#and when I was a child I was absolutely a neopets addict and am on Subeta TO THIS DAY

[antheraea]

Flash Was Killed Because It Was Objectively Dangerous

I get it, I get the Flash nostalgia and the fondness for old Flash games. I was big on Neopets before they decided to ruin the art and make all the pets samey paper dolls to play dressup with (completely ruining the point of the far more expensive "redraw" colors like Mutant and Faerie and Desert). I have fond memories of Newgrounds games and I even managed to take a class for a semester in high school where I could learn flash.

But I also remember how terrible it was. And you should too.

Leaving aside all of the issues involving performance and inaccessibility (such as being easily broken by bog-standard browser actions like the back button, and its ability to modify web code AND OS code in real time likely broke a lot of accessibility tech too), Flash was legitimately one of the most dangerous web technologies for the end user. An end-user is you, or more specifically back then, child-you.

According to Wikipedia and its sources, Flash Player has over a thousand vulnerabilities known and listed and over 800 of these lead to arbitrary code execution.

What is arbitrary code execution? That's when someone can just run any commands they want on a machine or program that didn't intend it. A fun way to see this is in this infamous Pokemon tool-assisted speedrun where they manage to get an SNES to show the host's twitch chat in real time. It's not so fun though when it's someone stealing all the files on your computer, grabbing your credentials so they could clean out your Neopets account (yes, really, it was a pretty common concern at the time), and other nefarious works. Also, there was a time where it allowed people to spy on you with your webcam and microphone.

Oh and on top of all of this, Flash had its own "flash cookies", which could not be cleared by ordinary means and thus could be used to track users indefinitely, at least until Adobe slapped a bandaid over it by introducing yet another screen an ordinary person wouldn't know to use. (I assume this is how the infamous neopets "cookie grabbers" worked, so they could get into your account. This is mainly what I remember about using Flash back in the early 2000s lol) So it not only was a "stranger taking over your machine" concern, but a bog-standard privacy concern too, arguably a precursor to our current panopticon internet landscape, where greedy websites would track you because they could and maybe get some money out of it, facilitated by this technology.

When Apple decided to block it, it wasn't out of greed; Steve Jobs cited its abysmal performance and security record, among other issues such as an inherent lack of touchscreen support, and Apple cited specific vulnerability use-cases when blocking specific versions before they nuked it entirely. When Mozilla, who makes Firefox, decided to block it, it's not like they would've gotten money out of doing so, or by offering an alternative; they did so because it is fucking dangerous.

Your ire and nostalgia is misplaced. Flash was not killed by our current shitty web practices that ruin unique spaces and fun games. Flash was killed because both Macromedia (its original developers) and Adobe were incapable of making it safe, if that was even possible, and it was killed after third-parties, in an unprecedented gesture, collectively threw their hands up and said enough.

Well, that and HTML5 being developed and becoming more widespread, being able to do everything Flash can do without being a pox on technology. One could argue that you should bemoan the lack of Flash-to-HTML5 conversion efforts, but that requires asking a lot of effort of people who would have to do that shit for free...and if they have to run Flash to do so, opening themselves up to some of the nastiest exploits on the internet.

Nostalgia is a fucking liar. The games themselves I think are worth having nostalgia over (look, I still find myself pining for that one bullet hell Neopets made and Hannah and the Pirate Caves), but Flash itself deserves none of that, and absolutely deserved to be put in the fucking ground. You're blaming the wrong causes. It was terrible.

(specifics and sources found via its wikipedia page, which has a lot more than is mentioned here. and also my own opinions and experiences back then. lol)