I think you’re viewing that era with significantly rose tinted glasses. Yes, people were using that Flash for that but it came at a great expense. Flash was a

I think you’re viewing that era with significantly rose tinted glasses. Yes, people were using that Flash for that but it came at a great expense. Flash was a massive battery drain, and to get better performance it required punching massive security holes in the browsers. Flash is only really great as a content creator/developer who doesn’t care about the specifics of delivery. But it would have phased out anyway regardless of the iPhone. HLS would have killed it for streaming video, advancing JavaScript and web standards would have killed it for more advanced websites. The only thing we took a step back on was web game delivery.