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Comment by sundarurfriend | Hacker News Reader

I'm no Apple fan, but Apple killed it because Adobe was letting Flash be an awful, unreliable piece of software for years, and seemed fine with letting that be the status quo for a decade more. If Adobe did a better job of improving the stability and resource management of the Flash clients, they wouldn't have had to "capitulate".

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Citation needed. Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were. I think that flash got a bad rap because browser vendors didn't like it's monopoly on content and they wanted a slice.

> Flash wasn't particularly more unreliable or awful than browsers were.

Citation needed. Saying that because Flash was widely touted as a significant contributor to browser crashes.

Though, looking for a citation for that myself just now... all of the search results I'm getting back are just an endless sea of "Flash crashed my browser" type of things instead. :/

Chrome was the first browser to stop letting plugins crash the whole thing, so yea it was a thing before for sure, but it was still way better than other things like ActiveX or Java applets…

Yeah, exactly. Just because everyone says it doesn't make it so, and the general public are often wildly wrong about basic computer facts.

Well, neither of us seem to have supporting evidence so far... ;)

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Using some different search parameters is turning up some results:

* http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-anal...

* https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash

* https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data

There is some talking around the problem on the old Mozilla Blog:

* https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash...

Things being about a decade old is adding further difficulty. :/

> http://web.archive.org/web/20140903235611/https://crash-anal...

This is a page where Firefox developers are discussing how to inject their own crash-reporting code into the sandboxed flash container. I never said that 3rd party plugins didn't occasionally have crashes, so I don't see the point of this link. Can you elaborate?

> https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash

This lists crashes seen in the Flash module. But again, I never said that 3rd party plugins didn't occasionally have crashes.

> https://wiki.mozilla.org/CrashKill/Flash_Breakdown_Data

This is a documentation page about types of all-cause failures related to Flash, (could be Firefox code issues)

> https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/firefox-3-6-4-with-crash...

Javascript also has "crash protection" in the form of a sandbox. That's why pages can "crash" without taking down the entire browser. This would also work exactly the same for Flash.

Yeah, that's all fair.

Did you manage to find citations supporting your assertion? :)

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