Flash was fast. Much faster than JavaScript+DOM at the time. In fact, it was only within the last few years that browser JavaScript and rendering engines became more performant.
The initial loading time was there, but then execution was pretty fast.
With the amazingly optimized JS engines we have now, it's easy to forget how slow things were just 10-15 years ago. (I think Chrome really kicked of the competition there)
The performance. The comparison macspoofing made was with JavaScript+DOM, not with native applications. I wrote games in Flash and played around with JavaScript+Canvas back when HTML5 was still fresh and Flash was still king.
The difference in performance was huge and Flash was faster for years. You'd hear people saying that JavaScript+Canvas was a valid replacement, sure, but those people had absolutely zero idea what they were talking about (especially when they said such stuff when there wasn't even a cross platform working sound API).
Things changed over the last years, sure. But do not rewrite history, JavaScript+Canvas sucked for a long time compared to Flash (and in some areas, like distribution, still sucks - a single compressed SWF file with all your resources is still nicer for distributing games than a bunch of HTML and whatever else files).
FWIW i always maintained that Java was miles ahead any of the above when it came to games (especially about performance), but Sun killed applets brutally with its awful startup times and bloated VMs. Then Oracle came along and just abandoned the whole thing.
On Windows, Flash was fast but on OS X (as it was called then), Flash performance was atrocious. In fact, this was one of the major reasons why Steve Jobs felt compelled to pen his famous “Flash” article [0], because after getting Apple’s engineers to work directly with Adobe’s engineers, they couldn’t quite get Flash to be performant on the Apple desktop. Jobs added that the single biggest culprit of stability issues reported by customers on Macs was: Flash [0]. I remember this part vividly because my MacBook had never crashed on me until I had Flash in use during a browsing session. The other time this happened was from another Adobe product: Adobe AIR, which I believe uses the Flash engine internally.
Apple worked directly with Adobe because investing the engineering resources needed to make Flash performant and stable didn’t make economic sense for them, but even after this, they couldn’t get it to be stable as desired. Job’s thinking was if you cannot do this on desktops, how on earth will you manage on a resource-constrained device like the iPhone?
Code execution and 2D rendering. What else could I mean?
But there's more. You know how people are excited to see native applications running in the browser? Flash did it in 2008[1].
You think you could run Quake2 with 2008-era JS engines?
You think you could run all those 2D games in 2002-era JS engines (even if had access to a Canvas element - which you didn't)?
>My wife's MacBook sounded like a jet engine whenever she would play the Facebook flash-based Scrabble.
Care to guess why it was a flash-based game and not an HTML5 based game?
> Care to guess why it was a flash-based game and not an HTML5 based game?
Anything would have been better, even bare HTML tables with no animations. The user experience of Facebook Flash Scrabble was awful (at least on OSX).
But that's the entire point!!! People didn't use Flash because they felt like it. People used Flash because there were things you could do with Flash that you could not do with HTML/JS. Remember there was a time that Flash was the best way to do video.
>Flash didn't seem "fast" to me (on Linux, Android and OSX).
Let's leave subjectivity out of it. If you ran a standard benchmarks and compare to JavaScript of the day, Flash would beat it. That's what I meant by fast.
Here's some metrics for a FlasCC compiled AS3 compared to C++: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PjMDwh4ZbJMMoo-G8vdK...
>Flash was clearly inefficient, it didn't use multicore
Neither does JavaScript (without WebWorkers). Neither does Node.js. Then again, Flash did get Worker support around 2012. And though your code was executed in a single thread, the actual rendering was delegated to the runtime, which was multi-threaded or backed by GPU.
>GPUs or hardware decoders
It sure did. Stage3D (think WebGL equivalent) was introduced in 2011. Video decoding delegated to hardware decoders since forever. Alchemy/FlaCC (WebAssembly equivalent) was released around 2009/2010. In many ways Flash was the vanguard of where HTML5 ended up going.
>The user experience of Facebook Flash Scrabble was awful (at least on OSX).
To be fair, Flash never ran well on OSX. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as on Windows.
>Java applets could do that since well before 2008.
Java applets were an alternative to Flash, but Flash was lighter and had much broader support. It was better for video, better for vector graphics and 2D animations. But yes, Java applets were used to gain functionality that wasn't available in the web just like Flash.