With the flash sites i refer to, the back and forward buttons didn't work at all. Slow to load today is nothing like loading a 1 mb flash app over dialup on a 800mhz pentium iii. I mean copy and paste, like back and forward, were not just l 'messed with'... you often couldn't even highlight text. Flash sites were far worse than the average awful HTML site of 2004, and this is why they're now almost totally dead.
Sure, the real problem is the people who made poor decisions and made sites like that in the first place, and still do.
This blame is misplaced. Flash was never designed for full websites and developers at the time knew that perfectly well - nobody was making a design decision to disable the back button.
The reality is just that HTML in those early days was grim - IE and Netscape were making up tags willy-nilly, and any kind of interactivity or media playback was nigh-impossible to achieve without plugins. (Even for static layouts it could be a significant challenge to make things work the same way across browsers and platforms.)
So the result was, for interactive media-driven sites, developers used Flash outside the bounds of what it was meant for, and the back button broke. The alternative wasn't to not break the back button, the alternative was having a big "This site only works in Netscape!" banner, or having no interactivity at all.
Correct, nobody made the design decision to disable the back button - they did it in complete, oblivious disregard.
I'm well aware of what you state and the entire point of my statements is that those decisions were wrong.
The solution I would have preferred to those issues you describe is actually not that at all. It's to make simple, usable sites like the one we are currently on.
As far as what you're saying about intent, i am not so sure that adobe never intended or encouraged flash to be used to make whole websites. I suppose one could research that, but it's beside any point i was making.
> The solution I would have preferred .. to make simple, usable sites like the one we are currently on
Neat, but many companies in 2004 wanted sites that couldn't be made out of styled text - minigames, product configurators, branded media experiences or whatever - and they wanted interactivity more than they wanted the back button to work. If you think they were wrong to do so that's fine, but it hasn't got much to do with Flash.
> I suppose one could research that, but it's beside any point i was making.
Its part of the point I was making - that Flash was originally a technology for inserting interactive animations into web pages, and all the significant usability concerns arose from people using it for more than that, which they did because the alternatives were so lacking. (Of course this put pressure on the alternatives to improve, which is what TFA is all about.)
Sure, the real problem is the people who made poor decisions and made sites like that in the first place, and still do.