I really don't know flash in depth , but my guess is that they today have a big advantage in flash tools and moving to html5 would seriously reduce their advantage.
I really don't know flash in depth , but my guess is that they today have a big advantage in flash tools and moving to html5 would seriously reduce their advantage.
The source code of the Adobe Flash plugin, if nothing else.
Incidentally, that does bring to mind one possible Hail Mary that could work: Open source the Flash player(s). Whether the open source community could fix performance issues on Linux and OSX depends on a lot of things, but they could certainly fix some things that would make it less aggravating.
(Since it's probably impossible to open source as-is due to licensing agreements it still might not work; depends on how much of the plugin is still left after you've removed those bits.)
I will agree - they might want to consider open sourcing the Linux version. I know nothing about Linux so I'm guessing it's related to trying to support the "anything-goes moving-target many-flavors-of Linux" issue.
OSX is another matter (blocked OSX APIs).
Flash's ActionScript engine, for instance, was donated to opensource and subsequently used to make Firefox faster.
(Adobe Flash Player includes licensed codecs from Fraunhoffer, On2 VPx series, H.264, more... Adobe can distribute them, but cannot license them for redistribution by others.)