Unfortunately, you are just about to enter an era where websites are going to start using Flash for a whole lot more than serving adverts - go check out what Adobe/Macromedia are up to, and you can see that Flash is being touted as the solution to a lot of web app development problems.

i.e. Flex, which lets you build an application in a similar way to XCode (traditional event driven OO GUI) and then deploy with Flash as the client.

Of course this is what Java applets was supposed to provide but history has worked out such that more people have Flash than even have IE.