You have to remember the background for this era. Shockwave (not yet even Adobe), Shockwave Flash was the overwhelming interactive media on the internet. Kids in middle school and high school watched episodes of .flv videos of South park, we played "stick figure skiing" or "stick figure fighting" games, there were stick figure sledding games, all sorts of "multimedia" apps existed inside the "flash" container/spec. Some of them (multiplayer) also had network support of some sort, if only for supporting ads. A big part of flash was that it was not bitmap, it was... scalable vectors, which allowed it to shrink traditionally "large" (500kb+, easily 10 minutes on dialup) spritemap heavy games, down into 45-100kb (less than 7 minute download) packages that could be played on nearly any desktop
SVG had the same base layer functionality but network support would have been a big step towards making an open standard version of Flash. The iPhone was famously one of the last devices to drop support for Flash (due to both wild and regular security holes), and when they did, Flash (the predominant consumer web technology of the early-mid 2000s) finally died. It was a big deal. Had SVG gotten flash-like capability, it could have been a real game changer (although with giant security holes). Security back then was "somebody elses' problem" so while raw sockets seems wholly irresponsible by modern standards, back then it was the norm, partly because less than 10 million people worldwide really had any kind of risk exposure, plus the fact that the internet was still mostly decentralized, AOL was still considered a major force back then. Facebook and others with billions of users didn't exist yet.
Good summary, only thing I'd add is that the iPhone didn't drop support for flash, they never had it to begin with and made it clear they never would. Android vendors at the time used to use flash support as selling point until they too dropped it.
Being the first to call the death on something seems to be an ongoing trend with Apple.
Flashback to Steve Jobs' famous "Thoughts on Flash" https://newslang.ch/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Thoughts-on-F...
It was not well received at the time. Oh how things have changed.
Have they? I would say the subsequent ~10 years of the web have vindicated Flash. HTML5 video hasn't made websites lighter or less annoying - quite the opposite (indeed video ads are a worse problem than Flash ads ever were). Meanwhile creativity and innovation on the web have taken a hit. 10+ years on there's still nothing that allows a lone auteur to produce a web experience as easily and effectively as you could with Flash (it seems to be possible to match Flash, a la the NYT's Snow Fall or the previous Madogatari intro, but not at a level that's accessible to an individual creator), and we're all worse off for it.
As someone that helped a little bit in bringing Flash to WebOS, it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure. Adobe was caught really off guard by mobile and never prioritized flash. If little else, the modern web is infinitely more secure than the flash player and Adobe would never have prioritized it. We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor. So structurally things are also infinitely healthier. That the web is a cesspool in turns of content is an orthogonal problem that would have always been the case (but also a flash laden website are up way more RAM and CPU than the equivalent html)
> it was a battery stuck because there was no HW acceleration. Additionally, the software was very very bad. Used a crapton of memory, was really slow, and horribly insecure.
Surely lack of hardware acceleration and poor implementation are incidental, not fundamental issues. Just as browsers eventually got their own PDF implementations because Adobe's sucked, I expect the same would have happened for Flash eventually.
> We also have ~3 major open source browser engines that independently implement the web compared with one closed source vendor.
We have WebKit and Gecko, and the latter barely exists on mobile. I'm not convinced we're a lot better off in practice.