> Come on, Adobe is and has been many things, but certainly not a champion of open standards. Apple's track record of supporting standards is stellar in comparison.
I don't think this is fair to say Apple is better when it's specifically the open web. While Apple has been timid to expand web capabilities, Adobe has been an enormous aid in pushing the open web, and they have teams of researchers that work with TC39, khronos, and other partners. WebGL, WASM, WebGPU, and a huge part modern CSS today is due to years of R&D and spec work. While Apple had a native app platform to lock users into, Adobe (especially post-flash) had not much to gain other than growing the web to be a better export target for their creative tools.
> Come on. None of the popular websites stopped functioning.
Popular is pretty relative. What about Newgrounds, Zynga (209 million users), schools using Flash rich media for courses, and every website that used Flash for video content. Once Apple iOS decided to forever block flash, it caused these sites to become inaccessible for years on Apple until web alternatives arrived.
Ugh flash based video was a scourge on the web. It was bad on desktop where you're tethered to a power cord and the worst problem with excessive CPU usage was that your fans would spin up. That would never fly on mobile where you're way more constrained by battery life. Besides that flash video widgets always caused problems on desktop with focus stealing and whatnot.
The benefits of standardizing video under the guise of HTML5 cannot be overstated.
I can grok the benefits of using flash for "rich" content (ignoring that most of the rich content were popup ads), but video? No. Video was hands down one of the worst uses of flash.
I don't think this is fair to say Apple is better when it's specifically the open web. While Apple has been timid to expand web capabilities, Adobe has been an enormous aid in pushing the open web, and they have teams of researchers that work with TC39, khronos, and other partners. WebGL, WASM, WebGPU, and a huge part modern CSS today is due to years of R&D and spec work. While Apple had a native app platform to lock users into, Adobe (especially post-flash) had not much to gain other than growing the web to be a better export target for their creative tools.
> Come on. None of the popular websites stopped functioning.
Popular is pretty relative. What about Newgrounds, Zynga (209 million users), schools using Flash rich media for courses, and every website that used Flash for video content. Once Apple iOS decided to forever block flash, it caused these sites to become inaccessible for years on Apple until web alternatives arrived.