I think there's a mix of bad mojo all around for the Flash player: -It's a quite old codebase at this point(approaching 20 years) -There's a huge amount of ba

I think there's a mix of bad mojo all around for the Flash player: -It's a quite old codebase at this point(approaching 20 years) -There's a huge amount of backwards compatibility expected - 11 major versions and counting -The technology is not easily tamed - it's a whole suite of formats and protocols integrated together, each one of which has its own complexities. -There's proprietary codecs in there, an open source player would be more expensive to support and reduce some strategy flexibility...which ties in with the last point... -It's not the center of attention because historically the tool is making the real money, as parent states. Adobe can still share plenty of blame for this, though. Even though they're in a monopoly position with most of their products, they are hesitant to make sweeping changes that can comprehensively address new needs - they opt to keep piling on features as long as possible and that is helping to contribute to exploitable bugs in both Acrobat and Flash. Even Photoshop has exploits, though they're less devastating since only some users frequently open PSD files.