Adobe Flash

Flash powered browser games, cartoons, portfolios, menus, loaders, and half the weird internet before HTML5 took the stage.

Flash supplied a shared runtime for work that ranged from small interactive jokes to elaborate games and animated series. Loading screens, buttons, movement, and sound could be assembled into an experience that behaved very differently from an ordinary page of text and links.

That flexibility helped give personal sites and creative communities a distinctive visual language. It also created a preservation challenge: keeping an old page address or media file is not enough when the experience depends on software the browser no longer runs. The end of Flash Player support changed how those works could be revisited.

Security issues, mobile incompatibility, and open web standards made it obsolete.