This isn't true, you're looking at Flash as a monolith when really it was a bunch of things.
To it's users it was a place many teenagers learned how to be creative with computers, building games and animations and expressing themselves in online communities which had more in common with a proto-youtube/tiktok than what you think of online web games today.
Worth pointing out Adobe didn't care about that part of Flash in the slightest and almost all their dev work post-Macromedia was building systems that community couldn't really understand or see a need to use.
What Adobe saw it as was a video player and a cross platform application tool, but to be honest it just seemed like the team in charge of the cross platform frameworks were just not talented enough to make something at all performant, air/flex UIs always just felt incredibly janky and slow, the Mac team as well just never bothered optimizing Flash on a Mac until Jobs kicked off then suddenly it ran close to Windows speed 2 months later after running literally 30%-60% Windows speed for years.
Jobs was definitely right to kill the latter of what I'm describing but unfortunately the former was collateral damage.
This isn't true, you're looking at Flash as a monolith when really it was a bunch of things.
To it's users it was a place many teenagers learned how to be creative with computers, building games and animations and expressing themselves in online communities which had more in common with a proto-youtube/tiktok than what you think of online web games today.
Worth pointing out Adobe didn't care about that part of Flash in the slightest and almost all their dev work post-Macromedia was building systems that community couldn't really understand or see a need to use.
What Adobe saw it as was a video player and a cross platform application tool, but to be honest it just seemed like the team in charge of the cross platform frameworks were just not talented enough to make something at all performant, air/flex UIs always just felt incredibly janky and slow, the Mac team as well just never bothered optimizing Flash on a Mac until Jobs kicked off then suddenly it ran close to Windows speed 2 months later after running literally 30%-60% Windows speed for years.
Jobs was definitely right to kill the latter of what I'm describing but unfortunately the former was collateral damage.