Forgive me if you're kidding. Designers and game devs loved Flash, but web devs hate(d) it. The only cool thing about it from a web dev perspective was Actions

Forgive me if you're kidding. Designers and game devs loved Flash, but web devs hate(d) it. The only cool thing about it from a web dev perspective was Actionscript, but this was before Javascript was cool. You could also do long polling with it, but not many people did – anyway, this was really something that game devs loved, not web devs. "Swf" is for ShockWave Flash; swfs are notoriously large. One of the hallmark of Flash files was the ubiquitous loading screen.