I believe the people calling for its demise are actually calling for an end to sloppy programming by bad coders who work for ad agencies. If Flash ever actually dies, and gets replaced by "HTML5", people are going to be sorely disappointed when those very same bad coders simply start writing exactly the same sloppy code in javascript.

But Adobe isn't doing itself any favours either. Once every day or two the fans on my laptop ramp up for apparently no reason -- and a quick trip into the process monitor invariably reveals that the Flash plugin process has gone rampant and is eating 100% of my CPU, long after I've left the site that was using it. It's excruciating to wait for Adobe to fix these long-standing issues, as they seem to feel no real urgency to improve the performance and stability of the plugin.

"HTML5" as a group of technologies to replace Flash will no doubt see its share of terribly written uses, but at least the Firefox, Chrome, Safari et al teams can compete to write the most-efficient, least buggy runtimes for those crappy sites to run on.

Sadly, Adobe hasn't seen fit to offer comparable functionality for dealing with a Flash application that goes berserk. But again, I think that comes down to browsers being in strong competition creating a lot of incentive for them to work hard on efficiency and UX, where Adobe is content to let usability stagnate and bugs fester.

  Unresponsive script is different then slow script

[1] Unless your are using webworkers. Those are executed in separate threads.

Edit: It was incredibly easy to locate this on Google, so I am sure a little research could have worked well for your comment and perhaps saved yourself the possible FUD attribution.

Mplayer is roughly twice as fast, and both are using libavcodec for decoding H264.

Or rather, I think it isn't a flattering comment on Flash's efficiency that having it display ads on webpages requires that much processing power.

Flash is a Turing-complete runtime that executes 3rd party content, and the environment that hosts Flash doesn't place any restrictions on how much resources it can use. With such liberties, it's completely expected that some people will produce banner ads that consume 99% of CPU time.

CSS+JavaScript has the same exact problem, so getting rid of Flash wouldn't solve anything. (You may think it does because you're running a Flash blocker, but that's just because the offending content producers haven't migrated to your preferred solution yet.)

I don't have anything but anecdotal data to back this up, which is a huge caveat. Please feel free to knock this down.

But I have to ask: have we seen as much improvement in Flash performance as we have in plain old browser performance? Browsers are improving by leaps and bounds. I'm skeptical that Flash has had a similar performance renaissance.

For one thing, who've they had to compete with until recently? Browser vendors are tripping over one another to improve speed. Until HTML5, you were out of luck for rich content if you didn't want to use Flash.

Now, I agree that eliminating Flash won't solve ads in one stroke of JS. Even so, moving that stuff out of Flash (which browser vendors have little control over) into the browser itself enables vendors to improve whatever performance-troubled cases that HTML5 ads provide.

And, most importantly, improving HTML5 performance, ads or no, is a win across the board, IMO. A faster browser means faster ads AND apps.

Simple fact is, Flash is not as good as we need it to be.

If you don't like Flash, fine. Just stop selling this fallacy that Flash has some universal special power to drain battery power, or has some special ability to empower the worst ads. It's patently absurd.

Amusing of course, but not even close to being accurate. Take a look at this for example:

http://www.unitzeroone.com/labs/alchemyPushingPixels/

That's rendering about 300,000 particles in 3D, in realtime. On my four-year-old macbook pro, the cpu usage is barely noticeable.

I don't know why our numbers are so different. But I do know that on both my G4 iBook and G4 mac mini, any flash meant that I was maxing out. Since it was a G4, I wasn't surprised. What I was surprised about is that when I got my intel iMac (CPU as above) flash wasn't slow but used most of my CPU power.

Edit: removed typo

Flash ads used to lock up my old G4 frequently.

Perhaps if Flash only ran in your active tab - or rather the one you were viewing - it wouldn't be so bad. It's hardly energy efficient - if I was to leave my computer for 20 minutes it would just keep consuming, whereas you'd hope it would throttle power use.

There's nothing that prevents somebody from writing ads in javascript/canvas and using your browser to fold proteins.

Browsing the modern web is an incredibly complex activity.

Many of those Flash ads feature high bitrate videos, sound streams, and complex interactive elements. Of course, maybe advertisers shouldn't be building such overbearing creations to try to grab your attention, but don't blame Flash for their excess.

We are talking about Flash - not ads per se.