And the user experience was incredibly different. For me personally, when I went to a website that used Shockwave I would reach for the back button because it r

And the user experience was incredibly different. For me personally, when I went to a website that used Shockwave I would reach for the back button because it rarely worked on my machine, similar to RealMedia player and Java applets. Regarding Java applets, I was tasked with fixing one Windows machine in a university computer lab that simply would not load a Java applet. All the machines in the lab were cloned from the same image and I was the resident Java expert. For the life of me I could not get that machine to load the Java applet - I spent an entire day on it. Flash always seemed to work and load fast which likely had some role in it getting mass adoption.