> Flash was a massive security hole. It was a resource hog. It was based on proprietary Adobe technology. It was woefully unstable and during some periods caused crashes frequently even on powerful desktop systems.

Ironically, most of that is now true of web browsers (or should I just say Chrome at this point?)

Much as I dislike Chrome....no, it's not?

Chrome is a privacy risk. It's not a security hole in the sense that bad actors can exploit its horribly buggy code and gain privileged access to your system (at least, not commonly that I've heard of).

Chrome is proprietary, to be sure, but it's heavily based on the open-source Chromium.

I'm not aware of Chrome being massively unstable on any common system—however, I freely admit that as I don't use it myself, I might just not be noticing the complaints of others because they don't show up where I would see them.

...Chrome is absolutely a resource hog. No argument there.

This is an enormously important distinction: security ne privacy. Although you can make your own Chrome install insecure, by default it really isn't bad. Transforming it into something that isn't actively compromising your privacy is another matter. Flash, for all its "democratizing" impact (not that I agree it really had), didn't address either. Back then too few were seriously doing anything about security or privacy. As someone who lived through the Rise and Fall of Flash, I have to second the sentiment of an earlier post: I'm happier now being able to use a text editor in my work instead of an odd assortment of vendor specific tools. That, and HTML5/CSS3 has proven to be amazingly innovative and flexible enough to finally make the case for standards easier. Now all we have to do is keep the big boys from perverting these standards into monsters from the pit of hell. Man, is that going to be a fun ride.

Also people forget that Apple knows a lot about Flash.

They would have had years of crash telemetry from OSX and so would have been intimately aware of its stability.