I'm with you on this. Running Flash as a plugin in a browser is not something I want at all. Flash Player was awful.
But...
The Flash editor/IDE was brilliant, and that's something that the web sorely needs. There's a few libraries that can do similar things (eg theatre.js) but they don't do enough. Flash's editor was genuinely easy to use once you'd mastered a few things, and if you remembered to save regularly, and it enabled people to make fantastic games, sites, experiences, etc.
I suspect the lack of a really good animation and interaction design tool is one thing that's lead to the homogenization of the internet.
I still wonder what browsers would be today if adobe had open sourced flash player and worked on making SWF and action scripts standards to be natively integrated in browsers rather than letting the player die as an annoying badly maintained plugin.
Agree - the success of flash was that it was designer-first rather than developer-first (and I miss that!).
Things like theatre.js look great, but very quickly their documentation make it clear that you are expected to use javascript.
Flash expected you to just draw stuff, animate stuff, and if you like there is an optional scripting environment. The first few iterations of flash didn't really even have much of a scripting environment at all (AS1 was incredibly limited!).
I think that is part of the nostalgia of that period - things were so easy to make that you got some really creative and crazy stuff.
But...
The Flash editor/IDE was brilliant, and that's something that the web sorely needs. There's a few libraries that can do similar things (eg theatre.js) but they don't do enough. Flash's editor was genuinely easy to use once you'd mastered a few things, and if you remembered to save regularly, and it enabled people to make fantastic games, sites, experiences, etc.
I suspect the lack of a really good animation and interaction design tool is one thing that's lead to the homogenization of the internet.