[icebraining]

I think the HTML/CSS/JS part of the web is competitive in certain domains, and native apps on others. Frankly, I don't see the problem with this. Walled gardens are certainly a problem, but there's no need to throw out the baby (native apps) with the bathwater.

As for plugins, I've never seen them as benefit. Either you're a big player and then you can influence the direction of the web, or you're just some random guy and your plugin is irrelevant because no one will download it just to see some websites.

There was an SVG plugin way before browsers supported it natively, but could any web dev actually rely on it?

[tolmasky]

So you honestly never saw the benefit in having video on the web thanks to Flash? Remember that even today HTML 5 video is not fully supported.

[icebraining]

I think Flash gave browsers the 'excuse' to postpone the implementation of a real standard solution, that we're only know seeing the first steps of.

I bet we'd have seen the video tag on browsers years ago if Flash wasn't there with a poor (GPU acceleration only last year, FFS!) but working solution.