All good points. But I'm still struggling with the idea of using the word "fast" to describe a technology that brought a 2GHz GPU-accelerated machine to its knees with Scrabble. Perhaps "sucked less than JavaScript"?
Both you and the person you responded to (Crinus) are right. I’ll share some context.
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?
FWIW i did almost all of my Flash development on OS X. It is kind of amusing to read that it was even faster on Windows (although TBH i do not remember any significant performance difference in the games i did between Windows, Linux and OS X - then again all i did was blit bitmaps and largely avoided the vector stuff).
