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]

I can see it now, this is the start of Occupygate.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[MightyMartian]

I'm Occupying my livingroom this weekend! If my wife tries to make me move, well, I won't be intimidated with threats from authority figures!

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Talderas]

That's it. It's time to Occupy Slashdot.

No longer will we idly stand by and stand for the continuation of all the Bitcoin slashvertisements!

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Oswald McWeany]

Bill Gates is clearly in the 1%.

Occupy Gate.

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"

[Oswald McWeany]

Yeah... it really went over the top when United Artists announced that the Bond film would be called:

Occupyssy.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[mx b]

"Occupy" is teetering on the edge of really jumping the shark here.

I believe the term is "nuking the fridge" now.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[arth1]

Isn't it just a common mislatinization? Clearly it should be occupodes!

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[jellomizer]

I think the Occupy Wall Street protest is called that because they are not protesting Wall Street but Wall Street as a symbol of a larger problem.

These other ones are just being stupid.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[cobrausn]

I've always thought the best way to govern is to favor incentive over punishment. I'm sure she could think of a way to get you moving...

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Barsteward]

Probably be iOccupy.....

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[UnknowingFool]

Did Bill Gates rape and murder a young startup in 1991? I'm not saying he did but I find it interesting that he's never denied it. I think he called it "buying out"

.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[heathen_01]

Punishment is cheaper & quicker.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Surt]

As a die-hard Twilight fan, and member of team centenarian pedophile, I resent this.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[IrquiM]

Because... you're the 99%?

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[TheCouchPotatoFamine]

um - ITS THE PEOPLE (finally, i knew they were somewhere) not a corporation... people that don't hire other people to lie full-time on the TV for them, so maybe it is a little less presentable to the media at large.. I think i'm okay with that.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Andy Dodd]

I think the worst was when some moron came up with "Occupy Tibet"... Um, being occupied is PRECISELY the problem they have.

Unfortunately I can't rant on the guy's Facebook page without "liking" the stupidity...

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[shish]

I'm starting an "Occupy My Pants" movement, any lovely ladies interested in joining? ;-)

... thought not v_v

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Overzeetop]

And, let's face it, punishment may be what he's after. Just as long as he remembers the safe word.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[Eponymous Coward]

Therefore I propose we Occupy "Occupy" before it's too late. We must stand up to those who would steal our term.

Yes! Stand up to them! Freedom of expression is for us, not them!

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[WraithCube]

which can only lead to nostalgic Gen-Xer's wearing lame "Occupy Empire" and "Occupy Rebellion" Star Wars shirts.

We've already reached that point. This showed up on my facebook feed this morning.

Such notable quotes as: "End Galactic Corporate Greed", "Occupy Docking Bay 94 We are the 99%", "Get our troops off tatooine", and "Death Star Destruction was an inside job"

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"

[Millennium]

It's also very easy to disprove. Just show me the message.

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"

[mcgrew]

Incorrect. They're against the redistribution of wealth from the creators of wealth (those of us who work for a living in factories, in construction, in programmer's cubes -- the 99%) to the 1% who aggreate and control the wealth without creating any of it at all. We're not against paying the 1% for what they do; the wealth doesn't mean much when it's not put to good use, so the 1% are far from useless, but they're WAY overpaid. And they're being paid from the wealth that YOU produce in your cubicle.

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

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.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[tmarsh86]

They actually seem to be protesting more vociferously against the corporate influence over Washington, D.C. I, for one, am much more worried about the separation of wall street and state than church and state.

Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"

[cayenne8]

Clearly the "Occupy" meme is being abused now.

I want to start an Occupy Margaritaville!!!

Time to hit the nearest bar....

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

[elrous0]

Reminds me of that scene in PCU where the main characters are being approached by the various causeniks in the quad, none of whom have any real understanding of the causes they're espousing. When one of the causeniks urges them to "Free Nelson Mandela!" they have to explain to him that Nelson Mandela has already *been* freed.

Re:Unfortunate

[ByOhTek]

Responsibility, and accountability for the wealthy few who direct the country. Focusing more on leading the country (and to an extent, even the world) and it's people to a more financially suitable situation for everyone, and not just the wealthiest few?

