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The Agonizingly Slow Decline of Adobe's Flash Player
harrymcc writes: Security and performance issues with Adobe's Flash Player have led to countless calls for its abandonment. But a significant percentage of major sites still use it--and many of those companies aren't eager to explain why. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman investigates why Flash won't disappear from the web anytime soon. From the article:
Despite the pressure from tech circles, the sites I spoke with said they simply weren’t able to start moving away from Flash until recently, when better technology become available. And even now, it’s going to take time for them to finish building the necessary tools.
"Originally, Flash was necessary to solve a couple problems," says Adam Denenberg, chief technical officer for streaming music service iHeartRadio. "Streaming was difficult, especially for live stations, and there were no real http-supported streaming protocols that offered the flexibility of what was required a few years back."
called for an end-of-life date on Flash, and wants Adobe to commit to it, yet they're one of the worst offenders for requiring Flash to play videos when h.264 and WebM exist......
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I don't mind ads (I really don't) as long as they stay in the side of the page and don't try to play audio or video. I run Flashblock in all browsers to avoid this type of thing and have started to run ad-blockers just to kill off the videos that are starting to come through HTML5. If there was a common browser option to never play audio/video unless specifically requested (similar to Flashblockers - if you click on it you really want to see it) then I'd be perfectly happy.
I'd love to remove flash from my system but unfortunately I need to use VMware's VCenter client. Same goes for the shitty insecure version of java I need to keep so I can run Unisphere and FC switch management tools. It's irritating as fuck I have to keep these turds on my disk.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
This. Especially the audio, but in general, any auto-playing video is unwanted.
Nothing replaces rtmp properly of the "new" technologies touted in html5.
Web browser makers are incentivised to make everyone use HTML5, regardless of whether it's a better fit than Flash or not.
Website developers are incentivised to add new features, rather than rewrite their existing codebase from scratch for no gain.
Surprise?
For many site owners, Flash isn't really broken - their video / audio players, animations, interactive displays and games work with enough users that they don't feel pressured to do them over again. Even video sites that support mobile browsers by serving HTML5 video and direct links to the .mp4 keep their Flash players alive in the full pages.
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I stopped using Adobe Flash completely fairly recently and have managed to get away without much difficulty. I basically use two plug-ins to do it:
User Agent Switcher for Firefox
MPV (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/watch-with-mpv/)
MPV is a plug-in that uses youtube-dl to extract the videos and present them in the browser on supported sites. More sites are supported than you might think. I have no trouble with accessing any content on Youtube. I can even watch streams that are on un-traditional non-mainstream websites. Not all work, but in those cases you end up with 200 links and at least 20% I'd say work. Even where there are only a dozen I still seem to find a link that works. It's a little bit more of a pain, but once you know which links work it's not so bad. It's only the first time if your watching a TV series or something where you might not know. And so you open 3-4-5 links to figure it out.
The other site I find that doesn't support my preferred system properly is the BBC news site. Some article with video refuse to show flash content if "Adobe" flash isn't installed. The hilarity of this is that if you use the user agent switcher and set it to Android 3.01 (or probably others) it works just fine. You would think they'd default to an HTML 5 stream where Adobe Flash wasn't supported, but apparently not.
Although flash may be the bane of all web users, especially on mobile, the alternative technologies aren't ready yet for desktop imo.
I'm mainly basing this on the recent youtube flash->HTML5 switch. Ironically, performance has been one of my issues with the HTML5 player. On linux/intel drivers, full screen playback will completely bog down the entire system when I tab out to a different tag, making it almost unusable. The flash player did not have this problem. Other problems have been bugs requiring a couple page reloads or video seeking to work around, while others are features completely missing from the html5 version compared to the flash version. I use firefox and webkitgtk.
It is trivial to monitor a document for tags and remove an autoplay attribute, add a controls attribute, or otherwise manipulate it to block items.
media.autoplay.enabled = false in firefox, don't know about chrome.
There were just too many attacks coming through it.
