> although the Flash player/plugin was a resource hog
And yet, it was really lightweight compared to what we have now. If you have a webpage or game on the level of what Flash typically did, expect tens of MB of downloads, more than 100MB of RAM usage, and choppy animation on anything but a high-end PC. Flash was a resource hog in the early 2000s, when people still had dial-up modems, single core sub-GHz CPUs, mechanical hard drives, RAM in the 100s of MB,...
Performance of the "modern web" is abysmal for the computing power of modern devices.
Also, with the loss of Flash, we lost most of the vector graphics that was typical of that era. It was, in a sense more, modern than what came after since vector graphics work really well on the high-resolution displays we have now. Vector graphics on the web are timidly making a comeback, on websites with many times the resource requirements of what was typical for Flash.
No, it deserved to be opened and have its accessibility improved. These were totally fixable problems and Adobe fucked up by not addressing them. Like the vulnerabilities, they were just a result of developers dropping the ball on bug fixes, not a flaw of the tech itself.
We wasted a good decade rebuilding things from ground up with what became the web stack, including many of the bad things we blamed Flash for, like intrusive ads and DRM. And along the way, we lost some of best parts, like the authoring tools, and we dragged a lot of bloat too.
And yet, it was really lightweight compared to what we have now. If you have a webpage or game on the level of what Flash typically did, expect tens of MB of downloads, more than 100MB of RAM usage, and choppy animation on anything but a high-end PC. Flash was a resource hog in the early 2000s, when people still had dial-up modems, single core sub-GHz CPUs, mechanical hard drives, RAM in the 100s of MB,...
Performance of the "modern web" is abysmal for the computing power of modern devices.
Also, with the loss of Flash, we lost most of the vector graphics that was typical of that era. It was, in a sense more, modern than what came after since vector graphics work really well on the high-resolution displays we have now. Vector graphics on the web are timidly making a comeback, on websites with many times the resource requirements of what was typical for Flash.