It's really a shame that Adobe's absolute garbage treatment of Flash ended up causing, in my opinion, roughly a decade and a half or so of young childrens' and teens' disinterest in making video games. That niche was somewhat filled partly by Roblox and Minecraft, and today it's getting easier and easier to spin something up in Unity, but there's never been anything quite comparable to the level of simplicity of just making some bullshit in Fireworks and fiddling around with Flash for a few hours while recording audio on a shitty microphone and splicing up old pictures to make a dumb joke. Ah nostalgia

On one hand, I kinda stand by being against flash, but on the other hand, we aren't really at a better place today than when Flash was all over the place.

I just wish someone had made a good Flash/ActionScript3 -> JS+HTML-Canvas compiler. There's no reason we couldn't have kept the authoring tools just because we got rid of runtime and all its security issues.

https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle

If Adobe had seen their ban from the iPhone as a challenge to make Flash player capable of running without a plug-in they would dominate so many areas today. Flex would have become a viable platform to develop web apps/PWAs with - effectively sitting in the same position as what Flutter is doing today (Although I don’t believe Flutter is a one size fits all universal toolkit). I suppose they tried with PhoneGap but without Flash/Flex, which was their super power, they just didn’t have enough value proposition.

I suspect they saw the desktop install base of Flash Player as too important to risk loosing by marking it redundant - innovator's dilemma.

For some reason they just excepted defeat with Flash.