IIRC the timeline was something like this: macromedia bought flash from another company and changed its name to flash and released it around 1997. At the time i

IIRC the timeline was something like this: macromedia bought flash from another company and changed its name to flash and released it around 1997. At the time it was merely capable of doing vector animations (no chance to spawn kongregate out of it, if spawning kongregate can be considered a good thing or not is another debate). Work on an open standard for vector graphics and animation started in 1998 (svg and smil) and due to the nature of the process took time. By the time the specification was mature in 2001 and 1999 flash had gone through a few major versions and had just started including the first version of scripting (still no kongregate possible at this point). Flash got another major release introducing actionscript 2 in 2004 and after being bought by adobe got its 9th major version with actionscript 3 in 2007 (and there we have kongregate). 4 years later support for the first version of the open standard equivalent was still incomplete in browsers, 10 years after the specification was mature. Could it be that it was not a priority for them as there was flash filling this market ? In the mean time flash had added support for video, of which the open standard equivalent specification took a while then took another while before browsers implemented it (once again, could it be related to fact that flash already filled this market ?) The other point to note is that flash from version 1 came with a GUI animation editor with a slight learning curve, while the open standard required to code, something most graphic designers do not care to learn. This also played a part in flash popularity despite being proprietary, being a resource hog, a major security issue and a serious privacy concern. IMHO had flash not existed, the open standard would have been given a higher priority and better authoring tools may have seen the light of the day. So as we saw, kongregate could not have existed with flash either at the time, and by the time kongregate launched, flash has had 10 years of existence and the better half of dominating the market preventing the emergence of the web technology that would have made a non-flash kongregate possible. And as we see now in 2017, the closed and proprietary flash is once again on the way out and with it about 20 years of web history are gonna disappear and kongregate is now switching to pure web technology, though it could have been done a few years back it only happened now that flash has been officially deprecated on all platforms. Nothing that we weren't repeatedly warned about for maybe 15 years now.