It's a shame that most of the people espousing Javascript were watching Power Rangers when Flash's real contribution to the web was being recognized.
There are a few archetypes of flash haters and they almost all fall into one of these categories:
* Tech Bloggers looking for a salacious story, considering Flash is Dead articles always get a lot of debate (and clicks)
* Young kids who lack the historical perspective to understand Flash's contributions to the web and just want to bully something unpopular.
* Mac Users who for years suffered a lot of stability and performance problems from the poorly supported Mac Flash plugin and have never let it go.
* Ex-Flash developers who feel that Adobe abandoned and betrayed them by their silence on the "Flash is Dead" issue and turned on the technology that predicated their careers.
* Security experts who were sick of the constant patching of their network's machines due to the continual trickle of discovered flaws.
* Impressional engineers who never researched anything objective about Flash but heard something from one of the above archetypes and blindly follow it.
* Brendan Eich, who in his quest to globally dominate the world with Javascript, threw Flash under the bus publicly many times.
Adobe has done several things to fundamentally address their concerns:
- They released auto-updating plugins (albeit too late in my opinion) so they could patch players on their own.
- They doubled down to make the Mac client more secure and performant (albeit too late in my opinion)
- They increased the frequency of updates, including biweekly beta releases, and quarterly major updates. Nobody knows this though.
What Adobe has not done is market Flash (or its little brother AIR) in any way. They have made some public announcements that they are not abandoning the runtimes but it's hard to know when that will change, so it's almost as if they never said it at all.
I have a very unique take on the situation. I think plugins are a superior way to distribute content technology. It is faster to innovate than open standards development, and provides a more consistent quality than fragmented browser-based development.
My analogy is 3D printers. One day 3D printers will be able to make super complex things such as watches or maybe even cars. Do you really think Rolex or Tesla would adopt such a technology? Hell no. And the reason is simple: your product is reduced to the quality of the crappiest 3D printer out there. The quality is no longer in the content maker's hands, but in the 3D printer manufacturer's hands. Your only option is to reduce the quality of your own content to the lowest common denominator of all the 3D printers out there.
And that's exactly what we now face in an HTML5 future. Flash provided a very consistent presentation of content across all browsers and even mobile during its brief life on Android. Flash would auto update major features every 3 months, giving access to very advanced GPU based rendering features. Now we have to wait around for every browser out there to adopt WebGL standards. Some have done it well, others half-assed it, and on Mobile, forget about it. And even WebGL is now an outdated standard now that glNext is coming. So we have to start all over again.
HTML5 enthusiasts sure are patient people. If they knew how fast Adobe can get updates/security fixes out to a very high % of people, they'd be green with envy.