The entirety of current web design practice is taking full control over the UX. Gone are the days when you sent a GET and got an html document back, the most interactive element of which was a textarea box.
The other reason flash was a pain, incidentally, was because it was easy to bog down a client computer with overzealous flash stuff... just like the current tendency to use javascript to do all your rendering and computation clientside -- exactly when more people than ever before are browsing on pocket devices with far less horsepower than traditional computing devices.
Rendering on the client side is fast, especially on the newer high end devices like the S4 & the IPhone5. It will only continue to get faster.
The biggest issues are bandwidth/asset file sizes & using heavy-weight frameworks. They bog down the UX on mobile devices.
On my current project, I'm using browserify, Backbone, jQuery, & compiled Handlebars. The same codebase supports rendering on the web server, rendering on the web client, mobile web, & apps using PhoneGap. Things seem to be performing well, even on the S2.
Note: there are strange performance issues with the S4 stock browser.
Rendering on the client side is not even possible with the vast majority of handheld devices in use around the world. The biggest issues are, as they have always been, the fact that commercial interests have triumphed over any kind of inclusive standard practice.
Please understand I'm not passing judgment on the matter -- but I would like to highlight the relatively elite status of people with quad-core telephones.
Agreed. This is also going to be its undoing. While I don't anticipate a sudden consumer rebellion against provider lock-in (not least since the market can remain irrational longer than you, qua the vendor of a better alternative, can remain solvent), I do think there is going to be a great clearing-out.
It was also a pain because there as nothing you could do about performance problems. Nowadays, there is serious work going into optimizing JS, that was impossible with a closed platform.
One wonders if performance could be solve by open-sourcing flash. I liked AS3 more than JS.
The other reason flash was a pain, incidentally, was because it was easy to bog down a client computer with overzealous flash stuff... just like the current tendency to use javascript to do all your rendering and computation clientside -- exactly when more people than ever before are browsing on pocket devices with far less horsepower than traditional computing devices.