I don't miss the vulnerabilities that came with Flash, but I do miss the ease of creating animations, training, games, etc. that came with Flash.
Back in the day I worked with a team that created training modules for products. We had a team of animators that was creating beautiful stuff. We had a cast of characters, voice talent, the whole shebang. It was very popular, especially in Asia where they loved the animated training.
Then the iPad came out. Our customers informed us that they were going to adopt the iPad for their on the floor training. Well, the iPad didn't support Flash so we had to rebuild everything to be HTML/CSS/JS only. It has been nearly 10 years and we are still using plain text, images, and the occasional video. We tried bringing back the interactive animations over the years, but nothing has come out that comes anywhere close to working as well as Flash did. It really sucks that despite nearly a decade no Flash replacement has emerged. I really feel like we lost something when Flash died. Interactive animations have been replaced with youtube videos and boring text and image web pages.
On the vulnerabilities... working with flash made me abandon it at home years before the iPhone. Flash, Java and PDF are some of the biggest sources for browser security flaws historically... and that doesn't even touch the complexity of some nearer term flaws that would have been found eventually.
One of the biggest sources of browser security flaws was browsers during that era, also. Moreover browser makers had access to the Flash source code, and Flash was an open spec anyone could implement.
I don't think it's as simple as "web secure, everything else bad". For the very longest time only Chrome and Safari had working sandboxes, and there wasn't a huge difference in the exploit stream between WebKit, Flash, Java and Adobe Reader. They all had somewhat similar feature sets.
For games, game maker studio is a pretty good replacement I’ve found. The interface is pretty idiosyncratic (so was flash’s!), but I have a similar experience coding in that.
Back in the day I worked with a team that created training modules for products. We had a team of animators that was creating beautiful stuff. We had a cast of characters, voice talent, the whole shebang. It was very popular, especially in Asia where they loved the animated training.
Then the iPad came out. Our customers informed us that they were going to adopt the iPad for their on the floor training. Well, the iPad didn't support Flash so we had to rebuild everything to be HTML/CSS/JS only. It has been nearly 10 years and we are still using plain text, images, and the occasional video. We tried bringing back the interactive animations over the years, but nothing has come out that comes anywhere close to working as well as Flash did. It really sucks that despite nearly a decade no Flash replacement has emerged. I really feel like we lost something when Flash died. Interactive animations have been replaced with youtube videos and boring text and image web pages.