People may be focused on different aspects related to that, but I'd call that the overall goal. Changing the government, and allowing government control over more things isn't the way to go about it, changing the mindsets of those individuals with disproportionately more power, who make the decisions, is what is needed, and I think that's what most of the people in the occupy movement are trying for.

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

[delinear]

Indeed - and we all know the media would never skew people's views to push an agenda. After all, the media told us they're only interested in the truth.

Re:Unfortunate

[mikerozh]

I experienced last 15 years of 70 years of communism which should now be called "Occupy Russia". I hope to never see this in the United States.

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

[ByOhTek]

The tea party is already going after that group.

If you have a lion chewing on your leg, and a tiger on your arm, would you use your free arm and leg on the lion, completely ignoring the tiger? You seem to be implying that is the best course of action.

Oh, wait, from the looks of your post and your sig, it's obvious, you use the simple metric of liberal=wrong, conservative=correct. Never mind, carry on without having to think about an issue.

Re:Unfortunate

[MightyMartian]

There are aspects of some of their complaints I can't disagree with. Where private concerns received public funds to stay afloat, the bonuses should have been squashed, and in all likelihood, the boards and senior management should have been thrown out on the street.

But in general, where you have a private company that has not dipped into the well, that remains strictly the concern of the shareholders, providing those getting bonuses are not violating the law (ie. various forms of what amounts to fraud and theft).

Other aspects of this movement remain very opaque to me. There seems to be a lot of anger at politicians and bankers, but little recognition of how the middle classes were as much the authors of this catastrophe as their betters, buy accessing cheap credit in obscene proportions. To my mind, a good deal of the Occupiers seem to be taking part in a vocal exercise in blame shifting.

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

[roc97007]

The Occupy Wall Street movement descended into self-parody shortly after it started. The participants themselves trivialized whatever issues they had by their own actions during the protest. Like a lot of people, I cared about the issues, but had to cringe at how silly and empty the protest became, and now wouldn't be associated with them for a big bag of gold.

The name had ceased to mean anything long before we started making fun of it.

Re:Unfortunate

[amicusNYCL]

What better symbol of corporate control is there than Flash?

Well, Apple, for one. Adobe exerts control over but two things: Jack, and Shit, and Jack left town.

Flash isn't going anywhere. It may end up relegated to corporate online training, but it's not dying by any sense of the word. It's just settling into its niche. The Flash player is only going to die when you can author a complete online training course in the Flash IDE and export it to HTML5 with no loss of functionality. That is still years away, at best.

Re:Unfortunate

[amicusNYCL]

Really? What is OWS's stated goal?

Try to keep up. For one, a major goal is to highlight and reduce the influence that corporations have in our government.

Re:Unfortunate

[cathector]

it's weird that with so many years of perspective people still refer to Soviet Russia as a communist system.
the primary political aspect of soviet russia was totalitarianism, not communism.
Stalin murdered 20 million russians, not counting deaths during the war.
he used enforced wide-scale mass-starvation as a weapon, for example.
that kind of terror is not a feature of communism, that's a feature of totalitarianism.
ditto china, ditto nazi germany.

for further reading, check out "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million" by Martin Amis, or "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt.

Re:Unfortunate

[ByOhTek]

Oh, like how it targets liberals (who helped with the problem) but ignores the conservative in the middle (who helped, maybe in different ways)?

You are targeting a lot of liberal stuff, but ignoring the conservative elements that also contribute to the problem.

Your right, it would be a stretch to call that thinking, it's obvious enough that you could stop at calling it 'observation of the obvious.'

Re:Unfortunate

[Toonol]

The 1% to be held more responsible/accountable for their actions,

What does that mean?

Are you talking about ones that committed crimes? Absolutely, they should be punished.

Are you talking about ones that did nothing illegal, but acted unethically? Name and shame them.

Are you talking about finding rich scapegoats and tearing them down, because you're miserable and want somebody to pay? Too bad, grow up.

Re:Unfortunate

[Curunir_wolf]

Try reading the signs instead of listening to right-wing radio. You might start to understand it.

