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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

Except it ran like shit everywhere besides Windows, never mind a 2007 iPhone.

I'm sure it could be made to work great, but it never did.

To play devils advocate, we are in 2017 and JS adverts on normal websites can slow the latest phones down to a crawling stuttering mess.

These are probability the same developers that were writing sloppy Flash banners a decade earlier.

Sure, but JavaScript is an open standard and you can tune your implementation at will.

Compare that to being at the mercy of a company like Adobe that bundles at least 3 different JavaScript interpreters, a full blown WebKit and who knows what else to Photoshop. All while having a custom made cross platform UI layer across all of their apps.

True, although sadly you can't also tune JavaScript developers at will.

That's simply bad app or library code. Any website can take up 100% of a cpu thread. If all threads are used then even the greatest workstation will slow down.

This is quite true. I had nothing but disdain for Flash back in the early noughties because, almost universally, everything I encountered that was built with it was terrible, especially those CPU core swallowing ads.

Nowadays of course we have CPU core swallowing and battery draining JavaScript ads, along with massive JavaScript bloat in general. For the heck of it I just went and had a look at one of my own pages, which runs an HTML5/JS/CSS game, and includes Adsense. It downloaded 633KB of JavaScript. By today's woeful standards that's not even particularly bad. To break it down a bit though, 52KB of it is scripts I use directly, of which 47KB is required for the game. The other ~5KB is FontAwesome, which I use for icons on the menu buttons. The other 581K? Well, Adsense itself is also fairly small (about 35K for two scripts), which leaves the rest - the vast majority - which is loaded by the ads themselves.

Like you, I've come to realise that it wasn't the tool/platform, but the people building for it. Clearly the best developers are not building ads. It feels like there should be some scope for disruption here.

I think browsers could throttle scripts loaded from cross origins. That may allow the main website to load faster, but then I guess from the content owners point of view the most important thing is getting the ad code loaded and registering hits :(

That's true, I remember when Adobe Air first came out for mobile devices and I was completely heartbroken at my game which ran 30 fps on desktop choking at 4fps on the iPhone.

At the time, it was such a great idea (in theory)

Right. Apple would never be able to figure out how to get a swf file to run quickly.

When iOS was released it was illegal for Apple to implement a mechanism to execute SWF files:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWF#Licensing

I'm sure they could have worked w/ Adobe to create a version of Flash Player for iOS; just like Adobe did for Android and Blackberry.

And how did those perform?

Blackberry designed their whole OS and app development ecosystem around Flash / AIR. It performed surprisingly well, but obviously their devices was not successful in the marketplace.

Android was hit or miss depending upon the specs of the device.

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