Next Flash Version Will Support Private Browsing

An anonymous reader writes "The world rolled its eyes when the problem of Flash cookies came to light several months ago. Even if you're careful about cookies or even if you use your browser's private surfing feature, sites can still track you through cookies stored by Flash. However, soon enough the next version of Flash, 10.1, will support private browsing and will integrate with browsers to turn it on when the browser itself is in private browsing mode. Browsers still store data during a private browser session, but they will delete it all at the end of the session. The same will be true of Flash private browsing."

Comments

That's simply not an adequate response

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry Adobe, but it's time for HTML5.

Re:That's simply not an adequate response

[Rejemy]

By which you mean "it's time for HTML5 in 3 years when IE9 penetration is high enough, assuming IE9 supports HTML5 when and if it comes out".

Re:Remind me why

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Because Advertisers are the customers that matter, and they love having something that survives a naive "clear cookies" attempt by the pitiful consumer?

Burn All Flashes

[Renderer of Evil]

Remember this site? http://burnallgifs.org

We need a similar campaign for Adobe Flash. It's dinosaur technology built for the internet stone age. Time to get rid of it for good.

Re:HTML5 is not an adequate response

[naz404]

Does HTML5 allows you to play video with some advertisement in a running text over it?
Sure. Just use a CSS layer.

Not if you're embedding 3rd-party videos on stuff like blogs, forums, etc the way people embed Youtube et al right now. Flash is great because it gives you a little widget that shows you a whole lot of options like contextual links, etc when embedded in 3rd party websites, giving the viewer the ability to check out related videos,etc.

Hardcore Flash games I can see and some super heavy duty flash "applications", but so often this can be done in HTML with CSS/AJAX.

You obviously are not a game developer and are talking out of your ass. "Easy to port HARCORE Flash Games often to CSS" my ass. CSS/AJAX has no equivalent for the timeline-based animation which makes putting animated stuff in Flash games so easy. Also, Flash has an excellent multi-channel sound API, something which is very rudimentary on HTML/Javascript. Sound is an important part of many games these days for the user experience, and Flash gives developers and the user good access to this.

Also, doing stuff in Javascript/CSS bloats the hell out of downloads since the interpreted Javascript code is in plaintext, unlike Flash which compresses it down to bytecode. Moreover, games built on the Flash platform can be made in a single SWF package which you can redistribute and embed to a whole bunch of different sites, unlike a DHTML-based game. Sure, you can build arcade games with Javascript/CSS, but they will not match the richness and features of Flash games.

Other stuff HTML5 doesn't have: support for microphone, webcam, multi-touch, accurate percentage loaded (down to single bytes) of assets (for preloaders which are important to the user so they can see accurate download progress and see when they can start using the apps), or client peer-to-peer support. Flash does. Let's see you try running relatively complex animated true-3D polygon models with texture mapping *at decent framerates* in DHTML too.

Yeah? That's what I thought. Flash is NOT YET dead.