Okay, I'll start.

• "I will never get a job in this economy"
• "close corporate tax loopholes, tax religious groups, legalize weed, and bring back Arrested Development"
• "shoot sperm not bullets"
• "eat local"
• "racial profiling stops at home"
• "one day the poor will have nothing to eat but the rich"
• "don't be a gashole"
• "if only the war on poverty was a real war we would actually be putting money into it"
• "even in a good economy I'm unemployable!"
• "kill corporations not people"
• "things are fucked up and bullshit"
• "pepper spray goldman sachs"
• "the clothes have no emperor"

Discuss

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.

Re:Unfortunate

[shutdown -p now]

The immediate problem is that income inequality in U.S. is at it highest point since the end of WW2, and still growing steadily. That in itself is really just a symptom of other problems, of course, but, generally speaking, the most obvious ways of treating this (like raising income tax back to where it was during the "golden age of capitalism") will also treat those other problems.

Zap!

[MightyMartian]

Just an electric chair so we can properly deal with Flash and Flash developers. The beast must die.

Occupy elrous0

[Xest]

Consider your comment occupied. I'm not even sure why, but I thought I better get in on the fad before I start to look uncool.

It's a shit meme and anyway George Bush beat them all to it years ago with Occupy Afghanistan in 2001 and Occupy Iraq in 2003.

Occupy HTML, written in HTML

[RicardoGCE]

Game, set, match.

Re:Occupy HTML, written in HTML

[Jonner]

Indeed, it's a beautiful site (though a direct copy of Occupy Flash) with no Flash dependency at all. The only way it uses Flash is to detect if it's installed. I'm skeptical it's serious at all. I have a sneaking suspicion one person dreamed the whole thing up, including both sites.

Re:Occupy HTML, written in HTML

[FumarMata]

You didn't understand a word. They are saying that for certain websites, it's better to use HTML and for other websites it's better to use Flash. To do all websites only in Flash or only in HTML is a mistake. One might think that it's a reasonable response... but well, some times you have to explain it twice for people to understand. Or people should read/listen before talking about something

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.

Re:pissing contests

[Jonner]

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.

Saying Flash is appropriate for a web site is like saying IPX/SPX are appropriate protocols for a LAN connecting to the Internet. Sure, it can be done, but it's a stupid way to do it and thankfully went away many years ago.

The right tools to create web sites are web standards. Even Adobe agrees with that; they've actually been promoting HTML5 for a while. They're still promoting AIR for desktop apps I think. I have no interest in that, but it is apparently the right too for some people.

Re:pissing contests

[Artraze]

Agreed. But part of the problem is that Flash's existence is a higher cost than HTML5. Flash a is closed source, singular implementation that exists outside the control of the browser. As a result, it increases attack vectors and can subvert browser managed privacy (e.g. having it's own cache and cookies). Sandboxing helps, but is more of a hack than a proper solution.

So, even if HTML5 isn't a superset of Flash, it does offer clear benefits in it's implementation. So if Flash's unique benefits are _mostly_ within HTML5, then it's quite possible Flash, while not replaced, quite simply isn't worth it anymore. This is rather why Silverlight was DOA: it just didn't offer enough to be worth having another plugin to maintain.

Re:pissing contests

[supersloshy]

Somebody forgot about Flash games and animations (like Homestar Runner), quite possibly the most legitimate uses for Flash in existence that HTML5 couldn't replicate nearly as well, what with varying implementations and a constantly changing standard.

Re:pissing contests

[sneakyimp]

AIR is basically like a redistributable type thing. Unless I'm mistaken, Microsoft does a similar thing with .NET and their other development tools. Similar also in concept to Java where there's a virtual machine to interpret your code.

You are right about standards being the way to go, but the point of creating any sort of redistributable/virtual machine concept is to provide consistency and continuity where there is a lack of standards. Flash has provided a pseudo/quasi standard means of delivering video and vector graphic animation to a desktop browser for years because there was a huge pissing contest going on between different browser factions and they offered poor support for audio and video and no way at all to connect with sockets and wildly different ways (or no way at all) to do things like rotate objects, blur things, or change the transparency of objects or work with vector graphics. To say it's "stupid" to use Flash for a website completely ignores the fact that Flash was either necessary or expedient to do things. Last time I checked, Youtube (you've heard of it, right?) and Vimeo still used Flash to display video for linux, osx, and windows platforms.

