content: Short answer:  It's obsolete. Rambling answer:  In my opinion, Flash used to be cool.  It allowed you to build a website that would look the same on all browsers when that was not an easy task.  The only problem (for the user) was that the player had to be installed.  Once ActionScript 3 came out, I found it pretty fun. Then, when the iPhone launched and Apple said they would not support Flash, it was predicted that Flash would die in the next few years.  And soon, web standards improved (HTML5 and CSS3), making it much easier for developers to create graphics-rich, cross-platform applications without needing users to install Flash or Java.  At this point, Flash no longer offered anything unique, but I seam to remember reading about a few security flaws with it over the years. Now as far as I can see, there's no good reason to use Flash anymore.  Since it was so popular for media players, games and banner ads, I guess it's just taking a while to phase out.