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

[lennier1]

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

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]

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!

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: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

[greg1104]

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

You mean besides Java applets, right?

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: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:Streetview

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.