No it wasn't. What was difficult was removing the user's ability to choose their own music player.
i don't know if anyone's really noticed, but flash's real-time adaptive video CODECs are actually incredibly good. i created a video chat site a few years back [tried red5 as the back-end server, and finally got to actually put some reality behind why i detest java. up until then i'd only known *theoretically* why java is a piss-poor language compared to the alternatives...]
anyway, leaving the back-end alone as it's a red herring, i was deeply impressed at how little bandwidth each video window could be given yet still remain audible and actually convey useful video information. i restricted each user to a paltry 10k-bytes (!) of bandwidth - that's for video *and* audio, limited the window size to 240x180, and was absolutely amazed to find that the video would easily recover from drop-outs.
basically what would happen is that during a drop-out, audio would be prioritised, and video would pause. recovery of the video stream (which could be done *precisely because* i had set the bandwidth so low) would literally "unfold" before my eyes, in exactly the same way that you see those 1980s pop video and children's programs "pixellation" effects.
basically they would transmit a crude video image, then send the improvements as a second round, then a third, and so on. now, here's the thing: i have looked for "adaptive video" algorithms in the past, and, whilst there exists an effort to create such a standard as a public standard, it's simply completely behind the times.
adobe managed it *years* ago... yet no open standard exists in common usage which comes even remotely close to successfully replicating this.
i appreciate that technically, it's incredibly challenging to get right. even the team behind skype - when they sold and created a real-time video streaming company "joost" - failed after a few years and gave up.... but what people forget is that *adobe already succeeded*. ... what has been substituted in its place? well, sure, we can do real-time video browser-to-browser.... but the assumption is that there is "perfect conditions". perfect bandwidth. perfect connections. no drop-outs. no brown-outs. zero latency.
adobe's solution isn't perfect: i know from experience that after a few hours, the real-time adaptive video stream *can* get out-of-sync (by over a minute in some cases), and will "recover" in a flurry of fast-forward stop-motion frames. really quite hilarious to witness. but, the only other alternative that i know of which is even *remotely* close to replicating what adobe did is *another* proprietary video codec, behind "zoom.us". it's developed by a former developer behind cisco's real-time video system. which uses flash in some places, and java in others. and is dreadful and unreliable, and has latency often of up to 1..5 seconds. unlike zoom.us which works incredibly well, and has very little latency.
so i'm going to call this article out, as entirely missing the point, namely that there *really* aren't any good alternatives to the core of what flash does really really well, but the problem is that they should have released the entire client and server as software libre under the LGPL a long, _long_ time ago because it just doesn't make them any money, and they just don't have the manpower to keep on fixing the security issues any more.
I don't mind ads (I really don't) as long as they stay in the side of the page and don't try to play audio or video.
But you are ok with them tracking your browsing? Personally I find most ads to be intrusive, annoying and sometimes downright creepy but the tracking is the worst aspect of the whole thing. And the people doing the advertising can't help themselves in trying to track what I'm doing which is why I have AdBlock Plus, BetterPrivacy, PrivacyBadger, Flashblock, etc all installed at the same time. They started this arms race and I'll be damned if I'm going to lose.
I have NO problem paying for a site or service I find valuable and I do pay for some. If they base their business model on pushing annoying ads at me that I can block then that is their problem, not mine.
Their is a published EOL data for Flash... unfortunately it's just for Firefox (and other NPAPI browsers) on Linux.
It's approximately February 2017. "Adobe will continue to provide security updates to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years from its release."
https://www.adobe.com/devnet/f...
The first step (IMO) to ending Flash is to get it click-to-play. Firefox isn't willing to do this, yet [1].. AFAICT the holdup is Adobe with EME.. *sigh*.
[1] https://groups.google.com/foru...
I don't mind ads (I really don't) as long as they stay in the side of the page and don't try to play audio or video
You should mind. Ads are a known vector for malware. Whether it bothers you to look at them or not, proper security requires that you block them.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How would a vector animation like Homestar Runner or "Badger Badger Badger" have been created without Flash? With Flash, you can buy an old copy of Adobe Flash and use that. But with HTML5, you have to rent (not buy) Edge Animate on Creative Cloud. Or would you recommend creating the vector animation in Flash, rendering to AVI, and sending that to the viewer as MP4 and WebM? That not only bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests) but also destroys any possibility of interactivity.
Recently my company just got through signing a deal with Adobe to obtain a license and code for Flash multicast. It turns out that for things like multicast and the ability for customers to simply have a player on their machine without having to install a new plugin, Flash is still the way to go. Those are huge considerations for selling commercial video services to enterprises, and even smaller organizations. And it is believed that having this license and access to the source code will be a significant differentiation for our product specifically since it is solid, even if Adobe never actually had a product that leveraged it to its full potential.
