Occupy Flash?

mcgrew writes "CNN is reporting another Occupy movement — Occupy Flash. Their aim: get rid of Flash completely. They explain: 'Why does it matter when HTML5 has clearly won the fight for the future of our web browsing? Well, as we've seen with other outdated web technologies (most notably the much-lamented Internet Explorer 6), as long as software is installed on machines, there will be a contingent of decision makers who mandate its use, and there will be a requirement of continued support, the plugin will live on, and folks will continue to develop for it.' In response, a group of Flash developers have started Occupy HTML in Flash's defense. Popcorn, anyone?"

Comments

I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[elrous0]

Clearly the "Occupy" meme is being abused now. Every dipshit with any pet cause is slapping "Occupy" on it and co-opting solidarity with the OWS movement. "Occupy" is teetering on the edge of really jumping the shark here. If it goes much further, we run the risk of "Hey, remember that whole 'Occupy' fad? What was with THAT, huh?" becoming a segment on VH1's Hey, Remember The Teens? episode on 2011.

Therefore I propose we Occupy "Occupy" before it's too late. We must stand up to those who would steal our term. Because if we don't make a stand today, tomorrow we may be faced with Twilight fans wearing "Occupy Edward" and "Occupy Jacob" t-shirts, which can only lead to nostalgic Gen-Xer's wearing lame "Occupy Empire" and "Occupy Rebellion" Star Wars shirts.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Anonymous Coward]

This is what happens when your movement has no, or very loosely defined, goals.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention, and I'm sure I'm gonna get hate from all the web developers that are drooling in their coffee over new tech (I swear you guys are as bad as gamers when it comes to new toys) but everyone seems to ignore the elephant in the room that is taking a big shit on the rug and stinking up the joint! What is that elephant?

HTML V5 IS A BIG PILE OF SUCK! that's what! It sucks MORE resources than flash, requires MORE CPU and RAM, I've found it pretty much won't run at all on anything less than a dual core, whereas flash will run fine without hardware acceleration on a 1.8GHz Celeron or Sempron as long as you stick to SD video and will even play HD1080p if you put a decent GPU to share the load, sucks up MORE bandwidth than flash...

Are you people sure this idea of "progress" wasn't cooked up by Dilbert's PHB? Now I can understand the iFanbois rushing to embrace it because anything the God Steve said was law to those nutters, but web developers are usually a LITTLE more sane than that, so what gives? Did you lose your collective minds?

And before someone pipes in with "It'll get better" well that may be true, but I could say that in the future that I could play HD video simply by farting the theme from "The Dukes Of Hazzard" but that don't help us none NOW does it partner? We are talking NOW and guys like the nutball occupy flash want to replace flash NOW with a system that simply doesn't work!

It is worse in EVERY SINGLE MEASURE than flash and we haven't even gotten to the DRM that MSFT and Apple is gonna put into it yet! Hell is there even a way for the FOSS guys to legally play H.264 on Linux, or is it still like Blu Ray? If it sucks THIS bad now, imagine when the MPAA gets done. Oh MSFT and Apple will be happy, they both sign NDAs and support kernel level DRM so the next netflix will play beautifully on Win 8 and the next iShiny, sucks for FOSS though.

So why? It makes no sense! It is worse in every way, will most likely be a *.A.A wet dream as both MSFT and Apple want to "fucking kill Google" and what better way than trying to lock up the next format between themselves, and most importantly HTML V5 is a damned pig, sucking CPU cycles and RAM like a drunk at a free minibar! So WTF developers, have you lost your damned minds? Or is that iPad just too damned shiny for you to see anything but iMoney?

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Toonol]

The Occupy movement jumped the shark about two days in. The first reports were promising; Wall Street is rife with corruption, the bailout was cronyism at it's worst. The American public had, potentially, a lot of sympathy with those causes.

It turned out, though, that the Occupy movement was just the same old agitators, with a little more substantial marketing campaign behind them. The occupy movement is now, clearly, a leftist subset of the democrat party, with the same old, tired, socialist screeds. If they had kept it as a protest movement against corruption and granting political favors, I would have supported them. When one of the primary components became losers whining about their student loans, they had obviously taken their eyes off the target.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[maxwell demon]

I mean, Obama and Bernanke as part of the 99%?

Of course. everyone is part of the 99%. It's just a matter of choosing the remaining 1% accordingly.

