It wouldn't be too difficult to make something even better than flash that emitted wasm files, that could run everywhere. It would give lots of folks a creative outlet that could be infinitely shared.
A portable runtime isn't that hard. An effective and approachable authoring tool is the real challenge.
Anyone whose made an Instagram filter or TikTik effect recently - it was like that, though even easier, but allowing you to do actual coding right down to very low level stuff should you desire.
and you could get push your creation to any screen in the known universe with essentially zero testing.
Pretty sure half the internet surfers had plugins that made flash run only when user activated by the time it started to wane.
Personally I only activated it for games i wanted to play, so most of that creativity was lost on me.
Obviously flash was not designed for small screens or small batteries.
But it could have been adapted! If Adobe had been in any way competent or caring the flash runtime could have been converted to html5
But Adobe suck
It was the same even before mobile phones. Laptops had batteries too. CPU fans sounded even worse than today when pegged at 100%.
I remember the time when pc fans hearable meant 95% that i opened a web page with a flash component by mistake...
Humanity has proven it can't handle anything else than static pages. Then the developers themselves have to pay for their bloat rather than the users.
I think a Bret Victor, "Inventing on Principal" style editor would be perfect, combined with some sort of scratch like Python IDE where each element is defined in terms of its reactive behaviors with other elements on a timeline.
I didn't say easy, I said not too difficult. Order of magnitude difference. :)
https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII?t=634
With some http://lighttable.com/
If you just want to make animations, skip actionscript entirely. If you want some extra Easter eggs, just turn any symbol into a button and you can trigger any movie clip you want. Want to make this a whole game, heres the whole action script editor.
Maybe wasm+Canvas is getting close to being stable. But if you code up a webgl game and test it on desktop Chrome, odds are it'll just be a black screen on anything but the most popular Android devices, and you'll need to do tons of work and testing to get it to run on an iPhone.
And WebGPU is probably at least 5 years away from being stable enough to be considered to "run everywhere".
I strongly considered trying to do this a few times, but ended up writing an swf parser in C++ and used Skia to render. It's probably the best we can do right now, but we still regularly get players who complain about just seeing a black screen.
And those were THE best vector art tools, because when you drew a shape and the shape overlapped with another, it automatically erased the other shape like you would expect it to in a raster graphics editor. In pretty much every other software I tried, e.g. Inkscape, Affinity, Corel Draw, Illustrator, you just get two separate shape objects one on top of the other. They seem to be designed for drawing the outlines, not to actually paint with brushes. Flash understood what was intuitive for artists.
Honestly, the older I get the stranger I feel about the fact that there was a brilliance in creating interface for people to be productive with back then that seems to be completely gone. I think this may be in part because desktop applications are unusual nowadays, but it's just really strange that the things I remember seeing have been done exactly once and never copied by anybody despite how well they worked.
And yes, locking unmergeable files is essential either way.
It isn't great that are now so many Git GUI clients written in Electron?
The new Flash is a whole other pair pants. Also if people want to make easy things for the web in a closed platform, Unity already exists.