On a side note Firefox without Flash is so much smoother. IMHO it is the fastest and most stable browser when it doesn't have Flash bogging it down.
5 to 7 years ago I would have said the same thing, I hated Flash with a passion. But now, when it's almost gone for good, I see that it had its reasons. For example the new Google Street View is many times slower and lags so much as to give me motion sickness (when it's not blocking my browser) compared to the previous version, which was Flash-based, and which used to work like a charm.
I think the terribleness of recent Google web front-ends (not only Maps and Street View but also Search, Mail, Groups, Gplus, etc.) is mostly a product of incompetent management process internal to Google, rather than an indictment of web technology generally.
I've gone back to a desktop mail client (Thunderbird) and moved away from the web for this sort of thing myself.
As far as the web goes, I am very impressed at openstreetmap. That is fast, accurate and has more useful mapping data than anything else rather than fancy overlays and imaging.
Just having it find my location became a chore. I'd be walking down the street looking at my phone the whole block, waiting for it to get my location. Many times it would show my location (with several miles of uncertainty) as being somewhere that I had not been for more than several hours. Other times it would just never find the location at all, not even having any idea what country, let alone city, I was in.
I downloaded OSMAnd and the province map data, and it was able to find my location within mere seconds every time. It was able to do it fast enough that if I clicked the power button as I was pulling my phone out of my pocket, it would have my position before my phone was in front of my face.
Unfortunately OSMAnd does not do transit routing, so I was attempting to use both at the same time. This gave me a direct comparison between how fast both were able to find my position, and how accurately. OSMAnd blows Google Maps away. I often resorted to typing in my "from" location in Google Maps, just so that I could use it to find routes for me while it was stalling on finding my location itself.
My location permissions were all correct. I tried wiping the application settings, with no luck. On the last day of my vacation I uninstalled all the google maps updates on my phone, and tried the version that shipped with it. It worked just fine.
If anybody else ever gets annoyed at Google Maps being unable to find their location in a timely manner, I highly recommend they try OSMAnd. It saved my vacation. As a bonus, it even behaves sensibly when on a boat.
Despite Google's claim to the contrary, they obviously no longer care about performance for some of their web-products.
I did go through the crash reporter.
The company I work for makes interactive/animated training media. While I work as a coder doing mostly server-side stuff, I can vouch for the power that the Flash authoring environment provided. It was rather similar to something like Unity, with a tightly integrated scenegraph and coding environment. For our team of animators who (by necessity, not by choice) picked up some coding chops on the job, it was a huge blessing.
Moving everything over to web technology has been extremely painful for exactly one reason: lack of a decent authoring workflow for interactive animations. There's nothing that can even touch Flash in this regard.
I don't have much problems with Firefox, it seems to work smooth. May be it's Google's fault?
I posted a similar comment about it the other day: [0]
Personally I would like to see HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) [1] implemented in the all the browsers, it's a nice lightweight protocol and would be the path of least resistance since it's already used heavily in the mobile space.
[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874338
[1] - https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming...
For everything else however (like pre-recorded video, games via WebGL), Flash should be phased out.
That is primarily because of the flash ads being dumped. An ad/flash/js blocker achieves much the same and then some by further reducing the latency to collect everything needed to render.
I've heard Facebook video and last.fm streaming don't work without Flash for eg.
http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/eme/basics/#clear-key
Regarding Facebook video, I fail to see how that is a bad thing ;)