But now the web is plagued by javascript doing the same, often even more intensively. Is it better or worse?
Flash had a much more arms-length relationship to the browser and wasn't able to be used as a surveillance tool as effectively as Javascript can be.
The constrained nature of Flash made it less of a threat to an open and standards-based web than Javascript (and more broadly WASM).
Edit: On the last point - Flash wasn't able to boot a virtual x86 in a browser. Obligatory reference: https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Thanks to the ADA, American sites (or sites that do a lot of business with America) must work with assistive technologies, mainly web browsers designed for the blind. Most of those do not run js. So, you cannot design your website so that it doesn't work with js disabled, unless you are willing to expose yourself to massive legal liability. People used to ignore this a lot, but since Domino’s Pizza v. Guillermo Robles, most sites have been fixed so that they are usable without js.
I strongly recommend getting ublock, blocking all js by default, and then whitelisting sites where it is required/useful. It's hard to overstate just how much better it makes browsing in general.
My non-technical friends and family can't do that. Trying to impose that upon them would just frustrate them (and, for my family, increase tech support calls to me).
All my banking and insurance sites are useless w/o Javascript. Squarespace sites, Twitter, Imgur, don't work worth a damn without Javascript. I just gave up and mostly gave Google properties a pass to get Youtube to work. (I don't use Gmail so I have no idea how bad it would be.)
A site better be pretty damned compelling before it rises to the level of getting opened in an unconstrained browser setting. I just end up not opening a lot of stuff (or just closing it again when it lights-up "NoScript").
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamo...
In particular, Robles wanted the court to order Domino's to make their site WCAG-2.0 compliant. WCAG is completely silent on JavaScript. It's possible that some screen readers don't support JavaScript, but if Domino's site used ARIA tags and complied with WCAG the court would almost certainly consider that accessible (there's no official DoJ guidelines on what constitutes accessibility, so the court and businesses have latitude here.)
The ADA is all about reasonable accomodations. Supporting major screen readers is reasonable; supporting all of them clearly isn't. 98% of screen reader users have JS enabled (https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey4/#javascript), so it's clearly reasonable to provide an accessible webapp.
In the more general sense, a strictly online service that has no alternate means of access probably does have at least some responsibility under the ADA.
Flash cookies, anyone?
These were the only mainstream way to keep tabs on you across different browsers.
Flash is an intrinsically more efficient format; it was designed back when 56k modems were the norm, and computers far less powerful, so SWF made use of lots of interesting tricks to squeeze the most of out the platform and be extremely simple to parse.
Those who remember playing Flash games will definitely know just how much computing power they needed --- a fraction of that needed for today's "equivalent" with HTML/CSS/JS.
You will never get close to that level of efficiency with HTML/JS/CSS, although they are certainly trying with things like WASM.
I say this as someone who has implemented a significant part of a SWF player, including parts of the AS2 VM.
JavaScript has holes basically every month too
Well it still may be harder to attack this than Flash, but still...
The only people who could improve the Flash plugin's performance were the people at Adobe working on it. And, well, Adobe just doesn't give two shits about performance of any of their tools unless they absolutely have to.
Adobe approached Apple many times to nail down performance issues and Apple blew them off
The argument has merit that Apple wanted a more precise control over user experience, and badly written Flash apps could disrupt that, but I honestly believe that was a secondary concern compared to protecting their App Store revenue stream.
Edit: I was 9 when Jobs wrote his thing on Flash, so I appreciate the downvotes for asking a question?
https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/swf-fil...
Straight from the horse's mouth, as they say.
There's also a few other implementations, although they found use embedded in games and such instead of being browser plugins.
Besides, there's a lot more to SWF than the scripts.
Lots of badly written flash content would (even on desktop) completely peg a CPU core. And it would do that even when the content wasn't visible (for background tabs, or if you'd scrolled past the ad).
This is bad enough on desktop, worse on a laptop (where you care more about battery and thermals) but it was a disaster on the very low power phones we had at the time. It made the iphone's browser feel extremely janky and unresponsive, and your phone would warm up in your hand. People had no idea that the problem was that "punch the monkey" banner ad they had already scrolled past. The website operator didn't know what ads were being served. Everyone just had a bad time.
Steve Jobs was asked about it in an interview once and he said he'd never seen flash managing to work smoothly on a mobile device. He said if Adobe could show it working well, he'd reconsider. But as far as I could tell, Adobe never rose to the challenge. I think android had flash working for awhile, but they eventually dropped it too. (Probably for the same reason.)
On desktop, I remember having an option in chrome to make flash not play by default. That way flash banner ads just wouldn't get loaded. I imagine they could have done the same for mobile safari - but that sort of thing was never Apple's aesthetic.
Yep. Between the performance issues and interface hangups (touch screen = no cursor = no mouse movement events), Flash for Android was basically unusable for most applications.
Not supporting flash is the basis for the app store
— Steve Jobs, October 10, 2007 (three month after iPhone release) [1].
How long does it takes to create SDK? Jobs is too smart, he carefully creates narrative, he is playing with audience. It is just a show, think Freddie Mercury, I do not understand how anyone can take his words at face value.
[1] https://gizmodo.com/steve-jobs-iphone-sdk-in-dev-hands-febru...
https://web.archive.org/web/20141106212543/http://www.cnet.c...
Of course he hated it, because now everybody is writing software specifically for Apple instead of for the web.
Yes and no. iPhone apps weren't a thing until they were, but there were Brew apps[1], Symbian apps[2], Blackberry apps[3], Palm apps[4], etc.
[1]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_Runtime_Environment_for...
[2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbian
Jobs wanted Flash gone because it was direct competition to the App Store. That's it. There is no other reason.
Jobs could not say that of course, so he used his massive platform to assert that HTML5 was just as good as Flash, and that Flash was "riddled with security holes".
None of it was true, of course, but Jobs had charisma and a massive following of True Believers, and so his frontal assault on a competitor was successful.
An entire industry and platform destroyed so that Apple could not only control what games were played on its platform, but to charge for them
Yes, Flash had security issues, like every platform and program and browser ever, but there was nothing about Flash that was uniquely terrible the way Jobs and his minions asserted
Which is the same reason that Apple allows only their browser engine used by every browser on iOS, has blocked JIT (again, only allowed for their Javascript interpreter), has a neutered implementation of progressive web apps, does not allow alternate app stores or side loading apps.
Control. Money.
It didn’t help it had a lot of security issues and it certainly helped its downfall. IMHO we are better without it and good riddance.