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Six Months Without Adobe Flash, and I Feel Fine
Reader hessian six months ago de-installed the Adobe Flash player on all of his browsers, probably a prudent move in light of various recent vulnerabilities. "This provoked some shock and incredulity from others. After all, Flash has been an essential content interpreter for over a decade. It filled the gap between an underdeveloped JavaScript and the need for media content like animation, video and so on." But it turns out that life sans Flash can still be worth living. Are there things you rely on that make Flash hard to give up?
"probably a prudent movie"
where is this movie you speak of, i'd like to watch it on my flash player
Kids sites, educational or otherwise. All seem to use flash. IIRC, Khan Academy as well. If you have kids, you "need" Flash.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Cannot live without
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
This provoked some shock and incredulity from others.
Er, did it? I think some of you have your surprise bar set a little low, if one guy uninstalling Flash is enough to make you apoplectic.
probably a prudent movie
What about the imprudent movies? How are we supposed to watch those now?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Why not, for the hell of it, live with Gnash, the GNU Flash alternative, for six months? Maybe no Flash at all is better than dealing with a crashing Gnash, but who knows, you might be surprised!
.. fine, because now I use SumatraPDF, small fast no nagware no nagdates .. I feel great!
Yes, this is the case. It took me a while to realize that Apple no longer ships Flash with Macs, and so I was using YouTube sans Flash for about a month. It works on some videos, but not on others.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Just run the Flash you trust and need for normal functionality. Done and done.
The mere presence of Flash on the system allows it to be craftily run in more areas than you might expect(as with the 'flash exploit embedded in an Office document' story seen here just recently, along with PDFs in Acrobat and a bunch of other abominations). Even if you can find the correct toggles to shut that off, Flash's updater can't really be trusted not to merrily reinstall things whenever the next update comes out; but running a version of Flash that isn't the newest is just asking for trouble...
If it were only confined to a browser(and a browser that didn't trust it in the slightest), it wouldn't be so bad.
In an ideal world, I could live a life without Java, but I love my Android phone...
But also: MSNBC (TRMS, occasionally Morning Joe). Pretty much any decent video site still uses flash.
Netflix uses Silverlight, something that sucks quite a bit. They do offer a dedicated app if you use Windows 8, but the app is surprisingly poorly designed, plus I don't really want Windows 8 on my desktop.
Streetview on Google Maps needs flash. I would miss that quite a bit.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I bought an OSX laptop and successfully avoided Flash for a few months while I was using it to prepare the class I now teach. A good proportion of YouTube videos wouldn't play so I was glad at times to have another computer in the house to watch them, but mostly I didn't miss it at all.
Ultimately, though, it turned out that in order to hold online office hours at our university, I had to install Adobe Connect. That software is Flash from stem to stern. I installed Flash, and it took me a few days to get used to the surprise of animated (and noisy) ads again.
Conclusion: access to Flash is nice at times, but one generally does better without it.
All new videos, I think, get encoded into HTML5 friendly formats. Older videos may still not be.
HTML5 A/V could be a fantastic alternative, if only people would settle on a universal codec. Google is still firmly on WebM, while Opera and Firefox is all over Theora/Vorbis and Ogg and, of course, IE 9+ still natively supports MP4 only in H.264, I think. And Safari does QuickTime too.
Right now, the only way anyone publishing video will get away with only an HTML5 video option is if they encode to different formats, different resolutions and still provide a Flash fallback for older/incompatible browsers. Quite a mess.
If computers were people, I'd be a misanthrope.
I have been using ClickToFlash on Safari for about 3 years now. Eliminating Flash from my browser's normal processing made Safari much more stable (it only crashes about four times a year, instead of four times per week), and sped up page-loads by an incredible amount.
I consider ClickToFlash to be the best of both worlds. Flash that doesn't get to execute is essentially "not there", and unless I don't understand all the attack-vectors (which is likely), I think that, for now, this strikes a good balance. Because, before I click that little "Flash Placeholder", it makes me stop and think about whether I really need to see what's "behind the curtain".
