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I think there are a couple of misconceptions here: > 1. Modern JavaScript vms are sandboxed, not native plugins with unending security holes. Flash was sandbox

I think there are a couple of misconceptions here: > 1. Modern JavaScript vms are sandboxed, not native plugins with unending security holes. Flash was sandboxed (just as Java). You were strongly restricted in what you could access with ActionScript. Of course, the security was poorly executed. I blame it on the fact that it was developed in a different time, without the experience and tools we have today, and that it was closed-source. Still, native plugins don't have to be inherently insecure. > 2. It's nearly all open standards and open source, not proprietary closed source controlled by one company. OpenGL, EcmaScript, W3, Mozilla, Chromium, blink, webkit. True, but I'm starting to think "Open Standards" was a huge Trojan horse. - It lead to, or continued, a huge monopolization of platforms. Only a few large companies are able to maintain modern browsers (see the demise of Opera). This is bad, because they can push politically motivated restrictions on their users. (Firefox has a whitelist to only allow certain media codecs to play, although the system would support more. I could modify the source for myself - I did - but it's of no use, as the people visiting my sites won't be able to use it. I don't have the marketing power of Mozilla or Google.) - The "open" "web" platform limits what kinds of apps you can write. You can't really write apps without an (accountable!) central server. Without sockets, you have no Bittorrent, no P2P, no Tor, no Instant Messaging... - I think it also pacifies people who would otherwise be worried about today's locked up platforms. "You can always write a web app if you don't get in the app store." > 3. It works on mobile devices, flash doesn't. Which was a political decision, not a technical one. There used to be thousands of free Flash games, that would have ran with minimal porting on mobile devices. But Apple couldn't control flash, they wouldn't get their 30% cut from Flash apps, and they couldn't censor apps. So they forbid Flash on iOS, and crippled it on OS X, which was one of the main reasons for its demise. > 5. Flash never had the native performance or hardware acceleration that modern JavaScript has. Flash had support for native video playback before HTML. It had 2D acceleration for animations before there was canvas, and Shockwave Flash had 3D acceleration years before WebGL.

leoc 13y ago
> True, but I'm starting to think "Open Standards" was a huge Trojan horse. - It lead to, or continued, a huge monopolization of platforms. Only a few large companies are able to maintain modern browsers (see the demise of Opera). Free-slash-open-source programs are like banks in this way. In principle, a bank that fails can always be shut down rather than bailed out, and this is what justifies the existence of private-sector banks. In principle, an open-source program can always be forked if you can't persuade the maintainers to make the changes that you want, and it's always been agreed that this is a central, essential requirement for a program to be considered free-slash-open. But some programs are, in practise, TBTF - Too Big To Fork. A program can be "big" not only by having a large codebase but also through network effects, such as having vast amounts of client software tied to one of its interfaces. The big-boy Web browsers are TBTF in both these ways. So if, for example, you're insulted by Google's decision to knife MathML (as everyone should be), it's relatively easy to roll a Chromium with MathML inside, but you'd still effectively be just maintaining a branch, because you'd have no hope of maintaining "your" browser independently if Google took the whole Chromium codebase in a direction you didn't like - and more importantly, good luck getting users to use your browser or developers to create MathML webpages to support it. A second example of the phenomenon is the Gnome/KDE mess - part of the reason that the Linux desktop sucks is that, even if you have a clear idea of how it could be better, it's still a whole lot of man-hours to spin up an alternative implementation, get apps customised for it, and so on. In general, an area is the domain of TBTF to the extent that you have to win a political persuasion battle or spend a truckload of your own money before you can produce a viable implementation of your alternative idea. The solution, to the extent that there is a solution, to these problems is a technical one: find a way to shrink large programs and/or break them up into small, reasonably independent ones. (Of course all social/political problems are technical problems in disguise just as all technical problems are social/political problems in disguise. ;) ) In the case of the web, this is why the vertically-integrated Web browser must go away https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720793 .

leoc 13y ago

> True, but I'm starting to think "Open Standards" was a huge Trojan horse. - It lead to, or continued, a huge monopolization of platforms. Only a few large companies are able to maintain modern browsers (see the demise of Opera). Free-slash-open-source programs are like banks in this way. In principle, a bank that fails can always be shut down rather than bailed out, and this is what justifies the existence of private-sector banks. In principle, an open-source program can always be forked if you can't persuade the maintainers to make the changes that you want, and it's always been agreed that this is a central, essential requirement for a program to be considered free-slash-open. But some programs are, in practise, TBTF - Too Big To Fork. A program can be "big" not only by having a large codebase but also through network effects, such as having vast amounts of client software tied to one of its interfaces. The big-boy Web browsers are TBTF in both these ways. So if, for example, you're insulted by Google's decision to knife MathML (as everyone should be), it's relatively easy to roll a Chromium with MathML inside, but you'd still effectively be just maintaining a branch, because you'd have no hope of maintaining "your" browser independently if Google took the whole Chromium codebase in a direction you didn't like - and more importantly, good luck getting users to use your browser or developers to create MathML webpages to support it. A second example of the phenomenon is the Gnome/KDE mess - part of the reason that the Linux desktop sucks is that, even if you have a clear idea of how it could be better, it's still a whole lot of man-hours to spin up an alternative implementation, get apps customised for it, and so on. In general, an area is the domain of TBTF to the extent that you have to win a political persuasion battle or spend a truckload of your own money before you can produce a viable implementation of your alternative idea. The solution, to the extent that there is a solution, to these problems is a technical one: find a way to shrink large programs and/or break them up into small, reasonably independent ones. (Of course all social/political problems are technical problems in disguise just as all technical problems are social/political problems in disguise. ;) ) In the case of the web, this is why the vertically-integrated Web browser must go away https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720793 .