Obligatory point that Flash didn't fail in the marketplace. Rather, it was wildly popular, so much so that Microsoft eventually felt the need to develop a comparable tech -- Silverlight.
Flash on the web faltered rapidly after many years of efforts by Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and associated individuals. They were looking to move the web 'forward' had a high-profile disagreement with W3C, so they started their own standard-setting collaboration to specify HTML5 and associated JS APIs. The blogosphere eagerly awaited the results, which promised to formally bring multimedia and rich interactivity to HTML, without having to use a vendor plugin.
When Apple announced that Flash won't be supported on the upcoming first iPhone, it was over. After a few years, when apps came to the iPhone, Adobe failed at marketing the fact that their Flash assets can be compiled into iPhone apps using Adobe AIR.
With existing Flash assets effectively relegated to desktop-only, it was only a matter of time before it was pushed out of the standard browser stack. Although later, both Microsoft and Google shipped Adobe's plugin (with better process isolation) together with the browser or the OS, and hooked into their respective auto-updaters, Flash was on its way out.
There is an open source version Gnash. I installed it on a laptop a few years back and it ran fairly well, but a bit slow compared to the real Flash. Why do you think that didn't take off?
Flash on the web faltered rapidly after many years of efforts by Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and associated individuals. They were looking to move the web 'forward' had a high-profile disagreement with W3C, so they started their own standard-setting collaboration to specify HTML5 and associated JS APIs. The blogosphere eagerly awaited the results, which promised to formally bring multimedia and rich interactivity to HTML, without having to use a vendor plugin.
When Apple announced that Flash won't be supported on the upcoming first iPhone, it was over. After a few years, when apps came to the iPhone, Adobe failed at marketing the fact that their Flash assets can be compiled into iPhone apps using Adobe AIR.
With existing Flash assets effectively relegated to desktop-only, it was only a matter of time before it was pushed out of the standard browser stack. Although later, both Microsoft and Google shipped Adobe's plugin (with better process isolation) together with the browser or the OS, and hooked into their respective auto-updaters, Flash was on its way out.