> The amount of brainpower that is wasted on quirky legacy browser behaviour and the lack of consistency between them makes me long for the days where I could position and measure and control with ease and speed as in Flash.

Big AS3 fan here, it is less true today. I accept the fact that, while AS3 and Flash IDEs were exciting technologies to work with ( I worked with cool artists, musicians, video producers on crazy futuristic projects...), The underlying tech was bad, for 2 reasons

- security. this one is obvious.

- closed source tech. Flash is now almost dead since Adobe basically pulled the plug on the IDE and there is nothing AS3 devs can do about it. Yes the compiler is open source, but the player is not.

I made me appreciate the how important open technologies are. They do not solve everything. But they are important.

Frankly, as someone said somewhere else in the thread, Adobe killed Flash, by not opening the plugin's source code, by not trying to make it unnecessary. A lot can be done now with WebGL, C++ compilation can be done with Emscripten , Web APIs now cover a lot of what Flash used to do, and where was Adobe on that ? Edge Animate ? what a joke.

With the fall of Flash there are opportunities though, so that's a good thing. I'm thinking hard about it.

I might say much the same things about web development in general. Twenty, years later I still think its easier to create a desktop application with a remote SQL back-end than a web app for any moderately complex application. Data aware visual components and the like have only pale imitations in html/javascript/css. Things like crystal reports have been ported to the web environment but along the way seem to have lost the convenience they had, where it was possible to add them 3/4 of the way through a project. Now you have to rework 1/2 the back-end code (it not the entire project) to add a package like into the mix.

>Flash is now almost dead since Adobe basically pulled the plug on the IDE and there is nothing AS3 devs can do about it.

Adobe did not "pull the plug on the IDE". It has been renamed to Adobe Animate to reflect its ability to output to multiple platforms (such at HTML5, video AND Flash).

You can still use it to create Flash content, and will continue to be able to do so in the future.

More info here: http://blogs.adobe.com/flashpro/welcome-adobe-animate-cc-a-n...

And we will have a lot of information this week on our twitch channel:

http://www.twitch.tv/adobe

mike (I work for Adobe).

One of the tools has been renamed. The IDE is still alive and growing monthly. I have never used the Adobe tool, since it was time-line oriented and I have never used it in that fashion. Instead I use FlashDevelop, and Intellij. Both great tools for developing in AS3.

>Adobe did not "pull the plug on the IDE".

Flash Builder hasn't had an update in ages.

Totally agree. Rather than getting more enjoyable to work with, things just keep getting more and more fragmented. In some ways that's great, but for developers it means a hodgepodge of frameworks and tools. And things keep fragmenting more and more, new languages, more devices, more types of experience. I was a C++ game developer for many years, and last couple of years I have been using Flash for development. Other than memory management it's a great language. Been developing mobile applications on it as well as 60 fps 3D apps. Come on Adobe, we need you to promote Flash!