Flash tried to be everything to everyone.
While it did some things very well (like those amazing little games), it did other things very poorly (like information websites and accessibility).
- Every page had its own navigation style.
- Every page had its own font which you could not change. Remember the trend with 8px bitmap-like fonts where you used a special setting so they would render very sharp?
- Every page had its own scrolling style. Want to use the mouse wheel? Nope.
- Caret navigation for the impaired or people who prefer keyboard navigation? Forget about it.
- Stop sound? Only if we give you a button for that.
- Here's our looping video intro, you must watch it before accessing this website.
- Deep hyperlink to the next "page"? That came very very late. A bit too late for Flash.
- View on mobile? Even if you had the plugin somehow installed (some people did back in the day on Android) pages would still be unusable.
- An error has occurred within this SWF blob, good luck debugging.
- Later came the exploits.
I was a fan for a while and used it since Macromedia Flash 4, but I'm glad it's dead and buried. It was poor tech which subverted progress in the HTML/CSS/JS space for many years.
I would also add to that list the awful CPU usage of Flash, every time you had a page with Flash opening, the fan would start to spin and your computer just became very slow...
- Every page had its own navigation style.
- Every page had its own font which you could not change. Remember the trend with 8px bitmap-like fonts where you used a special setting so they would render very sharp?
- Every page had its own scrolling style. Want to use the mouse wheel? Nope.
- Caret navigation for the impaired or people who prefer keyboard navigation? Forget about it.
- Stop sound? Only if we give you a button for that.
- Here's our looping video intro, you must watch it before accessing this website.
- Deep hyperlink to the next "page"? That came very very late. A bit too late for Flash.
- View on mobile? Even if you had the plugin somehow installed (some people did back in the day on Android) pages would still be unusable.
- An error has occurred within this SWF blob, good luck debugging.
- Later came the exploits.
I was a fan for a while and used it since Macromedia Flash 4, but I'm glad it's dead and buried. It was poor tech which subverted progress in the HTML/CSS/JS space for many years.