And here I was thinking that it was Apple and the iPhone that effectively killed Flash. Silly me.
The offical reasons were speed and security, which was obviously a farce since all the major browser vendors wrote their own PDF viewers which is both slow and known for tons of security issues as well.
They could have just as easily wrote their own fast and secure implementations of flash and Java instead of disabling them. Especially for Java given Google's deep experience with it and that they already have their own runtime.
Apple may have fired first on flash but google recently disabled all NPAPI plugins in chrome as well. The reason... "Security". I guess code not made by Google isn't secure enough to be used on the internet?
I do agree with you that Google's security model is broken in many ways, both on the web and in Android.
As in most things there's probably some truth on all sides.
http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/mobile/opera-del...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
It actually ran quite well! I used to play flash games all the time.
Google went to significant efforts to sandbox it, but that still caused problems, not least with additional complexity. As for this idea that NPAPI should continue to live... Yes "security" is a problem with NPAPI.
As for Google fixing Java... You may have heard of Oracle? And the fact that they are .... not nice?
Yup, Google should:
1. Reverse Engineer a proprietary language/API (Flash).
2. Write a secure VM for it (Flash and Java), trying to hit a moving target.
or
Get everyone to use an open, standardized tech (HTML5/js).
Can you give me one reason Google should prop up Flash?
Security wasn't a farce at all. "Flash is a big hole" (which is true) translates to "Chrome is a big hole".