We're still committed to HTML5, but Flash will likely be with us for the immediate future, unless someone can push a capable replacement which has the same amount of market penetration.
As the cover of one of the trade magazines in our office states, Flash isn't dead as much as it is un-dead. It has serious problems, but it is still quite able to shamble along until someone makes a concerted effort to put a bullet exactly in the right place. If you really want Flash gone, a product needs to be provided which can overtake the penetration and capabilities of the platform and improve on them.
I was as surprised as anyone to find that Flash was still something we wanted to support, but when it was explained to me, it made sense. Flash is available, and by available, I mean it is there and has the capabilities that people need right now. It lacks on a lot of fronts, but without an real replacement for Flash, no one wants to dump it for those deficiencies.
Flash will die when:
There is a product that does everything important that Flash does
The new product has a killer feature that Flash does NOT have
That new product is widely distributed and ubiquitous like Flash has become.
The call to remove Flash, without a complete replacement, simply introduces less available products whose only justification for existing is that they don't have the same issues as Flash does. Of course, this is a dubious value, since Flash has been quite successful despite its many failings.
For the last few years there's been a cat and mouse game with HTML5 video, every time it's done there are new extensions or features. A few years ago when there was already slashdot rage about flash needing to die immediately, HTML5 video was to be some raw dump of theora or maybe webm VP8 that you would probably just have been able to save or open in 3rd party video player instead of implementing real support in a browser, now there are "MSE" and "Dash" (if I'm not mistaken) which well, do things.
The silent masses on 10-year-old PC that have to run all of this on the CPU have also needed actual smooth full screen playback, not that flash is much better, needed about a 1GHz CPU to play low def video. Firefox 40 only came out a few days ago!, bringing 'off-thread main compositing' to linux ; before that it was enabled in Firefox 33 for the Windows version. For linux with Firefox ESR, wait for version 45!
And now that I can run youtube html5 (without logging in) it has 360p as the minimum setting for video, no 240p or 144p ; all old videos seem to have been re-encoded.
So I have yet to see how slow (or fast?) that runs on a slow enough PC.
Other videos offer a choice of 360p and 720p. No 480p for you! So if you lack CPU power or bandwith for 720p, too bad for you. But enough ranting, at least it works.
Not only are ads a known vector they are quickly becoming the primary vector. Ad companies keep poking security holes in your computer and web pages so they can display more ads. Run Adblock for a week and then switch to IE. The difference is amazing.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
With Firefox 40 the HTML5 YouTube player is forced on Linux users. That would be fine if the HTML5 player wasn't completely and utterly shit. Only 360p was available at first, I then made some configuration changes in Firefox and all resolutions became available. However, the stutter is so bad that the videos are almost unwatchable and the CPU load is around 95%. Full screen is impossible. With Adobe Flash the videos play smooth and the CPU load is low, even in a virtual machine. Don't get me wrong, I would love to Adobe Flash removed as fast as possible, but please make the successor work first.
How will I do my bi-annual binge if no browser supports Flash?
Ads are a vector for malware, because the ad networks don't actually monitor their ads. IMHO class action lawsuit for Malware distributed by Ad Networks, killing each network that offers up infected ads. Pretty soon, only reliable ad networks (hahaha) will remain.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
As long as it's declining. And I expect that decline to accelerate going forward.
From the content side, even with the lack of browser support it's been relatively easy to start transitioning away from Flash - thanks to Adobe, ironically. In an attempt to future-proof it, they added h.264/mpeg4 playback support to Flash Player some time ago. So we started generating our content as h.264 video quite a few years ago, even though at the time we were still telling browsers to play it back using Flash Player.
Funny thing is - at least on the Mac side, Flash Player has always played h.264 video far better than it ever played Flash-wrapped stuff.
#DeleteChrome
I can't figure it out.
But there is or may be some javascript shmoo to load the videos, so it's also about controlling the flow of a computer program not just a document.
In fact we used to have browser options about what javascript can do (resizing windows etc.) now they are gone.
I hope we do get some option eventually. Else I think I'll install an extension that simply blacklist javascript etc. for a news site or other that autoplays video.
And you're OK with the endless stream of analytics companies and other assholes monitoring every site you go to so they can monetize everything you do on the internet.
If the sites in question were serving their own ads, then maybe.
But the 15 or 20 (or sometimes 30 or 40) external websites which come along with those ads are just parasites whose business model is predicted on you being willing to let them know everything you do.
