Flash isn't dead

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The absolute state of the 200m webpages that need flash.
I can't play web games, gnash can't support it.

We should have used sand-boxed machine code on the Web all along instead of crap like Flash or JavaScript. Smartphones did not exist back then and realistically we could have just had machine code transpilers or universal binaries for other platforms. It's really telling that running old console or arcade games on emulators works more reliably, more portably and is more secure than Flash. Java is not so horrendous, but it was just not the right tool for the job and the VM was not tuned at all for interactive multimedia entertainment.
In hindsight, it's obvious that ActiveX was utter crap but the idea of distributing native code on the web was the right thing. This is because CPU vendors are apparently the only people willing to create and manage super long-lasting interfaces that multiple parties can implement without creating an incompatibility hell. Microsoft's Win32 is not a good counter-example because it is way too huge and complex for competitors to implement (witness wine). It would have been great to have something like D3D9 or OpenGL in the browser though.
What a shitload of missed opportunities!