I mean, since we’re talking about it, I am so happy that Flash is dead. It was an absolute nightmare for support, accessibility, security, and open source code. It wasn’t quite as bad as ActiveX, but it was pretty close. Let’s all collectively agree to never implement any technology like Flash into the browser again.

Let me explain the open source code part. Before GCC, C compilers were closed source and expensive. This meant that if you wanted to work on an open source project that was written in C, you had to buy a compiler. That’s the same as Flash. There were open source Flash players, but as far as I know, there were no open source Flash compilers. Just Macromedia/Adobe. So anything open source written in Flash/ActionScript was only accessible to people who could afford the software license. That sucks.

Speaking of accessible, Flash was not. If you were browsing the web with a screen reader, the vast majority of Flash content was completely walled off from you. The accessibility implementation in Flash had to be specifically coded for, unlike HTML, which is relatively accessible by default.

For a while, Flash was the way people embedded video into web pages. This was neat, but again, a nightmare to work on. Flash players required very specific video encodings, so you’d likely have to transcode the video to embed it or at least remux it, and for a while, that wasn’t free. It also meant that a different piece of software was requesting the video as that which requested the page. This could cause some very difficult to track bugs.

Not all systems supported Flash, because why the fuck would Adobe give a shit about Unix? At least there was Linux support for the player, but if you wanted to make Flash content, your choices were Windows or Mac.

Last, but not least, Flash refused to die for a long time, which ultimately held back the industry. For almost a decade, it was very common to have to mux two copies of the exact same streams, just for people who were still clinging to Internet Explorer and Flash. People were really pissed off when websites stopped working when browsers abandoned Flash, but that was the fault of naive web devs who built their sites in a faulty, insecure technology. They didn’t get the blame. The browsers got the blame. And a lot of them kept Flash around well after its development had been discontinued, just for that reason.

Good riddance, Flash.