And I'm completely not willing to allow that.
Right now on Slashdot as I type this there's no less than 9 external sites who would be getting requests and running scripts if I wasn't actively blocking them. And Slashdot isn't even the worst site out there.
There's simply no way in hell I'm willing to let a bunch of corporations make money of tracking everything I do on the internet, run scripts, embed ads, deliver malware through shady partners, share that information with anybody they choose because they have an EULA ... none of it.
It's about FAR more than ads staying in nice places on the screen.
In Chrome install something like HTTP Switchboard, and look at the sheer amount of crap embedded in every page. Flash is an open invitation for dozens of sites you aren't even visiting to allow dozens of their affiliates run arbitrary code on your machine.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Okay guys, stop wasting time. We all know the reason we keep Flash around.... It is for that pr0nz flashing back at us. If I disablw flash, how am I gonna see dem 8008ies?
Run Adblock for a week and then switch to IE. The difference is amazing.
What does IE do differently here than any other browser?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
That's an interesting idea, but I feel like the ad networks will get out of liability because they don't host the ads on their ad servers (they do for some ads, but it's a small portion of their business). The networks will merely redirect the ads to someone else's ad server, and claim it's the fault of the person who owns the ad server.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I worked for a radio station back in the late 90s. I built the streamer and server that put us on the internet. At first it was Real Audio, then Icecast (streaming MP3). Icecast of course opened us up to a whole bunch of listeners who would have never downloaded and installed RealPlayer. But.. we did have quite a following on the RealAudio stream so we actually kept both going for many years.
Once we had Icecast it was easy for the web users. They just clicked the link on the webpage and for the non-techies Windows Media Player or whatever media player was standard, pre-installed on Macs at the time would just pick it up and start playing. Even better, our Icecast server could anounce itself to Shoutcast giving us a listing in their directory which brought in listeners that might never have even heard of us!
I will never undterstand why these people thought they just HAD to have what Flash provides. All it is ever provided was a way to wrap their streaming audio in a shitty, unstable, gaudy looking interface and ensure that nobody could ever listen to it on any kind of portable device or for many years even on a non Windows/Mac PC.
Now HTML 5 is going to let them keep doing the same although at least it shouldn't be so unstable.
Is it because they want to make sure that users have to go through their web site and see their ads in order to listen? It's a broadcast FCOL! They are going to HEAR your ads! Don't make it artificially difficult for them to do so just to get some web hits!
The problem is that ad companies want more than that. They are used to the real life equivalent of a door to door vacuum bed salesperson wedging a foot in the door, demanding time for their sales pitch, and one in every few salespeople will pull out a sawed off 12 gauge and do a home invasion.
Google's text ads are a nice change from that, but the only things you will see from the ad companies are pushes to attack AdBlock and more intrusive content. Security makes them no money, and they really don't give a rat's ass if their client's content compromises machines (like the attacks mentioned in The Register done on Azure servers.) The ad companies get their money by making sure their clients stuff is displayed on as many screens as possible, security and annoyance factors be damned.
when no one is visiting their sites they might decide its a good time to upgrade.
Devours your soul.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
vmware vsphere is still on it (needs HTML5 NOW)
"Streaming was difficult, especially for live stations, and there were no real http-supported streaming protocols that offered the flexibility of what was required a few years back."
And it's so easy with HTML5? NO! IT'S! NOT!
HTML5 has been claiming to be soooo media friendly for so many years, yet it's a fucking clusterfuck of competing standards and patents.
Maybe this jerkwad's is confusing "Progressive Download" with streaming.
But when it comes to taking an MP3 file, and streaming the bits down to a player on demand it's simply not possible without a Flash fallback to handle several current browsers. Chrome is the biggest fucking joke -- with google trying to pretend they are king of the internet and refusing to license MP3, so no streaming there -- progressive download only. HLS on Apple Safari works fine, but Google, being the king of the internet doesn't license that either -- so no go there. ... on Android ... sort of, and only Android 4 and above, and we all know what a clusterfark Android is thanks to Google King of the Internet ceding rights to the carrier to handle Android version updates, something the carriers couldn't give two shits about.
Sure, you can use RTSP
In all the years I've been putting together streaming web audio on the browser with HTML5, I've yet to find a reliable cross browser solution aside from Flash.
