I last did benchmarks like 8 years ago and even then it was usually an integer multiple more memory or CPU for something done in Flash versus the browser and that was before accounting for the browser having better quality text rendering, color management, alpha effects, antialiasing, etc. Had Adobe not just stopped investing after they hit 90% marketshare that might have been different but they were sitting still for too long.

The problem is that having made things like JS, the DOM, CSS, etc. so efficient just increased the threshold before performance forces developers to notice inefficiencies but that's a pretty portable problem, too — we had to force Flash developers to test on older systems with slower connections the same way.

Do we have same time period in mind?

2006-2009: Gnash, hardly anything works, 2010: Youtube introduced html5 video

My years may be off by one, but iirc I was a Linux user in 2007–2008, switched back to Windows between 2009–2010, and then have used Macs ever since 2011. I recall Flash still being common in 2011.

I tried to get some facts. In 2006 I remember Gnash, it supports most SWF v7 features [1]. One could install firefox and flash in wine [2] (didn't know, didn't bother). And in 2008 there was native Linux Flash Player 9 [3] (too late). In 2010 still no hardware acceleration and no 64 bit support on Linux - in comments [4].

So technical availability was issue just in 2006-2007. Yes, I remembered flash was ads so without plugin it was ads free experience before AdBlock. I liked it a lot. The only issue was "copy to clipboard" buttons, but could work around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnash_(software)

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20061030024511/https://www.howtof...

[3] http://web.archive.org/web/20080430162104/https://www.howtof...

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20110511095927/http://blogs.adob...

Odd, I explicitly remember using an official version of Adobe Flash in Linux.

I can't seem to figure out when Linux support started, but the archived version of Flash Player 7 on Adobe's site[1] appear to include builds for Linux (as well as Solaris!). The earliest Linux installer in the download has a file timestamp of May 20, 2004.

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1: https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-playe...

So, from my memory (I started with Linux in 2000 or so, haven't really stopped.)

There was a flash player for linux, I want to say it corresponded with about version 5 but don't trust me on that. It never really got any updates except perhaps the occasional critical security patch. Meanwhile, the Linux desktop moved on and the plugin got harder and harder to keep going. Things like sound required jumping through a few (extra) hoops to make work, I think it expected OSS but that faded out to be replaced with ALSA, so you had to add some thing to get backward compatibility for that, and it would tend to monopolise the whole sound device.

Meanwhile, Linux became more and more 64 bit, but the flash plugin didn't. So you either had to run a 32-bit browser (because plugins were a library the browser loaded), or use some crazy proxy plugin thing (nspluginwrapper[1]) that someone made that was 64 bit at one end and 32 bit at the other.

Also meanwhile, other platforms got Flash player 6, and 7, and beyond, and still Linux was stuck on 5 or whatever. Then Mike Melanson[0] came along and spent some serious time and energy re-porting Flash player to Linux and made a lot of people very happy because now we had AV sync and no 32-64 bit bodges and fewer and fewer crashes and so on.

After a few years(?) he stopped, not sure why, and things slowed down. But by then it felt like flash was starting its decline, and what we had worked well enough, and Adobe seemed to be keeping basic updates happening anyway.

Now more and more I forget about installing `flashplugin-installer` or whatever Ubuntu calls it these days and don't notice that it's not there.

Note, aside from Mike's name, this is totally from memory so significant details may be wrong. Go read Mike's archived blog, it'll probably give you a much more detailed insight. Might do that myself.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120903074409/http://blogs.adob... - note that this is an arbitrary time snapshot that I picked at random. [1] https://www.linux.com/news/nspluginwrapper-cross-architectur... - total madness. But it (mostly sorta) worked.

I don't know, checked more - 1999 Macromedia introduces Flash Player for Linux [1], I see traces of v5, v6, v7 [2], [3]. Never heard about them, in my circle there was consensus "flash does not work on Linux". Strange

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20070520080719/http://www.allbus...

[2] http://dsc.soic.indiana.edu/publications/flashjan01.html

[3] http://www.penguintutor.com/blog/viewpost.php?id=wp140

I think most tech oriented people can appreciate the downsides of Flash. But in retrospect it no doubt enabled a level of creativity that any replacement technology hasn't achieved to nearly the same degree. Some creators seemed to have moved away with Flash's decline.

> Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day.

It absolutely did not. It was a huge battery drain and super unintuitive to navigate with touch.

A web page designed with only desktops in mind will work poorly on a phone too - not Flash's fault.

Doesn’t really matter whose fault it was: the experience was abysmal, which further led to its downfall.

Flash did not "work perfectly fine" on Android.

Arguably Flash never worked perfectly fine anywhere it ran. It was notorious for high CPU loads and security vulnerabilities. Putting it on a power-constrained mobile phone platform just emphasized these shortcomings.

You can add these to the list of selfish parties:

Developers wanting full scripting support; this is what lead to all the security problems.

Advertisers that turned an amazing animation system into a thing everyone hated.

Macromedia and then (to a much larger degree) Adobe that took every possible wrong turn imaginable. What started as a system that allowed interactive vector animation to play from a floppy (native player AND media) turned into a bloated mess with features no one wanted or people wanted for only selfish reasons.

You make valid points. But for years malicious Flash applets were one of the primary ways malware was delivered over the web. For IT departments, unless a user absolutely needed it, it was removed from their system. There was a time where it seemed like there were new critical vulnerabilities in Flash every week, and it was a nightmare to keep up with. Security, or lack thereof, contributed greatly to its demise.

i don't remember flash ever being very good at its job. the best there was at the time, but slow/buggy/crashing. i remember being very excited for html5 being able to replace it.

Flash also didn't live a natural life. In an ecosystem of incresingly open web standards and interoperation, it was a closed-source single-owner multimedia time-synchronized event-driven content engine embedded in what increasingly became an ecosystem of open-source multiemdia time-synchronized event-driven content engines owned by multiple companies.

Flash ended up with a closed-source economic model of "Maintain a bunch of forks of our engine for every platform, hope people keep paying us for the dev tools" and it became a losing gamble.

If Adobe would have invested reasonably in security (timely fixes, code quality reviews, silent auto-update by default, general attitude towards code quality in hiring/development) Flash might have had a chance. They didn't.

Flash didn't work "perfectly fine" on Android - basically every product shipped with Flash was vulnerable at almost any point in time.

> Flash worked perfectly fine on Android back in the day

This is absolutely false. It was not fine, much less "perfectly fine".

It was slow to touch respond, super laggy. You couldn't hover. Scrolling and tapping wasn't supported right. It broke browser navigation when you weren't expecting it.

Flash never worked on Android fully.

It also never made it out of beta though, right?

I think it might have gotten better in time, particularly as mobile hardware itself got more powerful, and creators designed flash apps with mobile interfaces in mind.

> This is absolutely false. It was not fine, much less "perfectly fine".

TBF, not much did. Android was pretty rough until v4.

When Flash was deprecated for Android the official advice from Google was to send an HLS stream instead, but those caused some variants of the Galaxy S3 (the biggest selling handset at the time) to hard lock and the user would have to pull the battery.

Let's not pretend that early instability was all Flash's fault.