[quote name='jwezorek' timestamp='1321388060' post='4884284']
It's a terrible thing because the Adobe Flash player is a reasonably powerful multi-platform virtual machine / execution environment, that is installed on 92% to 98% of PCs. That's a nice thing to have around.

And if that execution environment weren't cumbersome, buggy and riddled with security vulnerabilities, I'd agree. But it's not developers that want Flash to go away: it's the users.

Nor has Flash necessarily been a good user experience on all the platforms it supported. There have been a lot of complaints about Flash player on Linux and mobile phones.
[/quote]

I don't know much about Flash security vulnerabilities so can't really comment other than to say the standard thing, that malware writers target the Flash player because of its huge installed base so it's not surprising that lots of issues turn up. But in terms of it being cumbersome to develop in -- I mean, come on, what could be more cumbersome than writing a large application in Javascript? Also swf's are binary so someone could always write a compiler from a language that isn't AS3 to .swf. But javascript is literally interpreted right? ... if it was to serve as the output of some compiler/IDE that output would have to be ascii -- to me that's just weird.