Flash is expected to be dead in two years

From The Verge:

If you've been waiting for the glorious day when the plague on humanity that is Adobe Flash will cease to exist, we now know when it'll happen. According to the 2016 global media format report published by Encoding.com, Flash only made up six percent of mobile and web video in 2015, down from 21 percent in 2014. The company believes Flash will be completely gone within the next two years.

In  a previous life, when I was still a programmer, a hotshot animator/"multimedia artist" (that was an actual title in his resume, this was the early 2000's you see), came to the office and peddled the idea of converting our entire web site (for big media company with a dot-com portal play) to Flash. We can now say with perfect hindsight that this was a Terrible Idea, that Flash was somehow structurally flawed and doomed from the start. But I remember it being a much closer call. The Web was a different place back then. The artist were tired of the ham-fisted way their visions had to be translated into HTML. Our UI guys were frustrated with how the most basic interface refinements could not be implemented consistently across platforms. Marketing naturally wanted "Interactivity!" and "Rich Content!" up the wazoo. And the biggest brands where getting in on the action.

In the end, the engineers were able to convince management to vote down the idea, or at least look before leaping. We played around with Flash, tried to keep an open mind (a couple of splash pages, menus here and there), but realized the Faustian bargain it represented. Flash had a lot of problems then and now, most of them springing from a deep divergence from fundamental properties of the Web.

Of course,  the way I phrased the problem at that time wasn't philosophical: building the web around opaque executable objects that cannot be parsed isn't sustainable. Programmers won't be able to build on it over the long run. Can you imagine Web 2.0, the social web, the shareable web, rising from a Flash-based web?