And now we have giant js bundles composed of thousands of little libraries, ad hoc animation, subpar media playback.
The web stack wasn't prepared to match the ease of authorship and distribution of Flash. It still isn't up to the same par, and it's been 15 years.
If Adobe had open sourced the entire standard and the player itself early on, they'd still have the best authorship tool and would have done amazing things. I don't know what they were thinking. They had an awesome tool, but their strategy was so wrong.
Flash was like PHP. Admittedly not the prettiest, but people did amazing things with it. It was a tool that worked for a lot of people. Teenagers were using Flash and getting really good.
Steve didn't want Flash eating his batteries, so he killed it on Apple. He also left us with the fucking robber barron App Store and the concept that we can't run stuff or upgrade our own devices. Seems like Apple shouldn't be able to dictate what you can or can't run on their platform - that's monopoly power. They killed Flash.
Steve was worse than Flash and stole from us.