I was not comparing Flash to the JavaScript of the era, just pointing out that, as an end user, Flash didn't seem "fast" to me (on Linux, Android and OSX). Performance on a desktop-class CPU is also only one metric. Flash was clearly inefficient, it didn't use multicore, GPUs or hardware decoders. Was your Quake2 demo above using even OpenGL? Java applets could do that since well before 2008. The original Quake2 could do that in 1997.
> Care to guess why it was a flash-based game and not an HTML5 based game?
Anything would have been better, even bare HTML tables with no animations. The user experience of Facebook Flash Scrabble was awful (at least on OSX).
>I was not comparing Flash to the JavaScript of the era
But that's the entire point!!! People didn't use Flash because they felt like it. People used Flash because there were things you could do with Flash that you could not do with HTML/JS. Remember there was a time that Flash was the best way to do video.
>Flash didn't seem "fast" to me (on Linux, Android and OSX).
Let's leave subjectivity out of it. If you ran a standard benchmarks and compare to JavaScript of the day, Flash would beat it. That's what I meant by fast.
>Flash was clearly inefficient, it didn't use multicore
Neither does JavaScript (without WebWorkers). Neither does Node.js. Then again, Flash did get Worker support around 2012. And though your code was executed in a single thread, the actual rendering was delegated to the runtime, which was multi-threaded or backed by GPU.
>GPUs or hardware decoders
It sure did. Stage3D (think WebGL equivalent) was introduced in 2011. Video decoding delegated to hardware decoders since forever. Alchemy/FlaCC (WebAssembly equivalent) was released around 2009/2010. In many ways Flash was the vanguard of where HTML5 ended up going.
>The user experience of Facebook Flash Scrabble was awful (at least on OSX).
To be fair, Flash never ran well on OSX. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't as good as on Windows.
>Java applets could do that since well before 2008.
Java applets were an alternative to Flash, but Flash was lighter and had much broader support. It was better for video, better for vector graphics and 2D animations. But yes, Java applets were used to gain functionality that wasn't available in the web just like Flash.
Code execution and 2D rendering. What else could I mean?
But there's more. You know how people are excited to see native applications running in the browser? Flash did it in 2008[1].
You think you could run Quake2 with 2008-era JS engines?
You think you could run all those 2D games in 2002-era JS engines (even if had access to a Canvas element - which you didn't)?
>My wife's MacBook sounded like a jet engine whenever she would play the Facebook flash-based Scrabble.
Care to guess why it was a flash-based game and not an HTML5 based game?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vH4p8wzqtuA