We will eventually come to terms with the fact that Flash was 15 years ahead of everything else on multiple fronts and we ought to have been just chastised the terrible developers doing awful and horrendous things with pretty technically sound software.
HTML5 _still_ isn't able to deliver the quality interactive experiences (Games) without applying a lot more effort. Even "simple" things like cross-browser low-latency sound effects are still difficult.
Flash presents a single platform with a single vendor that can innovate as quickly as they like. The web platform is inevitably cumbersome and slow in comparison -- over a decade later they're still playing catch-up.
I'm looking forward to WebGL ads that eat battery life with excessive shaders.
As a strong supporter of open source, doing a comparative analysis of HTML5 and Flash, I have to admit that private enterprise was able to kick the ball forward so much faster here ...
I remember watching a vector animation version of a "tell-tale heart" in flash in 1998. On a 28.8 connection it played smoothly full-screen on a 120mhz pentium with 16mb of ram. I remember clicking the play button and having it just miraculously starting to play without any wait, streaming down and uncompressing in real time. I was floored by it. 12 years later I was invited to watch a spiderman animation demo using HTML5 ... there was a 30 second load time, the framerate was probably 1fps, the audio didn't work, the content didn't render properly ...
It's like how Microsoft was able to pull off nearly everything we could do today by shoe-horning their activeX technology into ie3. Just load a bunch of cab files and drop them into the page like OLE components and bam, you got just about everything. The interactivity could bootstrap - that is, not need any extra plugin and you could engage with the other content on the site using vbscript or javascript interfaces in a two-way manner. It was pretty nice.
Netscape retorted with their JVM integration but it just wasn't the same ...
For all the problems Flash had, one problem it didn't have was a lack of mature tooling (compared to its alternatives at any given point in time). A lack of tooling makes making HTML 5 games very difficult, the abstraction layers that existed for Flash don't for HTML 5, at least not to the same level. Even if HTML 5 were capable of precisely the same level of performance, or better, as Flash today it would still be some time before the experience of a content creator reached parity with what already existed for Flash.
At no point has the debate between Flash and HTML 5 content ever included "Content creators will have an easier time with HTML 5". It's an ecosystem that has to develop over time, and HTML 5 the content platform has only approached feature parity with Flash in the past couple of years.
I'm glad you pointed this out. My roommate's career was a flash developer and his primary skills were animation and graphic design. He spent hours doing that and got me to help out with the few numerical/mathematical tasks he needed to fill-in.
I was a dork and overacted to his use of 100% global variables, etc. He gracefully tried to use Flash's OO to appease me and improve himself, but really he got quite far in life doing graphics and even basic database access in Flash.
I think the tooling might be the point where HTML5/JS (h5js?) becomes divergent. Think about it: making a flash-like editor for HTML5 requires an investment in time and different groups/companies will want to do it differently... Then, they'll start to add tiny features to push their implementation over the time and poof~ towerofbabel.jpg.
I place very strong bets that Adobe will create a dominant tool here. It will be nearly identical to flash but emit all the new fangled html5 asm.js stuff instead - in some nice tight drop-in way ... like
<div id="container">
<script src="//ad.be/UNIQID"></script>
</div>
Where ad.be is a "cloud" service you pay $xx/month to "host" your "app" for you. Essentially you make the thing, it saves to the cloud, generates your uniqid, and you put it in a container. They keep the source file and can continually regenerate the js as their "engine" improves and browser tech moves forward. It's a future-proof plugin-less flash with a large existing user and customer base.
If that's the flow, Adobe might as well just start minting money.
How would that have fixed Flash’s horrible CPU cost, chronic security vulnerabilities, awful touch support, or constant prone to crashing, even in the hands of competent developers?
Performance-wise flash wasn't that bad on Windows. Probably because Adobe put in a decade's worth more engineering into Windows than Mac. And of course they were caught off guard by the iPhone, like the rest of the industry.
