The thing I love so much about this visual history of Flash is that it really gets across the fact that the modern world we inherit is NOT the one inevitable possibility. Internet hstory could have taken a different course...

http://www.flashgamehistory.com/ 

Even if flash hadn't existed, or had died earlier, what we've got now is content distribution pipeline defined entirely around a) programmers and b) commercial platforms

The genius of flash was two things:

1) An easy-to-use, genuinely good* animation tool, with a timeline, multimedia support, and nice crisp vector graphics

2) A really simple distribution format. Stick a SWF on a website. Wrap it in some HTML if you feel fancy.

*enough

These two things meant:

1) Dorks like me who sucked at coding at the time could actually make interactive stuff

2) You put it up there and it was EVERYWHERE. You could email your aunt a website link and she could see your thing.

REVOLUTIONARY

Despite all the HTML5 hype from a decade ago talking about how Flash had to die because it was fundamentally flawed and that HTML5 could reproduce everything -- it never arrived.

HTML5 is fine, but it's almost always a big stack of programmer-first fiddly dependencies at best.

Like, even in it's simplest form you've got multiple files you have to coordinate just to upload the simplest thing. Even "vanilla" you've got floating JS files, html content, css, and an assets folder.

SWF was one big simple blob.

And don't tell me HTML5 is more efficient in principle because we all know how bloated absolutely everything has gotten in that regard.

Strong Bad Email #1 is 105 KB!!!!!

Now it's a giant compressed video on youtube that's bigger and of lower quality:

Imagine a world where say Macromedia open sourced the tool or something, and we addressed all the security/battery issues, and the AppStoreification of mobile devices never took off.

Imagine a world where you had an artist-friendly tool, with universal deployment potential

That world was not impossible! This world was not inevitable!

But it's the one we got.

The commons were enclosed, and now we all get to pay rent to the landlords, and on their terms.

Like, all of us who miss flash don't miss Adobe, or everything that sucked about Flash. We miss the freedom it represented.

To bring the magic back, three ingredients are necessary:

1) A high-quality, STABLE, artist-first tool
2) A simple way to share that content, preferably by uploading a single file to a server somewhere
3) An open internet you can share it on

HTML5 brought us... none of this?

HTML5:

1) Took years to converge to the point where it actually renders mostly the same on all browsers

2) Has made deploying web-based complicated MORE complicated and consume MORE resources

3) It didn't hurt the open internet directly but it didn't save it either

By the time HTML5 got its act together to be a mostly non-jokey way to deploy content equivalent to Flash at about 10x the labor cost, Apple had plenty of time to push the app-first model through and get those guard rails up tight