As for standards, what is the video standard for HTML5? Do I encode my videos as h.264? Or Ogg Vorbis? V8? Maybe they've sorted this out and I just haven't heard.

I think Adobe has been pretty forward-looking lately and is probably psyched to see an end to the constant updating of the Flash Player. I'm sure they spend a lot of money and energy on it and would love to see a standard evolve so they can get back to making really good tools like Photoshop and Premiere and Dreamweaver and After Effects and such.

Re:pissing contests

[amicusNYCL]

The right tools to create web sites are web standards.

What world do you live in that every piece of content created for online distribution is a "web site". How the hell are we supposed to produce decent and interactive online training courses without Flash? If you look at good vs. bad online training courses, you'll notice that the "bad" ones are basically glorified Powerpoint presentations, just page-turners with minimal interaction and nothing to engage the learner. Guess what technologies are used to produce those courses? If you look at "good" courses you'll find animation, narration, video, software simulations, interactions like games, drag-and-drop or matching, etc, things that are proven to engage learners and increase the information retention rate. Guess which technologies are used to produce those courses?

Flash as a concept is not going to die, not for a long time. The Flash player will only die once a project in the Flash IDE can be exported to HTML5 with no loss of functionality. As it stands, there are many, many things that you can do in the Flash IDE that do not get supported when you export to HTML5.

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?

Re:Glad I read this, I learned a few things

[MozeeToby]

I've yet to see HTML5 as an alternative for casual flash games though. Granted, volume wise flash is used much more for videos than games, but there are many popular websites out there for casual gaming that are powered almost exclusively by Flash. Ignoring this segment of Flash's users and pretending that we can just make flash go *poof* and disappear without addressing that use case is pretty foolish in my opinion.

Re:Glad I read this, I learned a few things

[Desler]

Well that's pretty impressive. It's been around for 15 years, and is still heavily used.

Why is that impressive? 15 years is nothing in comparison to C's 39 years, Fortran's 54 years, the Zilog80's 35 years, etc. Only idiots who constantly jump to the latest "ooh shiny" fad technology would think 15 years is all that long. Tried and true tech lasts many times longer.

Re:Glad I read this, I learned a few things

[MozeeToby]

Go under page info -> media (in Firefox) and you'll see http://chrome.angrybirds.com/fowl/gwt-voices.swf

Your example uses flash for sound effects, which are a pretty core component of a gaming experience. Care to try again?

Re:Glad I read this, I learned a few things

[Anrego]

Javascript as a language makes me sad.

I don't generally like prototype based OOP, but I've come around to being ok with javascript for stuff of low to medium complexity (and as I'm not a web dev, this has been most of my experience with it). Javascripts date handling is still bafflingly insane however, especially given that this is a fairly commonly needed feature.

Re:Glad I read this, I learned a few things

[kiwimate]

True. Hence my caveat:

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.

Re:Glad I read this, I learned a few things

[sneakyimp]

That's one reason people will come to hate HTML5 in a few years, once they realize that the primary use of the canvas and audio tags will be to serve up poorly programmed advertisements.

Yep. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss, only with a shittier programming language.

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.

Adobe Flash as a Content Classifier

[mmmbeer]

Flash must live on! If Flash dies out then that means highly annoying and CPU-hogging advertisements will be converted into HTML5 and get around my simple flashblock. I don't like Flash as much as the next guy but when you can currently carte blanche disable flash and easily remove the most heinous of web content, I fully support its continued use.

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

[Viol8]

Except with less rationale to it. Why anyone gets worked up about a plugin that does what its supposed to do reasonably well and has some very comprehensive development tools I have no idea. Its probably the sort of people who really have nothing to complain about in their lives but are still at the age where they need a "cause" to feel worthy who are making the most noise about it.

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.