However, on my iPad, which is Flash-Free, I think I run into a Flash-only site only about once or twice a month. Even porn seems to be being delivered in HTML 5 from almost everywhere.
Bottom line: The only thing keeping Flash alive is lazy developers and/or cheapskate PHBs.
I noticed that Gnash wasn't cutting it though for the few things I was trying to use it for (basically Youtube and the occasional stupid game).
That WAS ages ago... as you said. I see Gnash is a little CPU-hungry, but playback has been smooth for me. I don't miss Adobe Flash one bit.
There's experimental GPU acceleration in the works too.
youtube-dl
is nice too, if you don't mind the lack of streaming. I'm not actually sure why playback doesn't work on partially downloaded files.
All rites reversed 2010
Yes, this is the case. It took me a while to realize that Apple no longer ships Flash with Macs, and so I was using YouTube sans Flash for about a month. It works on some videos, but not on others.
Yeah, in my experience, the ratio of "works" to "doesn't work" is about 10,000:1. I figure that Google probably doesn't constantly churn through their entire collection from A-Z, searching for, and converting, all of their old videos to HTML 5; but has some algorithm for deciding what priority to put on converting old videos (new ones are ALWAYS available in HTML 5), and so that accounts for the occasional "doesn't work". Nothing else explains inconsistency, considering that ALL they deliver are videos.
I installed Flash, and it took me a few days to get used to the surprise of animated (and noisy) ads again.
Luckily, those are easy to circumvent if you just use a suitable browser. On Firefox the Adblock Plus - plugin generally manages to hide all ads and the likes, something that also includes most Flash - content, or you can use the Flashblock - plugin to disable Flash altogether on some sites or make it so that you must click on the item in question first before Flash gets loaded.
I have to add, though, that from the security perspective you should not run around without using Flashblock, there are still too many Flash - based attacks roaming the Internet and you never know when they land on your machine. An antivirus may help, but why let the virus/malware package on your machine in the first place?
In an ideal world, I could live a life without Java, but I love my Android phone...
Stop, stop, you are making Larry Ellison's lawyers cry.
Wait, actually, that's probably a feature. Carry on.
Since the iPad came out, many websites hve justed their sites so flash isn't needed. Indeed, with Flashblock on my mac, i find the times i actually need flash are few and far between. I could probably live without flash or java even for browsing nowadays.
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
All videos, however, can be downloaded from youtube as a .mp4, a .flv, whatever, then played in a normal movie player anyway. I haven't used flash in three years, and I've never run across anything on youtube I couldn't watch, unless it was "blocked in my region due to copyright concerns" or something. For a while at the beginning the tools were subpar, and you had to keep an array of them around, but these days something like Minitube will just work and leave your CPU unpegged.
On Windows, it's quite easy, actually. The non-IE browser plugin and the ActiveX controls are separate installs. Without the latter, you don't have issues outside the browser. The browser plugin flash is invisible to anything but the browsers. I don't recall if recent IE uses the browser plugin or ActiveX variant, I recall that older ones needed the ActiveX version.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I am using QUBES OS. So all the flash and java stuff runs inside a vm-app. For my clients I am using free sandbox solutions for windows.
Being part of the HTML5 trial isn't enough. You have to spoof your user-agent to a mobile device and use the mobile version of the site. I really wish they would hurry up and stop forcing flash on the desktop.
"sitting on your dick"
That would be an odd experience, I imagine. I've had OTHER people to sit on my dick. It's rather similar to having someone sit on your lap, but a bit more intimate. If you figure out how to sit on your own lap, let us all know, alright? Remember, though: Pics, or it didn't happen!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Google is still firmly on WebM, while Opera and Firefox is all over Theora/Vorbis and Ogg
Opera and Firefox support WebM (VP8+Vorbis in a subset of the Matroska container).
IE 9+ still natively supports MP4 only in H.264, I think. And Safari does QuickTime too.
IE 9 supports WebM through a plug-in.
and still provide a Flash fallback for older/incompatible browsers
For IE 8 users, what benefit is there to using the Adobe Flash Player plug-in over the Google Chrome Frame plug-in?
