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Comment by purephase | Hacker News Reader

While some might complain or worry, this is what makes this field so fascinating. A myriad of options, toolsets and methodologies means that it is alive, open and thriving.

Imagine is Adobe, Oracle or MS had won the Flash/Flex, Java or ActiveX battles, where would we have been today?

As much as I use Chrome (and love it), I can't help but admire the work done by Mozilla to rescue the Netscape codebase and mould it into Firefox. I think they deserve a lot of the accolades that enables this zany ecosystem to thrive.

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> Imagine is Adobe, Oracle or MS had won the Flash/Flex, Java or ActiveX battles, where would we have been today?

I don't know what 'would have been', but I know that we would not be where we are today (in a positive sense) without those companies and the many many technologies and products they have provided us with (even though some of them can only serve as bad examples).

I'm not bashing them as a whole, just some of their technology decisions. To be honest, I've always felt that MS gets a bad rap. As much as it was anti-competitive, bundling IE in Windows enabled users to download alternative browsers. Obviously, there are other ways to do it but I doubt many users would have gone down that road with higher technical obstacles.

As for Oracle, not much can redeem them. Flash had it's day, but I wish Adobe would let it die already.

> As for Oracle, not much can redeem them.

If anything. :)

> I wish Adobe would let it die already.

I know many here can't accept the truth that Flash had, has and will have its place on the Internet. There was a need for such a technology and there still is. I will be here for another 5-15 years or so, so we should make the best out of it instead of screaming 'DIE ALREADY'. But as always, there is plenty of room for improvements. :)

FYI: Adobe donated Flex to the ASF a while ago and the mailing list is already the most active on ASF. It is actively developed and people are quite motivated.

If it wasn't the security issue laden monstrosity that it is, I could see it living on.

But the facts are that the only real "secure" version is the PPAPI implementation in Chrome (which has it's own limitations), Adobe has dropped future development for embedded systems and that it is almost non-existent on mobile does not speak to the longevity that you predict.

Flex is cool, but it's dependency on Flash will be it's noose.

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