Of course not everyone is part of the same 99%.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[mcgrew]

"Ron Paul, a current presidential candidate for the 2012 election, has lead an
incredibly successful life and has a Net Worth of $4.9 Million".

"Barack Obama is the former Senator from Illinois and the 44th President of the
United States with an estimated net worth of $10.5 million."

Obama is only twice as rich as Ron Paul. They're both 1%ers.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Anthony Mouse]

The problem is that there is no cause. There is no 99%. It's just a bunch of people who collectively agree that they don't like the way things are, but fundamentally disagree on how things should be instead.

It's shades of "change you can believe in." People want change, but what change? Borrowing so much that we can't pay the interest is change. Nuclear war is change. Is that the change we want? Certainly not.

You need to define a platform before you can have a cause. But that dissolves the coalition of the naive who each believe that everyone wants to do the thing they want to do rather than each having their own ideas and goals.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Karlt1]

And is there nobody here that can think for themselves anymore? Why has NOBODY here asked themselves "Who is pushing this? who will gain from it?" and the answer is....drumroll....Apple and MSFT! By pushing a heavily patented spec like H.264 as the video "standard" they will be able to further lock down the web.

As opposed to a closed source plug in? Where is the spec for the Flash run time?

And guess which codec Flash video usually uses?

What you will see is the MPAA come up with a truly horrible DRM for H.264 to protect their content, Apple and MSFT will embrace it, FOSS will be fucked.

So Flash is open sourced and doesn't have DRM?

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time to stop the redistribution of wealth from the 99% to the 1%. We created it, we want more of it.

Then quit working for "The Man" and do it your own damn self. If you want it, then you earn it.
Quit crying like a little bitch.

This doesn't work so well when "The Man" is systematically rigging the system to tilt the table. For example, consider the demonization of universal public health care by the right wing, which is currently the tool of the 1% (and of the American Christian Taliban, but that's not relevant to this discussion). How many people are rightfully afraid to risk 'doing it their own damn self' if that means losing their job-provided insurance? People with family responsibilities and health problems which will make it difficult or expensive to self-insure have hidden but real golden handcuffs tying them to their jobs: they're the only way to get (relatively) cheap guaranteed insurance which can't be taken away as soon as you start costing the insurance company anything.

Nor is it a sane opinion if you actually bother to think about the difficulty most 99%ers would have in striking it out alone. You don't seem to have noticed that most professions in our society don't work so well for independent lone wolves. The fact that we need large organizations to get many economic activities done doesn't mean that the people with the capital to create those organizations are working any harder than the people who actually do the work, or that the wealthy deserve almost all of the profits and bargaining power. Study the late 1800s and early 1900s for what can happen when the balance of power is much too far in the direction of the people with the money, and then study the post-WWII economic boom to learn how everyone wins when things are more fair.

Or don't, and continue to wallow in your Libertarian looney-toon world where the more money a person has, obviously the more righteous they must be, as only hard working heroes can get money, and if you don't have money you must be lazy scum. Where it is flatly impossible for an unregulated 'free market' to do anything bad, because free markets are good and pure and incapable of doing wrong, by definition, damn all observations to the contrary. Where you're oddly completely tone-deaf to the ways that the labor market is made less than free by the people making the loudest noises about the value of free markets.

Unfortunate

[timeOday]

I think the Occupy Wall Street movement is tackling an important issue, and co-opting the name for a trivial issue like this is unnecessary and unfortunate.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

What issue are they takling? You talk to people and they have no clue what they are demanding... it is simply a disorganized mess.

Re:Unfortunate

[MightyMartian]

That's an insult to disorganized messes. Even a disorganized mess makes more sense than the Occupy movement(s).

Re:Unfortunate

[timeOday]

I feel like I get the gist of the Occupy movement, just as people get the gist of the Tea Party. I agree that neither is definitive enough to be considered a political party, but pushing in a general direction and keeping some flavor of issues on the front burner can be constructive.

If the press really wanted to understand the Occupy movement, it wouldn't just stand back and complain that the movement is not producing a manifesto. Rather, they would take an empirical approach, by conducting surveys with the protesters, to see which attitudes best characterize them, statistically. (Quick, somebody write an app for that).

Re:Unfortunate

[kelemvor4]

It's really bad. I saw an interview with one of the occupiers who had been given the boot the other day and when they asked her what she thought of the coppers evicting her and the other protesters she said "maybe it was what we needed." I think she is right.