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

[jcupitt65]

It's pretty awful on OS X as well. Flash 10 needed about 6x more CPU on OS X than Windows and crashed every 10 minutes or so. According to this elderly benchmark anyway.

http://arstechnica.com/software/news/2008/10/benchmarking-flash-player-10.ars

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

[Jonner]

You've clearly never done any serious web development. Even you'd been a heavy Adobe user, you'd have noticed that they've been pushing HTML5 for a while now. I have no idea if their tools for working with web standards are up to the quality of their Flash ones, but that seems to be the goal. Hating Adobe is less reasonable than hating Microsoft, but hating Flash is not.

"Legacy" websites

[iB1]

As long as there are websites out there that aren't been updated, then Flash is here to stay

Occupy HTML Site

[tlongren]

Does anyone else find it hilarious that the Occupy HTML site is done in HTML5?

Re:Occupy HTML Site

[Jonner]

I suspect both sites were made by the same person.

Occupy screwdrivers...

[FumarMata]

Occupy screwdrivers, use hammers

Re:Cartoons - newgrounds.com

[sadness203]

And the internet was never designed to be what it is now. It was supposed to help share knowledge and idea around university. (Or military). What's your point ?

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.

The grass is greener on the other side

[DrXym]

Of course as soon as Flash goes everyone will suddenly realise how frigging awful the equivalent code in JS hooked up to a canvas is. At least with Flash the plugin had the potential to be rendering content on a separate thread and largely independent of anything else going on in a page. It was even better on Windows since a Flash anim could invalidate its plugin window and repaint without bothering the browser.

Now if you hit a page with a few Flash-like HTML animations, they'll all be in contention on the same thread, running off timers and generally chugging. And hardware accelerated video? Screw that, you're stuck with WebM or whatever else can be called the lowest common denominator.

It'll cost a lot of money to promote

[tepples]

Vote for whom?

Start a party with a platform of government transparency. Buy a significant chunk of ad time on major cable TV networks. Internet advertising is not enough because more people watch ads on TV than watch ads on the Internet. I'll admit that it'll take a lot of fundraising to match the Republicratic political machine.

Protocol instead of plugin

[techtech]

I think they should open it, and it should not be plugin, but a protocol, as in flash://adobe.com would launch the app/anim/advanced air application/whatever in flash.app / flash.exe or your open source choice for executing flash.

And at this time when you can do everything for the most in html (html5/csse3/js) it just need skills., why should you embed the really advanced stuff flash could do like 3d games etc. For HTML pages, html is the best.

Then I do not need to restart the browser everytime there is an update to flash either, much safer than a forced execution of flash (I use flashblocking), I do not see the reason for a page to have a lot of different flash animations one page, that scenario would usually be just ads.

And you do not need flash for playing video, that era is over. If you are a developer and can not manage to make a cross platform player / solution and a worst case fallback to flash, you should not develop that page.

Re:In a 100 years Occupy will be equiv. with STUPI

[impaledsunset]

I'm sorry, but you've missed one important criticism:

It's a proprietary non-standard technology controlled by a single company with a single proprietary working implementation. Whether you like the other technologies used in the web, they aren't controlled by a single company, and have multiple implementations letting you choose the most secure or stable one. With Flash, you're stuck with Adobe's implementation, especially on platforms that are overlooked (such as GNU/Linux and non-x86 hardware such as mobile devices), and if unfixed bugs pop up, you can't fix them. At the moment I can't play mp3 sounds in Flash, because Adobe have incorrectly used memcpy instead of memmove, but my distro can't fix that with a patch.

What's more, the open standard technologies with free implementations easily yield to developments on the part of the client. Want to extract information from HTML? That's easy. Want to learn a HTML 5/JavaScript inside a daemon on your server? That's not difficult. Want to alter the behaviour of a HTML 5/JavaScript application with GreaseMonkey or NoScript? Please, go ahead.

With Flash? Haha, good luck!

Ten times bigger.

[tepples]

I think they should open it, and it should not be plugin, but a protocol

Adobe's way ahead of you. It relicensed the Flash spec as part of the Open Screen Project.

