In my experience, the folks who are most vocally anti-Flash have never written a line of code in their life. I've never seen a reasonable justification for the amount of hate it receives. If anything, Flash deserves high praise for playing such a key role in the evolution of a media rich internet, despite its flaws.

I don't think the haters realize how good it actually is compared to the historical alternatives. It makes me physically ill to think of a universe where RealVideo became the dominant format for streaming media.

Is that Flash's fault? No, of course not. Lazy programmer/graphics artist who didn't bother to streamline their code.

Flash lost the PR war. It's done. At least for the masses.

  > I've never seen a reasonable justification for the amount
  > of hate it receives.

  > I don't think the haters realize how good it actually
  > is compared to the historical alternatives.

Re: second point, I disagree. Being better than alternatives makes something very good--better than everything else in fact. What you're saying is good is actually some kind of fairy tale perfect that doesn't exist and never will.

I mean, hey, use whatever you want, but have you ever written a flash application? And if so, what are the key problems?

Want to middle click a link? You can't, it's Flash.

Want to run a spellcheck on that textbox? You can't, it's Flash.

Want to search the text? You can't, it's Flash.

Want to increase the text size (with reflowing)? You can't, it's Flash.

Want to use a screen reader? You can't, it's Flash.

Want to link to a particular page? You can't, it's Flash¹.

(And this is not even talking about more geeky stuff like Greasemonkey, blocking code without blocking text and images, etc)

Sure, there weren't any real alternatives for advanced stuff like animations. But you know what? It would have been better to have no way to do that stuff if it kept all the stuff that could already be done with HTML/CSS in those technologies.

¹ Yes, I know this and probably other issues can be fixed if only developers do such and such. That's irrelevant. I know, you know, and Adobe definitively knows that bad developers are everywhere, and Flash makes it a pain to do basic stuff that comes by default in standard web tech, therefore making sure we would be flooded with broken apps.

I think it was clear that Flash was going down years ago, but the fact that they've decided to drop support for the fastest growing computing segment should solidify the fact that everybody needs to move away.

HTML5 is pretty sucky in places but has the backing of several big players, it's open and works well on pretty much all platforms and it's being actively worked on. If Google, Mozilla and Apple give up, we just take the software and move on. Is there a downside to this scenario that I am missing?

And also, the way flash handles making animations and anti-aliasing almost makes my very non-artistic feel somewhat versatile when tackling those things.

Not in my experience. I've recently finished writing a fairly large and reasonably complex HTML5 app and getting it to work across standards compliant browsers Chrome/Firefox/Safari has been absolutely painless. In over 6 months of development I have (without exaggeration) spent no more than 8 hours fixing cross browser issues and this includes cutting edge and vendor prefixed stuff.

I think that flash still has its place... it's still way better at doing things like client side image compression/encoding and has very sophisticated binary manipulation capabilities (if you need those).

It really is a technology of the gaps, and the number of gaps that it can exclusively fill is rapidly dwindling.