I never liked Flash, but the browsers were very far behind initially. Animation was slow and stuttering.
At some point the browser vendors started addressing that, and things got better.
But I think the other part of Flash is the tools used to create it - I never understood why they didn't port those to HTML5 and worked with the browser vendors to get kinks ironed out, instead of doubling down on - what was the name - Adobe Air? I think they still had some market power they could have wielded.
Abobe's failure to switch the flash tools to targeting HTML5 is one of the most inexplicable decisions of all time.
In late 2000s they owned the Web App space ( what was called Rich Internet Applications in their speak). Flex (their business GUI components library and markup language) was absolutely dominating corporate Web app development.
And they just abandoned it.
In an alternative reality we are all building HTML5 Web apps with Flex Builder right now.
Sorry I don't understand what is the connection between HTML5 and Flash? Isn't flash an object that runs inside HTML5? What would you like Adobe to have done exactly?
Instead of outputting a flash object file the Flash tools could have output actual HTML.
The Flash Player is, at the end of the day, a proprietary Canvas widget with a ECMAScript based VM powering it. With HTML5 they could have targetted the actual real HTML5 Canvas and completely eliminated the flash player plug in whilst still retaining the tools.
At some point the browser vendors started addressing that, and things got better.
But I think the other part of Flash is the tools used to create it - I never understood why they didn't port those to HTML5 and worked with the browser vendors to get kinks ironed out, instead of doubling down on - what was the name - Adobe Air? I think they still had some market power they could have wielded.