As questionable of a move that is, this kind of excites the 'omg, is flash finally going to die' moment i've been waiting for, for years.
Why is that? Flash seems pretty logical to me. If you were giving the choice to either design with a single language that compiles to bytecode and runs in a vm(jit), or an array of interpretive scripts that's heavily submitted to fragmentation, which would you choose? You'd probably go for the first, as would I. Flash may be a bad implementation of good idea, but alternatives have not exactly wooed me either. To be q…
But with flash the fatal problem is, and always was, that the only viable implementation of the interpreter is a proprietary and buggy blob, not even available for all platforms. Apart from that being a plugin also made it clunky, too much like a "java applet" (it never integrated into a page as well as javascript does).
If it had been based on an open specification (like HTML5 is now) then it could have been successful. Different browsers could have competed for the fastest and most secure JIT, like they do with javascript now. The end result would probably have been great. Alas...
Even non-technical people I hear complaining almost daily about what a piece of crapware the Adobe Flash plugin is, after it crashed for the zillionth time. Everyone wants flash to die, as the last sites that still require it either move to HTML5 or are replaced.