[traderj0e]

Web apps weren't so easy to make back then, so standalone apps were the norm. Shortly before 2009 a lot of the web apps were Java or Adobe Flash, and 2009 was part of the transition period where platforms were at war with that stuff but open-web alternatives weren't mature yet.

[mwkaufma]

Yeah I know I was there -- also today's wasteful "open-web alternatives" wouldn't fly anyway, because I recall even during the XP era having min-specs of, like, 800mhz/512mb

[traderj0e]

Yeah, they were like "Flash is too slow" then the replacement was 5x slower

[yen223]

No one argued Flash was too slow, they argued (correctly) that Flash was closed source, proprietary, and had a lot of security issues

[traderj0e]

The most famous criticism of Flash was "Thoughts on Flash" by Steve Jobs, which said among other things that it's too inefficient. He did cite inconsistent hardware acceleration for H.264 that was a real performance drawback of Flash for video in particular, and was also complaining about the power usage for interactive Flash content in general. Jobs was right at the time from what I can tell, but somehow the end result was even slower stuff. People did keep repeating the line that Flash is slow.

I also remember people citing performance as a reason YouTube switched from Flash to HTML5. Searching those blogs now is giving a lot of 404s. Like I said this should've helped since it's video, but somehow YouTube immediately got slower anyway back then. Back then I installed an extension to force it to use QuickTime Player for that reason.

The proprietary and insecure parts were real problems too. I'm fine with the decisions that were made, but this was a drawback.