Nah, Flash was awful. Terrible performance on low end devices. Unforgivably terrible for web video. Nightmare on Linux. Nightmare in enterprise environments.
There were cool games, but there still are cool games. And the indie/hacker/homebrew gaming ecosystems are bigger, richer, and more accessible than ever (due in no small part to the web, both as a gaming platform and for learning/community).
This take doesn’t make sense unless you’re comparing Flash to current technology, rather than the tech of its time. It’s like saying CD players were awful: sure they’re awful NOW, but they had a time and a place when they were the coolest thing around.
Similarly, the only reason Flash had “bad performance” on low end devices is because people were using it to do stuff that web tech could not do. It took over a decade for web tech to catch up, and 20 years later we still don’t have tooling that’s as good as Flash was (other than Adobe Animate itself).
Calling it “terrible for video” is completely backwards! Flash became the standard for video on the web for years because everything else was terrible and Flash was the only thing that worked. There’s a reason that YouTube used Flash to play videos for the first ten years.
It’s one of the topics I feel I’m too biased since I spend 10 years as a flash developer. The requests for widgets and or small applications we got where simply impossible to write in a frontend only fashion at the time. And a lot of my peers moved on to work on HTML5 which was pushed hard as the successor at the time. A lot felt like a step back. I moved to native iOS and worked on games in cocoa 2D. I remember that I thought more than once: “This was already solved in flash”. But I think in the end it’s a good thing that we don’t have or need the flash player anymore. I wish only we could have gotten a flash to wasm/webgl compiler or flash to js transpiler.
ActionScript 3 was great and leagues ahead of JavaScript at the time.
Yup, this was my career path as well. I worked professionally as a Flash developer for many years but gradually that became more of an iOS developer role and I made games using Cocos2D etc.
No, I’m talking about at the time. CD players were great at the time, so I don’t really see your analogy. Maybe the closest thing would be those brittle CD jewel cases, those always sucked!
There were cool games, but there still are cool games. And the indie/hacker/homebrew gaming ecosystems are bigger, richer, and more accessible than ever (due in no small part to the web, both as a gaming platform and for learning/community).