I'm no Flash apologist, but there was recently a HN thread about CSS-only drop shadows. Many people on fairly modern laptops reported significant slowdowns when it came to scrolling the page, animations, etc. And that was just with drop shadows.

That Nissan example ran pretty clunkily on my laptop and another desktop I checked in the office.

(That said, gradient transparencies always seem to doom Flash pieces to slow-hell for me.)

True -- I didn't say flash is completely useless, just that it's losing territory. There is no structural reason why pure browser rendering should be slower, but indeed some tricks are still slow.

Anyway, the quip with rendering performance is only a matter of time. With every browser release, CSS and HTML rendering performance is increased, for example, by leveraging GPU acceleration.

Flash will be beaten soon, I'm sure. And at least that works for every platform, not just the ones on which Adobe decides it's important.

Platforms Adobe decides are important vs modern or whatever subset of non-MS browsers are capable of handling what you want to do...

I've had a bad day dealing with HTML email newsletters so I'm probably a bit more pessimistic about it than usual, but all sides of working on the web are a serious pain in the arse!

Making things simpler on the net is probably a good thing. I'm worried though about what will happen when the same bad programmers who make mem-leaking and performance consuming flash ads now will jump on the JavaScript train. Flash is in a shell: no messing up the global namespace, no interfering with the rest of the website code.

It has been said before: not Flash is the devil. It's people who program but who have no clue how it's done. They have destroyed the reputation of a not-too-bad platform.