&gt; The amount of brainpower that is wasted on quirky legacy browser behaviour and the lack of consistency between them makes me long for the days where I could position and measure and control with ease and speed as in Flash.<p>Big AS3 fan here, it is less true today. I accept the fact that, while AS3 and Flash IDEs were exciting technologies to work with ( I worked with cool artists, musicians, video producers on crazy futuristic projects...), The underlying tech was bad, for 2 reasons<p>- security. this one is obvious.<p>- closed source tech. Flash is now almost dead since Adobe basically pulled the plug on the IDE and there is nothing AS3 devs can do about it. Yes the compiler is open source, but the player is not.<p>I made me appreciate the how important open technologies are. They do not solve everything. But they are important.<p>Frankly, as someone said somewhere else in the thread, Adobe killed Flash, by not opening the plugin&#x27;s source code, by not trying to make it unnecessary. A lot can be done now with WebGL, C++ compilation can be done with Emscripten , Web APIs now cover a lot of what Flash used to do, and where was Adobe on that ? Edge Animate ? what a joke.<p>With the fall of Flash there are opportunities though, so that&#x27;s a good thing. I&#x27;m thinking hard about it.