I don’t enjoy everything about the bloated platform that is the modern web, but the design of it is a lot more sound. And when you look at all of the functionality stacked into this unsandboxed blackbox to keep it competitive and alive, I don’t feel it’s terribly surprising. There was a period of time where it felt like there was a new use-after-free in Flash every month. I still, before that point, had been personally hit by a Flash 0day, and a couple of my friends got hit later by a malicious Mediafire Flash payload. I disabled Flash before most people, and was using a userscript to use the then-new and buggy tag for YouTube. J2ME may have been not the most thrilling platform, but I’d not be surprised if it had a better security track record at the end of the day.
Would the problems with touch usability and accessibility be resolved at some point? Maybe I don’t know - I presume Adobe Air was able to do it for native apps, although my experience with Adobe Air apps was also not very good.
But even for games and other software, I just don’t think the NPAPI browser plugin model was worth keeping. It was never ideal for what it was most popular for (videos, streams) which only became apparent after the alternatives stabilized. Phones now have better CPUs and GPUs and I am relieved beyond words that Flash is totally dead now. Worst of all, Flash frequently crashed my browser and sometimes even caused the entire phone to reboot. If you had Flash enabled on a blog or other site that just happened to pop up a flash ad, it would make the whole page janky, greatly hurting pan and zoom functionality and killing your battery life for no benefit. Worse than this was sites that used Flash in non-essential ways like ads.
Flash games and applications almost worked, although virtually none of them were responsively designed, and they mostly worked pretty poorly with touch controls, and unlike HTML there was no way to reasonably work around or improve this at the browser level, because it was just a big proprietary black box. I was an Android user at the time and the only way Flash on my device could be described is in terms of locomotive incidents.
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