Re:Unfortunate

[Jonner]

Though OWS has fuzzy goals, they clearly seem to be against corporate control. What better symbol of corporate control is there than Flash? OWS's issue may be more important, but technology standards are not trivial.

Re:Unfortunate

[kimvette]

Really? What is OWS's stated goal? To be a nuisance? To institution a communist system like the Soviets had, where you get paid even if you don't show up to work, can't get fired, but also no one (except elitist tyrants) can afford anything, and there is nothing in the stores to buy anyhow?

Thanks, but no thanks. I'll take my chances with capitalism where a combination of work, ingenuity and luck can result in accumulation of wealth.

Re:Unfortunate

[TheRaven64]

Maybe I missed something, I was under the impression that they were protesting against the concentration of wealth into the hands of a small percentage of the population, most of whom did nothing to create that wealth. What they lack is a good solution to this problem - part of the point of the protests is to draw attention to the problem in the hope that someone will solve it.

Re:Unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

Occupy is a result of what happens when enough people get sick of their bread and circuses - they might not be able to coherently word their grievances into a manifesto but they know they're generally unhappy with the way their society is heading. It usually degenerates quickly into governments struggling to keep control with police and then military violence against civilians, and then you either have a regime change or a bloodbath or both on your hands.

Re:Unfortunate

[Jeng]

You cannot come up with a solution until you know what the problem is.

If you tear down a government without a clear idea of how to rebuild it it is then likely that the rebuilt government will end up being worse than the original.

Re:Unfortunate

[amicusNYCL]

What issue is that? That a bunch of idiots are having a street party calling it a 'movement' when all they really need to do is actually fucking vote rather than being whiney little bitches?

Hey, great solution. They can vote for the Republican candidate who has been vetted and funded by Wall Street, or the Democrat candidate who has been vetted and funded by Wall Street. Yeah, that will show them!

Re:Unfortunate

[DriedClexler]

You can't both be for "responsibility" while also being for forgiveness of your debts incurred when getting an overpriced worthless degree.

It's unfortunate, too, because I agree with their criticism about all the wealthy who have gotten that way without producing any real value ... but most OWS solutions would simply make *themselves* those people, to the extent they want high salaries despite having worthless skills. Plus, their demand for more funding for higher education would just make the education system even more bloated and wasteful, with more university leaders getting big salaries for doing nothing of value.

pissing contests

[tverbeek]

HTML5 is not a superset of Flash.
Flash is not a superset of HTML5.

Get over the pissing contests and use the right tool for the job.

Glad I read this, I learned a few things

[kiwimate]

Though the 15-year old technology is still commonly used for advertisements, videos and games, many developers have been moving toward more modern and universal standards like HTML5

Well that's pretty impressive. It's been around for 15 years, and is still heavily used. That said, HTML5 is looking pretty sure to eclipse it, eventually.

"We feel this move effectively creates two Internets -- the one you can use on mobile/tablets and the one you can use on the desktop," one of the founders of the Occupy Flash movement said via e-mail. "This is not good for anyone except Adobe."

Now that I know it's been around for 15 years, I'm kind of impressed it's still working, and not terribly surprised that it hasn't morphed well into newer technologies that are being used in ways people were only beginning to think of at the turn of the millenium. I know 15 years is not that unusual for some technologies, like mainframes, but just think about the rapid pace of development in web standards, graphics cards and algorithms, etc.

Huh, I wonder what Adobe thinks.

HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community

Seems reasonable. As does this:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations

Fair enough. What about security fixes?

We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Spiffy.

Aren't there more important things these people could be spending their time on?

As much as I hate flash..

[Superken7]

As much as I hate flash, you gotta admit flash existed for a reason: it filled the gaps where HTML was more lacking. Unfortunately, that's still true today even with HTML5, although the trend towards HTML5 is very obvious and clear.

Many browsers still can't playback HTML5 properly and there isn't even a single video codec which will work consistently across browsers just like flash does, AFAIK. (I'm talking about h264 license issues, WebM's lack of hardware decoding, etc..).
Also, while rich media solutions are certainly possible with CSS3 and javascript, it still requires significantly more effort than its flash counterparts.

Of course, that doesn't excuse many many (many) uses where flash isn't really necessary but still being used. THAT must go. And flash video should be avoided where possible if the browser supports anything else. I think the main issue with that is that many web developers are still being lazy (hey, megavideo, I'm looking at you!).