Quite a mess.
Not quite.
You can support almost all browsers out there with only two codecs: H.264 + your choice of ogg/theora or webm/vp8. And the H.264 will of course still work with Flash. This URL http://caniuse.com/#feat=webm is very handy if you want to see for yourself.
At least that's the situation for static streaming / VOD. Live broadcast is where the mess is with Apple's HLS, Microsoft's HSS, Adobe's RTMP, MPEG's DASH along with IETF-standard RTSP (15 years old but still somewhat alive) and various less-known protocols. AFAICT, none of the recent protocols (that support adaptive bandwidth and work over HTTP) support open audio/video codecs. If Google/Mozilla/etc want patent-free codecs to get traction, they should work on a version of DASH that works with theora/VP8.
My 0.02€ as a former employee of a large video-streaming-oriented CDN.
Gotta add that VLC can play YouTube videos too. In XFCE I was able to create a launcher for VLC and drag'n'drop URLs to the icon.
An Amazon Instant Video...flash only currently.
You can use that on AppleTV, the PS3 and all iOS devices - all without flash.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
AppleTV, the PS3, iOS devices all support Hulu without needing Flash.
So, in order to escape Flash, people should pay hundreds of dollars? I don't think that's really a step up.
Has YouTube yet fixed the inconsistency where only Flash is allowed to deliver videos that have ads of any sort?
Yes. Ad-enabled videos work on the iPad. Though you end up with the issue of not being able to play videos that disallow mobile device playback.
Both of these restrictions are enabled by the video uploader, and both cause (IMO) more harm than good. Any uploader that disables mobile viewing is an uploader I'm far less likely to subscribe to or otherwise watch future videos from.
Only if you treat a subjective word like "safe" as an objective absolute. Nothing, anywhere, is absolutely safe. Putting the burden on the user and giving them the impossible task of being "vigilant" is not helpful.
However, if you treat safety as the subjective word it is, you may realize that removing Flash and Java will increase your safety on the web by an enormous amount. Most people aren't technologically savvy enough to use vigilance as a safety mechanism. Just avoid Flash and Java, run antivirus software (if you're on Windows), keep up with software updates (on all platforms), and only enter in personal and financial info into sites you trust, and you're about as safe as can be reasonably expected.
Even with all that, there's still a risk, but it's a reasonable risk. The sort of risks we deal with in every other aspect of our lives without fear. Why should we treat the risk and safety aspects of computers any different?
I wish they would hurry up and stop differentiating what I have access to by what type of computer im currently using.
Good-bye
That seems to be a problem related to the video not the app. I've seen this in several different file containers, from what I can tell MPEG4 has some kind of built in index at the front of the file that gets checked for consistency before it plays. Unless the file is intended for streaming in which case it's set up a bit differently. Quicktime won't play many cut off videos but VLC will play them often after an error message. If it's an AVI with MPEG4 video it'll offer to repair the file.
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Gimme a break. The GGP was talking about OS X, which pretty much implies Safari, and then you DON'T come back with "Well, if you are using Safari, use THIS (like I did)", or "If you use FireFox, you might want to check into...".
No, I deliberately used the wording "a suitable browser" so that it would NOT rule out any specific one. I do not know about Safari's capabilities because I do not own any Apple device and I have no interest to start Googling about a browser I don't use, so that's why I chose to use such a wording.
No, instead you made a snarky, side-swipe at Safari, and got called-out on it.
You wish I did, but just look through my comment history and point me to where I had done such previously; I have no need to bash OSX or Safari or whatever, I don't care what people use, I just wanted to make a point about how to avoid some of the vulnerabilities of Flash. The fact that you attack me like a rabid troglodyte, however, says a lot about you.
youtube-dl -o - $URL | mplayer -
The only difference to actually streaming is that you cannot jump into the middle of a video straight away. But after caching for a while, you can move back and forth with MPlayer's usual keys.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I just tried it. It's beautiful, and I learned how to use - for std I/O. Thanks!
All rites reversed 2010