Could you elaborate? What justification would I be ignoring? Closed source runtime? Bad flash programmers? Plugin hate? Anecdotal "flash always breaks my computer" type stuff?
Re: second point, I disagree. Being better than alternatives makes something very good--better than everything else in fact. What you're saying is good is actually some kind of fairy tale perfect that doesn't exist and never will.
I mean, hey, use whatever you want, but have you ever written a flash application? And if so, what are the key problems?
My main complaint about Flash is how it completely breaks the normal web experience.
Want to middle click a link? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to run a spellcheck on that textbox? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to search the text? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to increase the text size (with reflowing)? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to use a screen reader? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to link to a particular page? You can't, it's Flash¹.
(And this is not even talking about more geeky stuff like Greasemonkey, blocking code without blocking text and images, etc)
Sure, there weren't any real alternatives for advanced stuff like animations. But you know what? It would have been better to have no way to do that stuff if it kept all the stuff that could already be done with HTML/CSS in those technologies.
¹ Yes, I know this and probably other issues can be fixed if only developers do such and such. That's irrelevant. I know, you know, and Adobe definitively knows that bad developers are everywhere, and Flash makes it a pain to do basic stuff that comes by default in standard web tech, therefore making sure we would be flooded with broken apps.
My main reason for supporting the removal of Flash is Adobe's lack of support for Flash on non-Windows platforms especially mobile. It took them ages to come up with a decent Mac OS version. And they already dropped further development and support for mobile. Did they ever get their mobile version working 100% correctly?
I think it was clear that Flash was going down years ago, but the fact that they've decided to drop support for the fastest growing computing segment should solidify the fact that everybody needs to move away.
HTML5 is pretty sucky in places but has the backing of several big players, it's open and works well on pretty much all platforms and it's being actively worked on. If Google, Mozilla and Apple give up, we just take the software and move on. Is there a downside to this scenario that I am missing?
Re: second point, I disagree. Being better than alternatives makes something very good--better than everything else in fact. What you're saying is good is actually some kind of fairy tale perfect that doesn't exist and never will.
I mean, hey, use whatever you want, but have you ever written a flash application? And if so, what are the key problems?