There's many reasons this didn't happen. Some of them Adobe's fault, some not. The main thing to realize is that Adobe based AS3 on many leading proposals for

There's many reasons this didn't happen. Some of them Adobe's fault, some not. The main thing to realize is that Adobe based AS3 on many leading proposals for Ecmascript 4. Ecmascript 4 would lay the groundwork for future versions of javascript, etc. Flash would still be closed source, but the language would be useful elsewhere in the browser. Several people have described the political issues surrounding this ES4 situation in far more detail, and how we arguably ended up the worse for it: Resig: http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-harmony/ http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-harmony/ Canasse: http://ncannasse.free.fr/?p=82 http://ncannasse.free.fr/?p=82 Mike Chambers: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/08/14/actionscript-3-and-ecmascript-4/ http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2008/08/14/actionscript-3-a... So, why didn't Adobe just open source the flash plugin? One main reason not to was Microsoft: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#Sun_vs._Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine#... Another reason was, naturally, control. Both for Adobe and for user development. The Flash player was quirky, but incredibly consistent with decent performance. There really was no other option... js, java applets, activeX, they all had significant weaknesses due to differing availability and performance. If you wait around long enough in web development, you will have seen this type of situation many times. Haxe is a "free agent" that can break this cycle imho. It is not tied to a company like Typescript or Dart, nor is it tied to corporate controlled committees like ES4. It has an incredibly gifted language author, and a great team of developers. It's also very mature at this point (> 5 years old). I've used Haxe professionally for just under 5 years now.