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by cratermoon 926 days ago
Great until you have to support n versions on m platforms and half your customers are enterprisey and stay on a 6-year-old version from before your last LTS version on a now-unsupported platform because they built a core part of their business processes on a a misfeature.
2 comments

I've worked on various forms of "legacy code" for most of my career. As long as the economics line up and the customer is willing to pay for the required support, then it's a fine business avenue.

If economics don't line up then you have to pull the plug and set them adrift, which is much easier and more secure with a fat client that runs without a server than say, a complex cloud system.

Yes but targeting WASM and SQLite minimizes that pain quite a bit.
Remember when targeting Macromedia Flash was going to solve the web compatibility and interactivity conundrum?
> Remember when targeting Macromedia Flash was going to solve the web compatibility and interactivity conundrum?

This sounds like the set up for a "No? Me neither." punchline. Certainly one of the features of Flash is that it gave you fairly good consistency across computers, but honestly my perception of Flash wasn't that it was going to solve some grand web problem, but more "oooh look, shiny rollover buttons!" and "ooh look, super obnoxious advertisement that forces people to pay attention to it!"

> "oooh look, shiny rollover buttons!"

That's the interactivity aspect. At the time, it was the bees knees of UI capabilities.

Yeah? It was targeted for destruction by Apple because it was buggy and insecure, not because it wasn't delivering.
Don't forget horrendous mobile performance (battery drain)!
Don't forget proprietary.
And the lack of accessibility. You generally couldn't even copy and paste text out of it.