That sounds like a big deal until you realize that nothing was private back then. Most internet traffic wasn't even over SSL. It wasn't enforced until 2018! N

That sounds like a big deal until you realize that nothing was private back then. Most internet traffic wasn't even over SSL. It wasn't enforced until 2018! No CORS (first standardized in 2014), no cross-site protection (first standardized in 2012). Everything was the Wild West. Flash was fine and could have adopted the same mechanisms. If Adobe (or the earlier owners) had open sourced the player and the format standard, they could have won and had the best authoring tool for the format. To this day, Flash is the only downloadable binary bundle format that can still run on your PC after being downloaded. You can't download and SVG animation. It's a bundle of brittle web tech slop.