Back in 2005 I was tasked to write a web-based CAD viewer. Flash with AS2 was an obvious no-brainer. It could do complex cross-browser high-performance graphics

Back in 2005 I was tasked to write a web-based CAD viewer. Flash with AS2 was an obvious no-brainer. It could do complex cross-browser high-performance graphics, and AS2 was a mature typed programming language that could be used to program in the large (using an event- and component-based API). It was fast and really easy to program for. I never even used the animation tools, and I still thought it was amazing. By contrast, javascript was still that weird language almost no one took seriously, before jquery, before "the good parts". It had abysmal performance (way worse than flash), and couldn't do cross-browser graphics (firefox released some basic SVG support towards the end of that year, IE6 had that weird VML thing, and adobe had a slow bloated SVG browser plugin which crashed every 5 minutes). So, yeah, back in its prime, flash was unbeatable for client-side apps and games. But, things change.