And you do not need flash for playing video

But you do need Flash for playing vector animations like Weebl and Bob. Otherwise, you have to render each frame of the SWF to produce mp4 and webm files, and in my tests, those end up ten times bigger than the SWF.

About that HTML5

[PGGreens]

So how long before people start grumbling about HTML5 like they have been about flash? And by people, I mean the occupiers here. I mean, HTML5 seems great, but it's sure to have its own set of headaches. Just seems a bit over-zealous.

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.

Either way...

[awjr]

So what we're really discussing is which Adobe product we will be buying/using, their Flash IDE or their HTML5 IDE.

Flash a total CPU hog?

[5865]

Nothing does a better job making my Athlon64 3000+ obsolete than by switching everything to HTML5.

Watching a video on Youtube in HTML5 shoots my CPU up to 80% while watching it through regular Flash only uses 55%.

Angry Birds in HTML5 is jerky (not to mention the crappy aliasing) and it'll work a lot better if implemented in Flash.

So surely I'm missing something when people keeps complaining Flash is a resource hog.

I hope it's not another hipster programmer fad like the functional language for everything trend a couple of years ago.

Occupy this...

[ArcadeNut]

While I despise Flash, I realize that a lot of companies have a ton of money invested in Flash. Replacing it is not going to be free. Flash will eventually be replaced without the help of protesters if the benefits of HTML5 out weigh those of Flash and the cost of HTML5 is similar to Flash. Cost = Labor, Training and Development Tools.

Re:Converting web cartoons

[supersloshy]

With this ;)

Re:In a 100 years Occupy will be equiv. with STUPI

[Billly Gates]

I was just about to type a similiar point.

One difference between you and me is I HATE FLASH. I agree with your points on a technical scale too. However, it is agaisn't the very spirit of the web itself. 15 years ago anyone could learn HTML and get a job. You opened notepad and typed in html and it was easy. Flash ... oh you need that for a job now. Ok that will be $700. Photoshop too? That will now be $1400.

Linux for web developlment? Nope. MacOSX or Windows :-(

I learned Linux 10 years ago because unix had awesome tools like PHP that were free. Now flash being proprietary is forcing me to use Windows again and that is agaisnt the spirit of GNU. I am not a gnu zealot but those who are and like flash are hypocritical. No one sees the dangers of this?

Now you need to pay Adobe and use closed standards to develop wibsites. You mention IE which I just learned to hate developing for as I am trying to start a business and learned how bad IE 6 is. I expect corporate customers and the big boys still use IE 6 and will well after 2013 as they use VMs and I need it to look pretty across all browsers. Now I am tempted to learn flash and it is wrong and so many levels. Sigh

I pray Windows 8 is fixed more in desktop mode so corporations and people can upgrade IE 7 to IE 10 and we can start HTML 5.

Apple did the right thing in killing Flash. It sucks on my Andriod and is CPU sucking when I try to watch porn. Mpeg hardware acceleration can help things greatly.

To me in 2011 Flash is the most practical solution, while HTML 5 is the most ideal.

Think of Flash as the tool, not the plug-in

[Arkhan]

Flash may very well be on the way out as a browser plug-in (a distribution platform, if you like).

It will likely live on a long time as an artists' tool.

Flash as a platform, a plug-in, was a way to solve the problem of "I've made this cool animation in Flash, now how do I show it to people?"

Adobe has gotten with the times, and turned Flash into a vector animation tool with the level of features for professionals you'd expect (think Photoshop or Illustrator). Sure you can make a "Flash movie", but you can also import your artwork from better creation tools, easily animate it with tweens (etc) in Flash, then export to any number of video or animation formats, or more importantly to frames or sprite sheets. Those exported formats find their way into your game, program, etc. The old "Flash movie" has nothing to do with this workflow.

The plug-in is decreasingly useful every day. The tool is quite useful for the designer/artist and will live on. You just won't watch Flash-created content in a Flash platform plugin. You'll be watching Flash-animated content (likely created outside Flash) in some other platform and never know Flash was part of the picture.

You don't look at graphics in a Photoshop or GIMP plugin, or play iOS games inside XCode, but the tools still exist and are useful, separate from the obsolescence of the delivery platform.