Some of you might remember when a 3mb flash animation could pack in some 5 minutes of animation, with the more advanced ones even having chapter/scene selectors, which could also include clickable easter eggs and other kinds of interactions during the scenes.
Idk how old you are but it feels like you’re just looking up dates without really understanding what it was like.
I did flash animation.
I am a developer (I prefer backend but we all have to do some web).
I was an adult during that time.
The textbook dates don’t tell the story. I’m telling you that flash died long before support ended. I’m telling you that replacement tools didn’t exist yet. I’m telling you that getting flash artists to try to animation using JavaScript was not feasible. It’s crazy to me that you think that the existence of a basic canvas support means that artists had an realistic path to making their art.
Smartphones weren’t the main platform for flash, and that’s why it died early.
You’ve got a skewed view of what flash was used to animate. People made absolutely beautiful flash. Just like all art, there is good and bad. Flash made it accessible enough that bad amateurs could produce reasonable animations.
Rasterized video was not better. What a crazy thing to say.
Personal websites? You think that people mostly consumed flash animation and games from personal websites??? Where did you get this from?
It feels like you’re reading this from a timeline of major events instead of having lived it.