because nothing in javascript looks very nice.
I guess that's something that needs to change.
It does. It won't for awhile, but I wrote a
piece of code last year that takes the first steps toward converting Flash-like code to Canvas without having to light things up pixel by pixel. There are a few other packages out (Grant skinner literally ripped mine off directly to build easel.js, and there's rumor of a falconjs that Adobe's giving to Apache to be the ultimate Flash-to-JS converter)...but although I can code some mean ass Javascript, I recognize that the engines still aren't up to the task of giving rendered graphics downloadable or flash- or java-like quality in the browser. Which is important for gambling, especially games like roulette, craps, anything with a lot of animation. Or even nice card animations. Even though it would be barely possible now to port one game at a time from Sapphire's flash code to Javascript, it would run like a hog on an iphone, no matter how perfectly optimized it was. The javascript canvas and webkit engines are just not as efficient as the AVM2/AS3 virtual machine, or the JVM. Let alone native code.
It does have to change, and it will get there. But if the reason you don't like Flash has to do with all the annoying banner ads, it's going to get worse, because Flash almost never actually crashes a browser, but Javascript crashes them all the time. The more of those banners move away from Flash and into JS/HTML5, the slower the web is going to get.
Ten years from now it won't matter, because Javascript 2 is basically Flash anyway, and HTML6/JS2 will resemble what Flash is now pretty closely. In the meantime, it's either smooth graphics on the desktop, or shitty graphics and works on an iphone.
