And at least the "performance nightmare" is an irony from today's perspective as the Flash player wasn't actually slow at all! It was the incapability of the Safari browser to handle plugins in a good way and on mobile devices. Today's implementations of mobile application, JavaScript heavy applications and websites are much much more performance heavy.
ActionScript3 was a very suitable language.
Re:Vite 8.0 Is Out
by c-hendricks on Friday March 13, 2026 @11:19AM
(#47365666)
Flash performance was also hit or miss on Linux.
Though it’s hard to imagine what the web would look like if the language had become the standard. JS is a pain but AS was even less suitable for general purpose compute.