HTML5 keeps making claims to be this and that, but when it comes right down to it with streaming media and 3D applications, Flash is still VERY MUCH irreplaceable when it comes to performance and cross-platform reliability.
Look at all these people that think flash is just for playing video.
Next thing they will say is that HTML is just for rendering text documents.
The problem there is that no one can follow the rabbit hole very far.
With the mobile emphasis placed by search engines, the fact is it doesn't matter if they do or don't adapt. Currently,
pages whose main content is flash dependent, fail to provide a useful (and usable) results for mobile users and are replaced by others that do. Take a look some time and see how many of the top 10% for basically any query don't have mobile friendly landing pages.
They'll die or they won't. You just won't see them in the top results of a search.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Or would you recommend creating the vector animation in Flash, rendering to AVI, and sending that to the viewer as MP4 and WebM? That not only bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests)
You can export directly to other video formats with Flash / ToonBoom (etc) and publish those to YouTube
That's what "bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests)". In an era when more people are browsing the Internet over a connection with a limit of 2, 3, 5, or 10 GB per month, a usable vector animation solution becomes helpful. (I said "rendering to AVI" but meant more generally rendering to any high-quality intermediate that can be transcoded to smaller sizes.)
...what is the purpose of the giant hot pink Flash logo desktop wallpaper sitting right under the third paragraph?
What information is it adding to the journalism of the piece? How does it contribute to the reader's understanding of the concepts presented? What does it tell us about the editorial philosophy at FastCompany.com?
The problem is:
1. Too many business apps have flash built into like a dependency such as signing payroll forms, training videos, websites made for older versions of IE (use flash to make up the lack of ability in IE 6 and 7) etc
2. Zombie cookies. These cookies are permanent and can never be deleted. Advertisers LOVE THIS. It means always tracking
3. Mouse and keyboard logging. Yes actionscript can monitor your keywords and mice and sell the data to those who feel it can be useful for more targetted ads.
Advertisers hate HTML 5 and will fight tooth and nail to make sure flash is required on a PC and not play content even if they offer it via IOS. How frustrating :-(
http://saveie6.com/
I'm a bit shocked that all the replies here latched on to the "I don't mind ads" part, and mostly ignored the rest of the comment - how to block autoplay, audio, and video.
Flash is an open invitation for dozens of sites you aren't even visiting to allow dozens of their affiliates run arbitrary code on your machine.
Whatever.... so is HTML+Javascript. However, the big difference is that you can easily block ALL flash from loading, and selectively load flash elements so that the main content is run (ex. a video or music player), and the ads don't run. AFAICT, that's not so simple under HTML5 (the browser option to disable autoplay disables the autoplay tag, but that doesn't mean the page won't be able to rewrite parts of the page, trigger actions, and make things play... and what keeps them from loading at all besides ad blockers and similar tools?)
I think we'll get there, but there's a lot to re-invent. On the side of those using flash, there may be significant rewrites needed, and there's no simple way to do it. It's a big re-tooling (for anyone actually using it; and fwiw, I do not use it). Major sites like Facebook and Youtube are still not getting it right, and that's just for the relatively simple act of streaming some video.
There was a comment that went by on Reddit(?), from a flash game dev that basically lamented that the sound and gfx capabilities (or perhaps the dev tools?) of html5 were not up to par yet. I was hoping someone would provide some more insight.
The problem is, ad networks should be held accountable for the ads they are dishing out. If they don't want malware, then they should actually do their job and vet the ads before promoting them. THEY are promoting them, right? They are the responsible party.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The question is, what's "modernity"?
Don't forget that Javascript has been called archaic and pronounced dead countless times as well. But it refuses to die either.
Wait until we're all supposed to re-tool for the next great scripting / multimedia platform. How many websites will cling to javascript?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
One moment the plugin is installed, the next moment it no longer is. As far as I am concerned, Flash completely vanished months ago. If you want to change the world, start with the things you can do now.
THANK YOU! I've been annoyed for AGES that FF and Chrome to play media WHEN OPENED IN BACKGROUND TABS, i.e., when middle-clicking links in YouTube. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Hence the shrill, eponymous cry of desperation: "Aiiieeeeee!"
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Adobe just doesn't know how to write secure programs. That means their programs can not be used with untrusted data. Maybe they can make their adaptive video technology public so that it can be implemented by competent programmers.
for certain kinds of development for which HTML/JS still do blow chunks.
For example: making a sane, reasonably maintainable RIA application.
