I remember having these conversations with web designers so many times about Flash. I can't tell you how many times I was told that HTML4 was "obsolete", and wh

I remember having these conversations with web designers so many times about Flash. I can't tell you how many times I was told that HTML4 was "obsolete", and why can't we just do everything in Flash already??? So what if Flash's bitmapped text isn't parsable, why would anyone want to parse it? And so what if it isn't scalable, everyone should be at the same resolution as what we designed it on! It's the users fault for not supporting our ActiveX controls! What kind of a weirdo doesn't use Internet Explorer??? Users like it when we play soothing background music for them. What? Who uses tabs anyway? Users like informative popups that offer them helpful offers from our advertising partners! Hah, Mozilla is obsolete. LOOK, this is just the way things are, OK? They can't be changed! And the starry-eyed optimism that /this/ technological ecosystem was great, and utter certainty that this was the correct path. And how I was some sort of weirdo for saying that things could be done way better. However, unlike 15 years ago, there is no Mozilla Firefox. The Mozilla foundation has been corrupted. If things had been the way they are back then, culturally, then things never would have changed. Ubuntu would have been obsessed with emulating Windows XP perfectly, and Firefox would have been trying to support the latest Microsoft standards.