The codec problem was real but portability didn&#x27;t make the performance (or reliability &amp; security) problems inevitable. That was due to Adobe&#x27;s management seeing the period of browser stagnation &amp; the lack of widely available high-quality codecs as the natural order of things rather than an unlikely opportunity which they&#x27;d lucked into.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to speculate about what might have happened had they chosen to cultivate a culture of software quality rather than putting everything on customer-milking mode. If Flash had performed well and been well-supported with a non-joke update strategy, Steve Jobs wouldn&#x27;t have had so many enthusiastic supporters in the war on Flash and the second round of browser wars might never have heated up.<p>I count myself in that camp in part because I&#x27;ve always preferred the web&#x27;s openness but also because I used Flash for a few projects and saw how horrible the experience was – technical debt at record levels, clumsy development tools and lousy documentation, and the $800 price didn&#x27;t even buy reading comprehension on support requests. Fortunately, WebKit was getting serious traction by then so it became increasingly easy to avoid it. If I had any doubts about that call, it was confirmed when the next Flash release came out a year or so later and all of my bug reports were closed with a generic “please pay $900 to see if this was fixed” message after I&#x27;d gone to the trouble of including reproducible test cases for each one.