The rise and fall of Adobe Flash
Found on Ars Technica on Tuesday, 07 July 2020
Few technologies have yielded such divisive and widespread passion as Flash. Many gush over its versatility and ease of use as a creative platform or its critical role in the rise of web video. Others abhor Flash-based advertising and Web design, or they despise the resource-intensiveness of the Flash Player plugin in its later years.
So even if many of us now scoff at pop-ups asking us to enable Flash or sigh at news of the platform’s involvement in a security issue, when looking back at the platform’s totality it’s not difficult to argue it provided far more good for the Web than bad.
The problem was not the technology itself, but the immense load of bugs it contained which allowed exploiting millions of devices over the years.