Despite all the complaining, the situation today is a vast improvement over the internet ca. 2000 or so. Just a few points:
- There are four different browser engines, but no website ever asks you to install a different one (except some Google Cloud stuff tsktsktsk)
- You can develop a complex javascript application and, at the very end, discover that it works in all browsers.
- You can develop a complex javascript application
- seriously, this point needs repetition. In the past I'd spend more than half of the time trying to get something working at least in both firefox and IE, with the fix for A frequently braking B...
- websites cannot open 100 popups, maximise the window etc.
- almost all websites are usable on screens of every size (flash liked to insist on, for example, 800x600. which almost never was the right size)
- Even worse than Flash: Java Applets, Active-X. Seeing a Swing UI today is like a reunion with your childhood tormentor after you've succeeded in life and he has three marriages and a stint in jail behind him: you still have vivid memories of the pain, but it can no longer hurt you.
- Most important: Flash broke everything that makes the web a web. It was simply a delivery platform for binaries with URIs. No links, no way to spider content, access limited to the select platforms Adobe felt like supporting etc.
- Netscape, IE, Opera.. Firefox started to emerge around that time too.
- The javascript complexity that can run in browsers is an achievement. Relatively speaking, flash was the one runtime Java promised to be, and Java applets however clunky looking back were as futuristic as today's tools are in some use cases.
- Responsive flash apps were perfectly possible if you wanted. Most never learnt that though. That resolution was painful tho.
- Ajax apps are the original JavaScript apps. It was possible to build desktop apps in the browser just fine. 1999, Outlook web app was one of the first complex JavaScript apps in 2000.
- Flash also developed the ability to index content. Same flaw though can exist in js apps too.
I don't want to guess how much of the stuff you wrote about you have used, but those were my experiences in that time. A lot of bleeding edge stuff much like today. I'd still take today though because there's so many more folks online.
It does feel like there has been a lot of constant reinvention and a loss of forward progress. We just keep rebuilding browsers, flash as webassembly, and no shortage of frameworks to extend programming languages to the web, and recreating libraries. I like choice and being a polyglot as much as the next person but at a certain point it seems like our tools are getting broader instead of deeper.
Flash was far from perfect but probably could have stuck around for a few more years while the future of progressive apps matured. They never really got their security game together, but flash lite powered graphical guis on more mobile phones than anyone knew and it was possibly a threat to iOS as no other rich experience existed in mobile.
Instead we all had to wait painfully for JavaScript apps to mature to what flash could do 10 years ago with flex and air (although I wasnt a fan of either they laid a lot of ground work for the rich internet application space.)
Granted it probably helped push things along that flash wasn't around as a crutch...
Some would argue developing mobile and js apps as as painful in the past 5 years as web dev was in the 90s.
I'm just pleased to see the ubiquity and js apps on any medium continue to converge. Hope the high level tooling is coming next to create a whole new segment of beginners.
I readily agree that Flash was horrible, but none of the things you mentioned has improved with the demise of Flash, at all.