This feels like history repeating itself. The Flash version still runs better for me than the WebAssembly version, and the Flash version worked well on people's systems 5 years ago! It seems like half of the things I see on HackerNews is JavaScript poorly doing that other solutions did better a decade or more ago
That's why programming is "half a field," according to Alan Kay. If it were a real field, then there would be greater preservation of group knowledge/experience. Instead, it's like a pop culture, subject to cyclic fads, with less overall progress.
For awhile, OOPSLA was full of presentations of things that people did in Java, that had previously been done in Smalltalk. I'm sure many others have parallels.
Also, if Adobe had done a much better job, things would be different. (You could say the same thing for Smalltalk and OO.) But corporate incentive structures are somewhat broken and too short term. This is why Apple could produce a better UX free of bloatware and outcompete Wintel. This is also why Apple is now starting to fail some of its users.
I'm now looking at networking for browser based multiplayer games. WebRTC datachannel has a pretty big header. Websockets carry TCP sematics. I think Flash did this better too!
The best part is that we're just now achieving what we could do in Flash 5-10 years ago, which was capable of achieving what we could do with native code 5-10 years before that.
I never had a problem with Flash games and I haven't heard it many others. Flash games and Flash animation were casualties lost when it fell out of favor.
What I hated with a passion is seeing a progress bar and warning to updates Flash so I could look at the hours for a restaurant down the street. It would also hijack copy/paste and other shortcut keys to switch windows or close the window. I would also hear my CPU fan spin up and battery life drop because I left it open in another browser tab.
When CSS and Javascript started doing things Flash used to do I sighed because while I can use a Flash blocker, I can't do the same for CSS/Javascript.
My point is that all of these things are running slower than flash did on much older hardware. The technical sophistication of what the average user does with computers hasn't changed much in the past 10 years (for the most part), but these bloated web stacks have made real world performance actually go down as raw hardware performance has gone up.
