Essay written for Good Internet, a serial zine for hobbyist website crafters
Around the time of a “take your kids to work day” at my dad’s workplace when I was 5, he showed me the website for the company he worked at. It wowed me how flashy and dynamic the site was. It was all Flash. Just one big Flash embed, completely bypassing any need for HTML or the web browser itself, really. This allowed the site to have nicer animations than with just GIFs alone, as well as have sounds and dynamically updating content. It looked like such a cool idea for a site design.
In a way, Flash was like a powerup for the web. It enabled so much more stuff beyond what the web (at the time) could do, while coming on the same delivery mechanism that carried HTML files to you. On top of animations and games, it was also viable for many other multimedia-related purposes. For example, Flash slideshows just worked on the web. PowerPoint slideshows weren’t easily viewable on a web page! Flash was also popular for delivering online course modules and could also be used to build full-on apps. And why not? It could accomplish the WORA (write once, run anywhere) dream that Sun Microsystems was trying to market the Java programming language for, but perhaps better than Java itself, purely because everyone had Flash installed, but not necessarily Java.
Flash was especially compelling because it looked and worked the same regardless of operating system or web browser. While Flash matured, the browser wars raged, with browsers from different vendors offering different features, conflicting interpretations of HTML, and straight-up bugs that affected the appearance of a web page. It was hard to make a site that looked consistent across different browsers, but Flash could resolve all this. Since all these browsers left a hole in the page for Flash content, that meant that no matter the user’s browser, an all-Flash site would be rendered by the exact same Flash Player plugin, so a web designer could know for sure that an all-Flash site would look consistent. That also meant that designers had total control over the typography of the site. They could use a custom font and Flash would render it, so they didn’t have to rely on the user to have that font installed on their system. It would take until the 10s for web fonts to become common; before that, Microsoft’s core fonts for the web were the best designers could hope for.
These benefits of Flash were great and very practical, but they came at a cost that was hard to shake off.
Flash had a lot of security issues. Since it wasn’t part of a browser itself, it was out of reach for browser vendors to do anything about the vulnerabilities. It was entirely up to Macromedia, and later Adobe, to fix them, if they even did. And if so, it was still up to users to download and install the update.
Flash also had performance problems. Merely having the Flash Player exist on a page would consume more CPU than an “idle” and fully loaded web page. This was especially apparent with banner ads, which used Flash for animations and sometimes interactive elements, so your web browsing would be slowed down by the dead weight of your CPU having to do work to render ads you never cared to see.
Unlike the web, Flash was not an open standard. It was controlled by a single company who had all the say in how Flash worked and what systems could have Flash. Macromedia and later Adobe held the keys to the “rich” web. We know with hindsight that having one corporate gatekeeper to what we want is bad for everyone, like it was with Microsoft and Internet Explorer. There were attempts to address this situation, like the Gnash project, which tried to recreate the Flash Player completely from scratch, with fully free code. Otherwise, though, if you were not willing to give in to Macromedia/Adobe’s hegemony over the web, you were relegated to the old, “document” web.
There were also plenty of accessibility issues with Flash. Its powerful design capabilities let irresponsible designers get away with making content that was hard to see and understand, and screen readers often struggled with Flash content. The fact that Flash content completely bypassed the document format of HTML also meant that it was also hard to index and archive Flash-heavy sites.
That site from the company my dad worked at was a performance sucker, used a proprietary program to go around the browser, and excluded a whole chunk of web users without a good reason. They got all those nice effects in, though! That site isn’t even properly viewable anymore, even on the Wayback Machine, because of the poor indexability of Flash content.
In hindsight, the accessibility problems with that site were a bad look for a company that made assistive technologies.