Ian, thank you very much for taking the time to give such a well thought out response, really appreciate it. Yes, you are correct, trying to defend Flash by today's standards is a lost battle.
One of the problems with something like Flash is you get all the stuff loaded into the player that you talked about. You can't choose to not load everything. Do you need native desktop integration on a website? Unlikely. For the other things you mentioned, the browser actually has access to most of them.
Yes-ish. At that time Flash had most of the "cool" stuff modern browsers have. If you look at the file size of Chrome 4 (from 2009) it was 11mb. Firefox 18 (from 2013) was 19mb. If you add 20mb for the flash plugin for all those instructions (ex: video/audio playback, or live streaming), you end up with something that resembles today's browsers like Chrome 68 which is 49mb. (i might be mistaken about this tho)
TL;DR - All the things you mentioned like SEO, accessibility, screen readers, are correct. Flash was terrible at them and many other things. What I'm trying to convey is that Flash has been around for more than 20years. It paved the way for numerous platforms we take for granted today. Labeling it all bad would be a terrible thing to all those features it paved the way for.
Ian, thank you very much for taking the time to give such a well thought out response, really appreciate it. Yes, you are correct, trying to defend Flash by today's standards is a lost battle.
Yes-ish. At that time Flash had most of the "cool" stuff modern browsers have. If you look at the file size of Chrome 4 (from 2009) it was 11mb. Firefox 18 (from 2013) was 19mb. If you add 20mb for the flash plugin for all those instructions (ex: video/audio playback, or live streaming), you end up with something that resembles today's browsers like Chrome 68 which is 49mb. (i might be mistaken about this tho)
TL;DR - All the things you mentioned like SEO, accessibility, screen readers, are correct. Flash was terrible at them and many other things. What I'm trying to convey is that Flash has been around for more than 20years. It paved the way for numerous platforms we take for granted today. Labeling it all bad would be a terrible thing to all those features it paved the way for.