Pulling out of mobile, which is the present and future, hints a little at Adobe's focus now. Flash seems to have lost with mobile and now Flex being pulled, how long before desktop is EOL or sunsetted?
Flash 11 and Stage3D seemed a promising alternative to WebGL or competitive player, which will they choose there? Google had O3D and chose WebGL. But Flash would have supported IE and Unity and Unreal have committed to exporting to it since it is a low level and compiled render engine, it may be faster than WebGL with just javascript for some time or more steady across all browsers like Unity. Anyways, lots of questions on Adobe's direction... standards or not? and which ones?
Flash 11 and Stage3D aren't just a promising alternative to WebGL: they're the only viable alternative. WebGL only works in Firefox and Chrome (50% of the market) and, further, half of the Firefox and Chrome users don't have modern or secure enough GPUs or drivers to use WebGL.
Said plainly, WebGL only hits 1/4 of the desktop market. Stage3D/AGAL, on the other hand, are well designed and have an automatic software fallback. It will work on every machine, with one of the fastest software renderers known to me (I believe it's SwiftShader, please respond if you know more).
I really hope Flash 11 doesn't go away anytime soon because WebGL just isn't ready for ubiquity.
> half of the Firefox and Chrome users don't have modern or secure enough GPUs or drivers to use WebGL
Fixed with current Firefox, as far as I know. The first release of Firefox with WebGL had an awful whitelist/blacklist system for video drivers, primarily due to them crashing when asked to do relatively basic initialization and operations. Now, Firefox has a sensible probing mechanism for video drivers, and as a result, almost any modern video driver will work just fine. (Certainly anything new enough to run OpenGL 2.0, which means all the graphics chipsets sold today, and those sold in the last few years.) Intel, ATI, and nVidia chipsets all work just fine; those represent the vast majority of the market at this point.
(Also, if a user's graphics drivers don't provide enough stability or security to work with WebGL, Flash won't improve that situation either.)
As for browser support, right now it works in released versions of Firefox and Chrome, and preview versions of Opera and desktop Safari. iOS 5 supports WebGL for iAds, and web content will likely follow soon; people have already figured out how to make it work using private APIs. As far as I know, current Android releases support WebGL as well. So, as usual, that just leaves Internet Explorer. (And even IE users have several possible alternatives, quite apart from upgrading to a better browser: plugins like IEWebGL, Chrome Frame, and even some attempts to use Java or Flash as a fallback.)
So, while WebGL support does need a bit more time to become sufficiently widespread, it seems likely to do so in the near future.
You missed my point entirely. Even if Flash has the same blacklist as Firefox/Chrome, it has a high-performance software implementation, meaning you can hit the entire market with Flash 11. Until IE gets WebGL, everyone out there updates their drivers, and the Intel GMA950 is no longer the top video card, WebGL just isn't ubiquitous enough.
That said, SwiftShader also features an OpenGL ES 2.0 API, making it highly suitable for WebGL implementations as well. In fact Google is currently in the process of integrating SwiftShader support into Chrome (http://codereview.chromium.org/8480015/).
If Stage3D is stillborn, I won't know how to react. As an old OpenGL guy with no Flash experience, I'd personally much prefer to work in WebGL and JS (or even better, NaCl). But, it was looking like Stage3D was going to win. I was expecting WebGL to be the right "open standards" choice, but Stage3D would have better compatibility and security in practice.
Also, with Unreal running on Flash, it's become clear that Alchemy has quietly matured into something serious. I was expecting to see everyone argue endlessly about NaCl's "open standards" issues while watching Alchemy charge ahead to take over without asking for anyone's backing.
Flash 11 and Stage3D seemed a promising alternative to WebGL or competitive player, which will they choose there? Google had O3D and chose WebGL. But Flash would have supported IE and Unity and Unreal have committed to exporting to it since it is a low level and compiled render engine, it may be faster than WebGL with just javascript for some time or more steady across all browsers like Unity. Anyways, lots of questions on Adobe's direction... standards or not? and which ones?