Had Adobe shown even the slightest sign of responsibility it might have been a different call but at any point after maybe 2002 it was pretty obvious that you shouldn't depend on Flash because Adobe was just milking the customers.
Had Adobe shown even the slightest sign of responsibility it might have been a different call but at any point after maybe 2002 it was pretty obvious that you shouldn't depend on Flash because Adobe was just milking the customers.
I'm not going to defend the quality of the flashplayer architecture and implementation (due to it's crapness) but it was perfectly fine performance wise - it was a 'resource hog' because of the terrible, terrible code that people wrote for punch the monkey flash apps.
Similarly, the fact that Flash was competitive with IE5 is the problem: browser vendors invested heavily in making that platform faster and richer. Adobe executives thought they had a monopoly and did not.
1. Apple couldn't improve the Flash player like they could with WebKit and Nitro to make Flash content run well on their phones.
2. Most of the complex content on the web was in Flash, by not supporting it the web was fast and light weight for a very low powered mobile device.
If you try and load a JS heavy website on an original iPhone now days it will likely crash.