There is still no HTML/JS framework that implements a proper widget toolkit alongside a proper services oriented, two way binding, nicely MVC architecture.
Angular (and simlar) are the closest we have come, but still lacks a useful widget toolkit (far too many things missing).
As a developer I don't want to have to re-solve well understood problems endlessly -- which is what HTML/JS work is like. I want to focus on solving my business and user experience problems. There is no good reason I should have to implement a custom widget for any common use case. Tabs, combo boxes, grids, multi-selects, split panes, etc. are a solved problem. Except, of course, in the wild wild west of HTMl/JS where they are still, at best, hit or miss.
Yes, I can use Dojo and/or JQuery and/or other widget toolkits with Angular, but only as a gross hack.
Why is this setting not the default? Thank you very much for sharing this important change!
Cold turkey works. One day I just removed flash from my tween kid's computer, which means no more flash games, causing much weeping and wailing for a few days. The flash games are social networks you see, which is why the kids keep going to those site, not the crappy retro 2D games.
Fringe benefits: the fan on the laptop isn't going all the time now. Ads are less obnoxious and consume less bandwidth. Hours of mind-numbing wastage on useless grinding-type games becomes available for, you know, education. After a few days of complaints, life goes on, and from where I stand, it's a better life without flash.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I agree, and it's strange that Google disagrees.
When browsing reddit I like to first open a bunch of links in background tabs, and then look at them. This works for every link, except for Youtube because the stupid video immediately starts in the background tab.
http://konashion.blogspot.ca/
Flashblock already has the option to block html5 videos. I think it's not enabled by default though.
Just go to "Add-ons" and click "Options" under Flashblock. Tick the "Block HTML5 video as well".
Why is this modded +5 Informative? Youtube HTML5 video still autoplays even with this option set to false. Apparently they get around this by loading the video from a script. I basically had to disable HTML5 on Youtube to get it to stop autoplaying. Flash, thankfully, can be blocked until user permission.
Some people don't realize that ad-blockers for IE exist.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'm skilled with Adobe Flash, HTML4 and ActiveX controls. Anyone hiring?
So when he throws a tantrum you don't actually have to run and do what he wants anymore.
In Chrome you need plugin, like "Disable HTML5 Autoplay" one.
Flash needs to die. It's incredibly insecure, unstable and a total resource hog. It has no place in 2015.
People keep saying this, and yet...
To my knowledge, there is no actual evidence to show that browsers are significantly better on security. The major ones all fix critical vulnerabilities regularly, it just doesn't get as widely publicised. (Don't believe me? Go check the changelogs for recent releases of your browser of choice.) Moreover, if browsers do start to offer all the same functionality as Flash but natively, they'll also increase their attack surface accordingly. Of course if you compare a browser against the same browser with a plugin then the second combination has a larger attack surface, but right now that is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
I see little evidence of Flash being unstable, and haven't for years. It's much harder than it used to be to hang or crash browsers generally these days, too, but when it does happen it's almost invariably a glitch in the browser itself. (This assessment is based on building various web applications for a living, and the reasonable assumption that consistent trends shown across long-term bug tracking for a variety of otherwise unrelated projects is probably quite accurate. YMMV.)
Finally, as for resource hogging, since sites like YouTube went to HTML5 video, I see my graphics card core speed, and consequently its temperature and eventually fan speed, ramp way up just from watching a video. Since web sites started using funky browser-accelerated tricks with modern JS, same result, and often CPU cores ramping up as well. Older sites that use Flash for similar video or graphics demo tricks sit there quite happily, barely troubling either the CPU or GPU for anything it seems. (Again, this is just based on long-term monitoring and performance testing with objective tools. YMMV, but it's hard data from the machines I use for web development work.)
And Flash still has cross-platform consistency and portability that things like HTML5 video are sorely lacking, and still offers some features that the browser-native tools don't.
The dogma that Flash needs to die needs to die. Flash can die when the browser-native alternatives are actually better.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The sooner Flash dies the better. I run with it turned off unless for some bizarre reason I come across a site with a feature I want that still uses this dinosaur technology that sucks CRU. Then I debate, to Flash them or move on. Usually I move on. They lose.
Die, Flash, Die.
For better or worse, your argument is flawed.
