On: Adobe ceases development on mobile browser Flash, ...

[jay_kyburz]

I have to agree, I'm really enjoying working in flash every day at the moment. Web development has a long way to go before it's this much fun.

[cft → jay_kyburz]

The fact that Adobe acquired Macromedia was quite unfortunate for the web. Had Google acquired it, they would have probably opensourced the player code, and maybe contributed the AS3 rendering engine into WebKit as an alternative to javaScript, making Flash native for WebKit browsers. Maybe it's not too late for this step even now.

[cowpewter → cft]

Adobe open-sourced their AS3 engine[1] to Mozilla, instead. That potential future of JS (based on ECMAScript 4) was rejected in favor of Harmony.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamarin_(JavaScript_engine)

[zzzzzzzzz → cowpewter]

Tamarin ain't bad, but for me the main advantage of Flash right now is the relatively fast, browser-independent and (unfortunately) closed-source rendering engine.

[bsimpson → cft]

Was Macromedia openly on the market? Did Google ever seriously consider buying them?

[kreek → bsimpson]

Just before Adobe bought Macromedia there was a lot of noise (and angst) that Microsoft would be the one to buy them.