The real problem is that out of all of the technologies used on the web, Flash is the LEAST shitty. Everything else is worse.

Apparently except when it comes to governments and high-paid hackers installing spyware onto your PC. The recent disclosure of a large cache of previously unknown flash-based exploits (plus flash's long history of security holes) means that browser vendors really don't have an option but to disable it right now.

Well, true. My comment is not specific to security of each alternative - I meant the entire ecosystem in general.

The real problem is that out of all of the technologies used on the web, Flash is the LEAST shitty. Everything else is worse.

Even leaving security concerns aside, I don't think one can anymore refer to "the web" as just that portion of the internet accessed by desktop browsers.

Google already started actively downranking sites that use technologies incompatible with mobile. That means that if your site uses flash, then customers will not find your site.

That represents the real death of flash - the current security bans only add another nail in the coffin.

In a recent post Unity said webGL is still at least a year out for real deployment. IE simply won't support it (period) and the new IE on Win 10 will, but its adoption rate will be crap for a while. Chrome and Firefox handle it ok but it soaks up system resources and has severe memory limitations.

No good answer really. Unity Player is dead for sure. Flash may be (but I doubt it). WebGL may be years before it reaches stability and hardware accessability. Gonna be a bumpy ride for web based content!

In a recent post Unity said webGL is still at least a year out for real deployment. IE simply won't support it (period) and the new IE on Win 10 will, but its adoption rate will be crap for a while. Chrome and Firefox handle it ok but it soaks up system resources and has severe memory limitations.

No good answer really. Unity Player is dead for sure. Flash may be (but I doubt it). WebGL may be years before it reaches stability and hardware accessability. Gonna be a bumpy ride for web based content!

Everybody is applauding the death of Flash but there isn't a really good alternative out there yet for web games. It's going to be a bad time for a lot of indie developers in the near future. This is going to end up killing the Unity web player (already dead on some browsers) as well. For as crappy as Flash is you can pretty much expect a Flash game to run the same on any web browser. Same can't really for HTML5.

What about all the historic content like Newgrounds, Kongregate, heck the majority of online games made for the last decade? If Flash is killed off, how much of internet history goes up in flames overnight? I can't imagine many people would (or even could) port their games away from Flash.

If it dies, it dies.

More seriously, no platform lives for ever. Emulators will be written to keep valuable content accessible, and life will move on.

Everybody is applauding the death of Flash but there isn't a really good alternative out there yet for web games.

Make a mobile app, and use HTML5/WebGL for the desktop browser if you must. There is no "Write Once Run Anywhere" solution.

Make a mobile app, and use HTML5/WebGL for the desktop browser if you must. There is no "Write Once Run Anywhere" solution.

But wasn't Flash that very solution?

Make a mobile app, and use HTML5/WebGL for the desktop browser if you must. There is no "Write Once Run Anywhere" solution.

But wasn't Flash that very solution?

Given that Flash never ran on mobile, nope. Flash papered over the differences between desktop OSes.

Make a mobile app, and use HTML5/WebGL for the desktop browser if you must. There is no "Write Once Run Anywhere" solution.

Unfortunately "HTML5" (whatever that really mean) remains a mess of a non-standard and WebGL suffers the same kind of cludgeyness that has plagued OpenGL.

Honestly, about the only good thing about them you can say is that they haven't had their security flaws discovered yet or at least not to a degree where 'the sky is falling!' is declared anyway.

Honestly, about the only good thing about them you can say is that they haven't had their security flaws discovered yet or at least not to a degree where 'the sky is falling!' is declared anyway.

Well, an additional benefit is that if a browser or company decides to block WebGL at this moment... Most people won't really care (or even notice).

Honestly, I'd rather we abandon this concept of 'web apps' altogether. Native apps perform better, use less resources, integrate better with basic OS-level functionality (i.e. window management), and altogether provide a better user experience.

And with many technologies that used to be web technologies now available for developing standalone native apps (like Flash/Flex), you can at least 'write once, deploy anywhere', even if the 'run anywhere' pipedream may be dead.

The mobile web is so important now, that no new/big service relies on flash any more. Uninstall it and mostly old/historic content will break.

Earlier on, I wanted to edit a video using YouTubes video editing tools on their site. I've been running a flash free browser ever since I moved to Firefox developer edition. Playing videos work fine as html5, in fact it works better than the flash player, takes less ram and less cpu. But, try to edit a video and you're told you need a recent flash player. There are unfortunately lots of big modern sites that rely on flash for functionality...