If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell. The optics of history seem to be blurring how bad it was. Yes, you could do some cool and fun things at a very affordable way, but it was a security nightmare as people were trying to do much more complicated things that sprite animations. Rose tinted glasses of an old piece of tech than one has fond memories of is clouding judgment I'd say.
> If Macromedia had a handle on it, it would not have been the dumpster fire it was when Adobe bought it. Flash was buggy as hell.
No matter who owned it, Flash was a security nightmare throughout its existence, just as ActiveX and Java applets were.
The key thing is, these things were created in a time when there were far less bad actors on the Internet - not just because finding an actually working version of IDA was a challenge in itself but also because the financial aspect motivating bad actors these days (i.e. botnets, crypto malware) just wasn't existing or at least was sorta confined to nation-state actors. Plugin vendors could get away with an awful lot of utter bullshit back in the early '00s.
less rose tinted glasses and more the insanity of people entrusting logins and security to flash player to start with, or even adobe for adding that in. Yknow. if it was riddled with bugs and all that, you might avoid such a thing, for say, a banking page. Macromedia designed flash to be a web based animation system, not a full web stack. The very fact that these things were attempted is insane enough, and whats worse is the people who were surprised when it came crashing down.
all this talk about security and flash's being bad at it, and you forget what flash really was for. It wasn't for blaring ads (you can do that without flash) and it wasn't for secure logins
anyone who did use it for those was a money maker or a madman.
