Worse. You could use most websites with Flash disabled and get by fine. That's a lot more difficult with Javascript today.

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...

You can use most websites with javascript disabled just fine. In fact, it generally greatly improves your experience.

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.

You don't have to sell me. I've had Javascript disabled by default for a couple of years now. I love it. I'm a technical person. I can handle (and have the patience for) fidgeting with settings to get sites to work.

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").

Since it's relevant, here's a very lightweight javascript toggle I made for Chrome a while back. I still use it every day. No data is sent anywhere, and no unnecessary permissions are required. The code is very simple and easy to validate, in case you're one of those paranoid people like me who insists on looking.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/js-toggle/bnhjfamo...

Domino's vs. Robles doesn't say you can't use JS. no court ever ordered Domino's to do anything, afaict. all they did was affirm that Robles was allowed to sue Domino's under the ADA (without deciding whether their site was in fact accessible or not.) See http://georgemauer.net/2019/11/04/dominos-v-robles.html for a good breakdown of the rulings.

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.

As an aside, I thought that the Domino’s Pizza v. Guillermo Robles decision was strange. Domino's Pizza stores are local brick-and-mortar operations. They all have telephones and take orders by telephone. That to me would seem to be a "reasonable accomodation" for a vision-impared person who could not use the website to order a pizza.

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.

If it was simply a case of ordering over the phone, Dominos would’ve been fine. The problem was that they had “online only” coupons and their website and app weren’t “ADA friendly”. It’s more complicated than it seemed on the surface (like the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit)

"wasn't able to be used as a surveillance tool as effectively as Javascript can be."

Flash cookies, anyone?

These were the only mainstream way to keep tabs on you across different browsers.

Jobs' rant about Flash was really a good example of "shooting the messenger".

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.

No, because JavaScript isn't nearly the bug factory that Flash was. Literally every month there was a new Flash full compromise bug, for multiple years.

Have you ever read the release notes of your browser?

JavaScript has holes basically every month too

Lol read this which was just posted today and makes my claims seem stupid:https://threatpost.com/firefox-chrome-edge-bugs-system-hijac...

Well it still may be harder to attack this than Flash, but still...

It's true that security bugs are being fixed in most Chrome releases. However, these seem to be much more obscure and/or hard to capitalize on compared to the Flash bugs. I admit I don't have a proof of that.

Browsers can attempt to improve Javascript performance because it's an open standard. And 2d rendering performance, and 3d rendering performance, and whatever else.

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.

From what I recall, Apple approached Adobe during development of iPhone to nail down performance/battery concerns of Flash and Adobe basically blew them off.

No. This is untrue. Apple had no intention of working with Adobe. Flash competed with the App Store.

Adobe approached Apple many times to nail down performance issues and Apple blew them off

There was no app store when the iphone launched

The App Store launched on July 10, 2008 one year and a half after the announcement of the iPhone. Previously there had been no 3rd party apps on the iPhone, only Apple-made native apps and 3rd party web apps. In that context, Flash's absence needed to be explained. Nevertheless, it took another 2 years for Jobs to write his screed, "Thoughts on Flash". By that time, Apple was well aware what a cash cow the App Store was

If the app store appeared 1.5 years after the first iPhones, it was already conceived and development well underway when the iPhone launched. I don't have any firsthand knowledge of who blew off whom, but I'd guess it was Apple doing the blowing because that's traditionally what they do.

I'm not sure that Apple intended to exclude Flash from day 1. I imagine there were difficult technical integration issues, never mind any other business interests. But once the App Store was launched and Apple commanded a 30% share of every single application sold on the platform, I cannot imagine why they would allow Flash to give away comparable applications for free.

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.

Mildly better. Flash was more like Java applets than JavaScript. It was its own thing running in the browser.

Better. JavaScript is a web standard.

And flash couldn't have been one?

Edit: I was 9 when Jobs wrote his thing on Flash, so I appreciate the downvotes for asking a question?

Flash was proprietary, didn't have a specification and only one real implementation ever existed.

What is all this BS about it being proprietary...

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.

It was and gnash/lightspark barely worked.

Flash was using actionscript which was ecma262-3/4.

ActionScript only "existed" on the authoring side. Scripts were compiled to (proprietary) bytecode before being embedded in the SWF file.

Besides, there's a lot more to SWF than the scripts.

Probably would not happen under Adobe.

Could have? Sure, if some things broke the right way. Was gonna be? Not that I know of. Did? No.