>At least with flash you had the guarantee it would crash the same on all platforms. Uhm no. The Mac-version usually was both slower and less stable than the Windows-version.

And the situation in JavaScript-land is getting better too. jQuery was developed years ago and while it still does paper over some implementation gotchas, it's main focus has shifted towards providing a nicer DOM-API. Since ES5, I started migrating away from jQuery for some more leisurely projects.