Actually, I wrote a pretty complex browser-based app in 2002. It ran on Microsoft Explorer as it was the only capable browser at the time, and it used Javascript, XML and XSLT to construct a Windows-like UI environment within the browser -- you may check the code at https://bitbucket.org/BerislavLopac/waexplorer

I used the web 10 years ago, along with a lot of those flash and java applets, and I use the web now, along with a lot of these richly interactive javascript applications, and comparing then with now strikes me as truly ridiculous. The web is hugely more usable now.

There were but probably in-house non public ones. I had a course where the teacher explained how its company was building portable asynchronous desktop-like applications in JS since early 2Ks. Maybe the exception though.

A few examples would come in handy. The only place I can remember using flash and enjoying it was youtube. (And then only because there wasn't a better/standard way of playing videos.)

There were some pretty good multi-user flash games around 1999/2000, when things were just getting going. I can't remember the names though at the moment.

It's only recently that graphics / audio / video / networking in javascript is almost as good as flash/java was 15 years ago!

Sometimes it's easy to think we're on the cutting edge. But we're really not.

I'm sorry but the UX on Flash and Java plugin-based apps was horseshit. They were sluggish and encapsulated clumsily within the plugin sandbox so the integration to the browser was terrible.

Yeah people did some amazing work on those proprietary platform when they were the only game in town, but it really doesn't hold a candle to what we have today in terms of a fully open and native web tech stack. If you want to be reductionist why not just say we haven't been on the bleeding edge since Lisp was invented and declare everything else derivative tripe.

They were faster than browsers were at the time, that's for sure. Especially Flash. At one point no serious design-focussed website worth its salt bothered with HTML because Flash was so much better and easier to author. Heck it's probably still easier to author.

The "open and native web tech stack" is something that evolved messily over a long period of time in a piecemeal fashion with little overall design vision. It's hardly something to be proud of.

And yet the sites that succeeded long-term (Google, Amazon, etc.) didn't use it, while all the sites that consisted of a zillion MB of Flash and Java all went by the wayside.

Maybe design snobbery isn't as important as designers think it is.

And yes, the web is definitely something to be proud of.

There has never been a cross-platform, cross-media, accessible platform like the web in the history of computing or humanity for that matter. It is very much indeed something to be proud of.