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?

Comments

i'd like to see that

[Anonymous Coward]

"probably a prudent movie"

where is this movie you speak of, i'd like to watch it on my flash player

Kids

[MightyYar]

Kids sites, educational or otherwise. All seem to use flash. IIRC, Khan Academy as well. If you have kids, you "need" Flash.

Re:Kids

[Anonymous Coward]

One more reason not to have kids.

Re:Kids

[lennier1]

Saving a shitload of money wasn't enough of a reason?

Re:Kids

[Paul Carver]

Saving a shitload of money wasn't enough of a reason?

No, certainly not. What's the point of a shitload of money if all you do is save it? Are you going to swim in it like Scrooge McDuck?

There's no point in earning or saving money if you aren't going to do something with it. Spending money on children (and grandchildren) is something that a lot of people (though obviously not 100% of all people) get a lot of enjoyment out of.

Feel free to spend your money on whatever you like if you dislike children, but you're just ignorant if you think that raising children isn't an excellent way to make use of hard earned cash for the vast majority of the human race who like children.

Saving money so that you have lots of funds for spoiling grandchildren is also highly popular and a worthwhile way to spend money for many people, but it's a bit more difficult to have grandchildren if you don't have children (though not impossible obviously.)

Re:Kids

[lennier1]

Now, now, we don't even know if he's from New Jersey.

Re:Kids

[SuricouRaven]

Immortality for your genes isn't worth very much. It gives you a legacy, but you don't get to see it.

I'm young enough that I've a chance, if only a very slim one, that immortality-tech will become available within my lifetime. Body transplant, cryonics that actually works, maybe even the holy grail of mind uploading. It's a long shot, but it's the only chance I see. If not, well... not much I can do about it.

Re:Kids

[rastos1]

Khan academy videos are on youtube and work fine if you join HTML5 trial on Youtube.

Gnash sometimes works, sometimes not.

Google Streetview, yeah it would be nice if that worked without Flash. There is no reason why it could not. It's just a matter of Google investing money/time/effort to get that working.

I personally don't use Flash. For years. It certainly is possible to live without it. The smaller amount of ads alone makes that worth.

Re:Kids

[TheMMaster]

They already have, you can enable an experimental webgl version of streetview that seems to work just fine for me.

I've been flash-less for the better part of 5 years now :) Never regret!

Re:Kids

[rs79]

The older you get the more you appreciate your children. What makes sense in your 20s may not make as much sense in your 70s and 80s.

Re:Kids

[robot5x]

1. Social security? If you live in a country where your retirement is entirely paid for by government, please let me know where it is - I'd like to move there.

2. Believe it or not, 'social security' is not a magical rainbow fairy whirlpool where money just appears. It needs ... money. Money which is usually generated through general taxation or some kind of contribution scheme. Where does this money come from? People who work.

Even in your utopia, the ability of your government to support you and your 'social security' in retirement is directly correlated with the number of people working in the economy and paying taxes. When you're old, those people will be - guess what? - other people's children.

Please make sure you thank them for indulging in their emotional/psychological need so you can retire in comfort.

Re:Kids

[K. S. Kyosuke]

But we have social security now.

No, the old people have social security now because young people like you work and some of the GDP they generate is redirected towards the way of the needy. When you become old or disabled and there are no young people to fill in the void, what do you think you're going to get from the social system?

Re:Kids

[K. S. Kyosuke]

If you did not have kids your life would be radically different.

If his parents didn't have kids, his life would be even more radically different!

Re:Kids

[tehcyder]

If you did not have kids your life would be radically different. You would have things you DO NOT have now.

Things do not make you happy. People do.

You do not need to have children to be happy, but you need something other than more material possessions.

zero punctuation

[AvitarX]

Cannot live without

What? And, what?

[wonkey_monkey]

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?

Two Month without adobe pdf and I feel ..

[burni2]

.. fine, because now I use SumatraPDF, small fast no nagware no nagdates .. I feel great!

Re:HTML5 on YouTube?

[MightyYar]

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.

Re:Flashblock

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Hulu, etc.

[IANAAC]

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view of cable/sat companies), I rely on Hulu for most of my entertainment, since I don't have cable - and actually can't get, due to remoteness. No way around the site without flash.

But also: MSNBC (TRMS, occasionally Morning Joe). Pretty much any decent video site still uses flash.

Re:Hulu, etc.

[jader3rd]

But also: MSNBC

For MSNBC change your user agent string to the IPad's user agent string and they'll server up Flash free video.

Not Flash, but Silverlight

[Gaygirlie]

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.

Re:Not Flash, but Silverlight

[green1]

I can't believe how many sites use silverlight. Even Microsoft backed away from Silverlight ages ago, but some sites are even just now starting to implement Silverlight. As a Linux user this is EXTREMELY frustrating, and as a user of mobile devices it isn't any better. Silverlight has never worked properly on linux, and nobody has ever made a plugin for it for Android, there was a Linux Firefox plugin ages ago called "moonlight" that seemed to work on about 10% of Silverlight sites, but that stopped development ages ago too, and isnt' compatible with any of the latest browsers.

Re:Not Flash, but Silverlight

[greg1104]

Question: What's the only thing worse than Flash?

You mean besides Java applets, right?

Streetview

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Streetview on Google Maps needs flash. I would miss that quite a bit.

Re:Streetview

[Anonymous Coward]

If you enable WebGL on Google Maps, I'm almost certain that the streetview is WebGL too, not flash.

Re:HTML5 on YouTube?

[eksith]

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.

Don't really miss Flash

[macs4all]

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.

Re:So did I, about four months ago.

[Ceriel Nosforit]

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.

Re:HTML5 on YouTube?

[macs4all]

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.

Re:Went without until I needed it for online meeti

[Gaygirlie]

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?

Re:Live without Java

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Re:Flashblock

[tibit]

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.

Re:HTML5 on YouTube?

[tepples]

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?

Re:HTML5 on YouTube?

[remi2402]

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.

In other places

[SuperKendall]

An Amazon Instant Video...flash only currently.

You can use that on AppleTV, the PS3 and all iOS devices - all without flash.