But flash still accomplishes some things across browsers consistently in a way that HTML5 and CSS3 still can't - or at least not effortlessly for the web developer, which is what counts most of the times; let's hope Adobe helps with that with the HTML5 tools they are building.

So don't blame everything on flash, the standards are advancing too slowly IMHO even with backers such as Apple and Google.

Re:"I hate flash" is the new "I hate Microsoft"

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried using the plugin in linux? It does not do what it is supposed to and it does not do it reasonably well.

In a 100 years Occupy will be equiv. with STUPID

[PortHaven]

Seriously,

Most people attacking Flash have never built an application in it. I'm not talking about some stupid animated banner ad. html 5 will do that fine.

But try coding a web application to handle a variety of browsers from ie 7 to ie 10, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and so on.

Doing that with html 5, js, css can often be a maze of exceptions, variants, etc. With Flash, it's simply installing a single common plugin.

Yes, there is a lot of bad Flash code out there. But there is far more bad html & js. Furthermore, there are many things that html 5 can't quite do on a level that Flash currently can.

So it makes more sense to allow for a transition. Allow html 5 to become more refined.

To call for such a policy of cold turkey is just stupid. Why not call for the elimination of all html 4 code from the web. I mean, we have the new glorious html 5.

---

Let's look at the criticisms:

1. Flash is buggy well so are many html, ajaxsites. I find Facebook hugely buggy and constantly run into issues with ajax. In fact, I run into issues far more with html, js, ajax, etc than I do with Flash.

Score 0

2. Crashes a lot. I guess on Linux. Over the past several years I've had very few crashes of Flash on either my Windows or Mac PCs. Exception, for about 2-3 months there was a version of Flash Player 10 that was crashing with sad face all the time. Comparitively, if I exclude that one update period. Then Flash has crashed less for me than any browser I've used.

Score 0

3. Requires constant security updates. Seriously, what doesn't? Windows does. Firefox feels like it updates almost everytime I use my computer. iTunes, I swear has a new update and new terms of service every launch.

Score 0

4. Doesn't work on most mobile devices.

Score 1 ... but how much of that is corporate politics?

In conclusion...

Challenge: Before anyof you downgrade this post. I challenge you to go look at ActionScript 3 as a programming language. And compare it with JavaScript. Tell me which is a better programming language.

Flash's demise has far more to do with corporate politics, closed gardens, and restrictions on use than it does with the technology itself.

And OccupyFlash is clearly full of people on par with the stupidity of a lot of the ows crowd.

"Apple iPhones and iPads, have not been able to view media coded for Flash on their mobile gadgets" - Occupy Flash

Who's fault is that? Adobe's? No, it was a greedy Steve Jobs with a personal vendetta to kill a company that kept Apple alive for nigh a decade. But finally when Apple was around 5% market share decided to release it's next product version for Windows first. For this blatant sin Steve Jobs has waged a war against Adobe and sought it's death.

Why? Because if you could play all those Angry Birds and Zombie games in Flash. Why would anydeveloper needlessly fork over 30% of their profits to Apple.

And that folks, is the crux of the whole issue. Just as OWS is really just aiding the cause of those high up corrupt bankers (more government involvement and regulations just means less and bigger banks, with more bailouts). OccupyFlash is just make Apple leap for joy and secretly shout "SUCKERS!!!!!"

PS - Slashdot, sure would help if you gave an example of junk characters.

HTML5 has not "won"

[tomhudson]

The problems with "HTML5 has won the web"

1. Its performance is crappy at best.
2. It exposes too much of the source for people who want to make a living off their code. It's bad enough with Flash and Java decompilers ...
3. Unlike Flash, Python, Perl, Tcl.TK, C, C++, Java, etc., HTML5 needs a browser - and browsers are themselves a crappy - and inconsistent - host environment, so you also inherit any security and bug problems from the browser.
4. The standard for HTML5 is not yet even finished.

Sure, you can write applications in HTML5 (I'm writing one now) - but it's a crappy way to write a program. The DOM might be okay for documents (hence the "D" in Document Object Model) but it's a real impedance mismatch for anything else.

A movement missing reality...

[n7ytd]

'Why does it matter when HTML5 has clearly won the fight for the future of our web browsing?'

A future technology still being defined does not solve today's problems.

While we're at it, let's boycott all manufacturers of prosthetic legs as using stem cells and legal pot to regenerate lost limbs is clearly the superior technology.