But those ideologists are right, Flash is evil in so many ways:

a) It eats babies. (Seriously, look at how much CPU and RAM it eats.) b) It's insecure. Want a flaw that even users with a safe browser (ie not IE) are not safe against? Search for a Flash vulnerability. c) It sucks for handicapped people. Blind? Well your bad that you can only use a screen reader. No website for you. (This obviously doesn't matter for video sites). d) Cookies? Lame, if you really want to track your user (or whatever you call the people that watch your ads), even if he clears his browser cache, use Flash cookies. Want to open Popups? Too bad the user has a popup blocker. Oh wait, we can get around that with Flash. d) It's closed source, so many free software people don't want to run it.

> c) It sucks for handicapped people. Blind? Well your bad that you can only use a screen reader. No website for you. (This obviously doesn't matter for video sites)

You are right that Flash's accessibility support and the...lack of content providers taking advantage of them...sucks for all sorts of handicapped people, but it's still there and being improved on (hopefully) so it's not a total dead end for screenreaders. Plus, flash videos can be a good source for audio for the blind.

I disagree, Adobe is evil.

The problem is web standards and browsers are not great, either. Evil Adobe/Macromedia took advantage of this chaos and solved several problems quick and dirty while pushing one of the most proprietary technologies widely used.

And "the web" has to come back with real non-proprietary widely adopted solutions to all this things because most web designers are addicted.

One of the typical non-video problems: file uploading.

So Adobe and Flash are evil, a necessary evil. The OP coded something instead of just giving an opinion. Respect.

PS: I still don't understand how Microsoft, Netscape, Opera and Mozilla allowed this monster to exist.

Aren't there enough objectively bad things about Flash to justify summarizing it as "evil"? It does so many bad things to a web site's accessibility, usability, download size, security, and performance that anybody with a genuine interest in making the web a better place should be encouraging migration to the open standards based alternatives. Now that HTML5 features are available, it seems that the only significant things Flash has going for it are a large install base and a decent authoring tool.

There's enough bad things about almost any good thing...

I use Flash (Flex, actually) for my company's website and it works very well for us. Blanket-labelling it as evil is just silly. Flash is no more evil than a hammer.

A large install base and a decent authoring tool are the sine qua non of online rich media.

Silverlight has the latter; HTML 5 will eventually attain a decent install base; but Flash has both now.

I don't think you can make a case for Flash in OS X not being evil. I never had a problem in Windows, but seeing it grab ~50% of my cpu, even when idle, on a Mac definitely makes me categorize it as evil.