system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why does everyone hate flash and why are they happy that it's "going away"?
gpt
You know how the Olympics have two official languages, English and French, right? This standardization allows everyone (athletes, judges, organizers, and watchers) to have one of two languages in which to communicate. Moreover, for the sake of this analogy, imagine that English and French are easily-accessible languages (that is, there are many many schools that teach the language, and many resources for learning them).

Now, imagine that, say, the Russian gymnastics team _insists_ on using only Russian to communicate. They are such an important part of the Olympics that the International Olympic Committee has no choice but to allow them to do so. Finally, imagine there are virtually no resources for learning Russian: either you grew up speaking it, or you didn't, but it's very hard to find a way to learn the language later. This situation would be totally disruptive to the idea that everyone should be able to communicate with everyone else at the Olympics.

(note: not picking on Russians here, they're just a great example of an indispensable country for the Olympics to keep its character.)

This is what happened with Flash - the open-source web standards of HTML, ECMAScript, CSS and so on were designed from the beginning to be open, accessible, and understandable to people _and other computers_ using the Internet. They were open, and standards-based, which means whole teams of people could support their development and stability. Then Flash came along, which had lots of nice features (like streaming video), but it was closed source, buggy, fickle, and completely opaque to the tools and people involved in using it. The result was that we had a split between the easy-to-understand, debuggable, and standards-based technology with a fickle and unpredictable prima donna that had a tendency to crash, taking down the whole browser.