[lucideer]

You're absolutely right (and an excellently written post; very effectively communicated ), but I think the difference is in what's possible/easy/difficult.

Building a usable experience in Flash was possible, but sufficiently difficult that almost none did.

Building a usable experience in JS is significantly easier than it was in Flash, though sadly still seems to be sufficiently difficult that too few do. The ratio of usable JavaScript apps is a lot higher than it was for flash, but is still a minority. It is at least an improvement though, if an incremental one.

[djhalon]

It's true that it is much easier now in JS, but that is because the browsers and the core web technologies have radically evolved in that 10+ years since Flash was the dominant way of creating interactive experiences. Looking back at the eco-system when Flash was still a viable technology, we have to recall where the browsers were at, where HTML was at and also JavaScript itself.

At the start of 2005, I was helping lead a team build a highly interactive experience for a major car company using Macromedia Flash and Flex 2. When we launched the site we had full cross-browser pixel accuracy, fully supported URL deep-linking, bookmarking, page history navigation, web crawling, keyboard navigation, screen reading support, interactive video, highly animated experiences and even had fully integrated web mapping using a beta version of Microsofts first interactive map tech (it eventually became branded as Bing maps).

What we built then was possible only because of Flash, there was no way we could have created the complete experience in JS/HTML/CSS. Granted, we could have done a lot of it in native web tech (and in some cases, we had to under the hood), but to make it fully pixel accurate cross-browser would be tripled the dev & testing time. On top of that, some of the features would have been impossible without Flash.

Let's recall where we were in 2005. Chrome was still 3 years away (it was released in 2008), Firefox was still version 1.0 (1.5 didn't release until Nov. of that year), Gmail was just released into beta (you had to have a friend to get access), Google Maps was still in an experimental beta and was truly pushing the boundaries of what JS/HTML could do. The browser history API didn't exist so we had to do crazy iFrame hacks to create deep-links and history (this was true of any app, no matter what tech). There was no video in browsers without a plugin (HTML5 spec wasn't finalized until Oct. 2015). There was no such thing as CSS animations, they got their first release in Firefox 5 (June 2011).

So, were Flash apps trash? Absolutely, but not all of them. That's like claiming that modern browsers solve it all. We still have massive load times (look at how much time and effort is put into optimizing content delivery), the cross-browser and backward compatibility is a nightmare, and way more of a challenge then it ever has been. In some ways, modern web development is much better than Flash development was, but to be perfectly frank, we have a LONG way to go. Honestly, we haven't caught up to where Flash was 14 years ago.

But, we are getting there for sure. I can see why Steve Klabnik is so excited about WASM. I can envision where it is going and it reminds me of where Flash was trying to go before it was slaughtered by Adobe. It's an exciting time for sure, but we should also look back at where we came from and instead of just stating Flash is trash and it caused the web to be terrible, we should also look at what it did right and what it allowed us to create before we throw it out with the bathwater.