Huh, I would have sworn that Internet Explorer had the blink tag at one point, but I think my parents had Netscape and then Mozilla pretty early so maybe that's what I'm confusing it with.

Regardless, I stand by my comment. Monsters! I want my browser to be obnoxious.

IE was holding back the progress even before Chrome and Safari were a thing.

Well technically you can still use Flash via Ruffle, a WebAssembly-based emulator:

https://ruffle.rs/

Sites like Kongregate amd albinoblacksheep are using it to revive their old catalog.

Although Flash really sucked as a technology, it did inspire a lot of visual artistry on the web. Half of the cool stuff you saw on StumbleUpon was made with Flash by people who weren't proficient with JS/CSS, which weren’t capable enough to achieve the same results anyway.

I stand by that Flash was the most fun way to write software, especially games.

It was so satisfying being able to animate something, and immediately have the ability to create code out if it.

I have not found a platform to replace that, though GameMaker gives something of a facsimile.

Good riddance. I once had the honor of being featured together with many other artist on an HP website. It was implemented in Flash though, meaning it existed as a smallish rectangle in the middle of a website; within that rectangle you could click through to browse the exhibition one artwork at a time. This entailed that your path through the Flash app was not connected to the browser's address bar and exhibits did not get a URL of their own. When you wanted to direct others to your piece the only way was by giving them a "Japanese visitor's address", as in "go to this well-known named point (the domain name), from there walk west and when you see a tall black building, turn right and take the third alley to your left, I'm living in the fifth house down that alley".

Plenty to replace it with to afaik.

Really? Flash had been such an absolute pain for me for years, I was so happy when my bank stopped using it so I could uninstall the heck out of it.

This doesn't surprise me, I've seen a lot of cool stuff being done in CSS.

I've never been much of a frontend person, so gluing stuff together with JQuery was kind of my go-to until I was able to abandon the web.

I just kind of feel like removing it makes the internet less fun. 90's internet was basically a playground for geeky people to make things purely for fun, with basically no ambitions of making any money; people would host their own terrible web pages. My first real introduction to "programming" (other than making a turtle walk around) was when I was nine years old and bought "Make Your Own Web Page : A Guide for Kids" from my school, and this was something a nine year old kid could do because the web was easy and fun to program for. There weren't a billion JavaScript frameworks, CSS was new (if it was even supported), everything was done with tags and I loved it.

Yeah, the sites would be ugly and kind of obnoxious, but there was, for want of a better word, a "purity" to it. It was decidedly uncynical; websites weren't being written to satisfy a corporation like they all are now. You had low-res tiling backgrounds, a shitty midi of the X-files theme playing on a bunch of sites, icons bragging about how the website was written in Notepad, and lots and lots of animated GIFs.

I feel like the removal of blink is just a symptom of the web becoming more boring. Instead of everyone making their own website and personalizing it, now there's like ten websites, and they all look like they were designed by a corporation to satisfy shareholders.