Posted 2020-June-30, 11:22
Because Adobe is killing support for Flash at the end of the year, and Google will probably disable it working in their browser at that time, if not before. So will the rest of the browsers. It's unsafe, has been for a decade, and Adobe is finally saying that the cost of dealing with the continual stream of found security holes is more than the cost of retiring a massively-used browser platform, now that there is an alternative (HTML5).
This is not a new thing, everyone has known about it for at least a year. And you have been in threads, just like I, that have mentioned it.
BBO really did not want to build a v3 client (or at least, didn't want to necessarily bring the mobile client to the big screen). They were forced to. With a time limit. And that time limit has been attacked by - well, some other issue that affected the number of bridge players using their service. I, too, hope that the things that are difficult in the V3 directing screen get cleared up soon (I know that a massive one was fixed literally the day the ACBL RAH started, and a couple minor other ones during the tournament). Since the directing tab makes BBO money (and a fair bit more of it these days than before), I assume it's a higher priority than other things (categories, grumble, type without click, whine,...) as well.
I see Newgrounds, which has a *much bigger* flash codebase than bridge does, is working on a flash emulator in HTML5/Rust. It would be fun to see if BBOv2 works on it - but the answer is almost certainly "no, and likely never will".
When I go to sea, don't fear for me, Fear For The Storm -- Birdie and the Swansong (tSCoSI)