You are a statistical anomaly. Even in 2015, a heavy majority of web users don't even have a basic ad blocker installed, which is why on-line advertising is still an extremely profitable industry. Consider a parallel with sites have those really annoying pop-ups when you arrive: enough people actually do sign up for their newsletter that the technique works, even though it might alienate a few people who really will leave... but actually, most people won't, even though they protest that they will when they post on Slashdot. For the same reason, using Flash content is still effective in many cases.
The people running sites that use these techniques understand that your final paragraph has it backwards. Someone who really will actively block these things or go somewhere else is far less likely to be a good customer and far more likely to cause customer support headaches in other respects even if they do join or buy something. Professionally run sites want those people to go away as early as possible, they don't need you to visit their site, and they are happy if you go cause trouble for their competitors instead.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It works for .play() too, as of Fx41.
...and I meant to add a link to bug 659285 there, but I dropped a quote and the entire <a> tag got stripped out, and I somehow missed it in the preview. Sigh.
And then the system suddenly starts to LOOK like it's the way you want it and hasn't been tampered with, but actually has been. Even tweens are starting to pick up on that stuff now that all they have to do is borrow a friend's device and search for "how to..." Given physical access to a system, sufficient time, and some motivating factor (social stuff, media, warez, pron, or just the challenge of winning against "the man" (parents), there's not much that's truly out of bounds.
YouTube and Twitch kept me tied to flash player. YouTube switched a while ago and Twitch just changed.
No more flash player on my main system ;)
WebRTC is maturing quickly with good vendor support for creating direct audio, video and data connections among browsers with many peer-to-peer possibilities including for example a sort of BitTorrent client: https://github.com/feross/webt... . Already WebRTC is the data conveyor for the Facebook Messenger app for example. I have been lucky to attend a couple talks in recent months about this. Be sure to check out Red5 if you are interested in video superpowers: https://github.com/Red5
For flash-like HTML5/Javascript controls I have been impressed with Greensock - see http://greensock.com/get-start... - it even has a lot of 3D capabilities. Greensock started as a Flash toolkit and moved into HTML5 later, as I understand it.
We are getting to the point where even Unreal Engine can roughly compile for the browser so I think most of the unique capabilities of Flash are finally becoming supplanted in better and more open ways.
--hongpong.com
A lot (most?) news sites are guilty of the same thing. I try to not open video links in background tabs, but when one gets through, it can be a bitch to figure out what 'just started fucking playing' when you have a whole sidebar of nested tabs open, especially if it was a slow loading one ten tabs back.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
This is a bad analogy. There was no point when flash was great.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
doesn't work on https://www.airbnb.co.uk
An eager explanation...
Most of the sites offering television content -- Hulu, NBC, etc. -- use a video player and content library management system from a company in Orem, Utah, in order to implement their commercial insertion mechanisms in order to monetize their online content. This player only works in flash, and simply would not work in HTML5, even if you wanted it to, without giving people the ability to block commercials from these sites.
Other companies content is managed, and the DRM protection mechanism, and operational ticketing mechanism, is implemented using Adobe Access. Adobe Access is a content management system based on an older product known as Adobe Flash Access (actually, it's the same product, renamed). The content control mechanism therefore requires the use of a flash player in order to implement the DRM. Companies using this content platform include Google (Google Play) and Amazon.
From a non-content perspective, a number of companies do a couple of things which are impossible to do in JavaScript, but which are often highly convenient as UI features, and flash allows a click bypass in the UI for these companies in order to implement their desired behavior. One of these is GMail, which has an upload drop-zone mechanism for email attachments (actually, lots of web mail applications utilize flash specifically for this feature). Another is the Amazon "one click purchase", which would otherwise be "two click purchase".
Finally, a lot of content is simply authored with Adobe Content Creator tools. Say what you will about flash, but Adobe has the finest web content authoring tools, content management system, and so on in the business. Others are at best a poor second, and none of them contains all of the capabilities of Adobe Creative. Sadly, that lets them, as part of their content creation, transparently insert flash into your web content. You can disable this (there are some obscure settings to allow it), but doing so disables some of the features you can use on your web sites. There are more modern methods of adding those features back in, but Adobe has not provided alternative implementations, since they feel "the flash implementation is good enough".
That explains everything that I'd be personally "reluctant to discuss" about why my site was continuing to require flash. As you can see, there are reasons, and they aren't great, but it's not like everyone is using flash to crap "super cookies"; there are other ways to track you.
flash :) classic http://www.classicgamesarcade.com/game/21667/international-karate-plus.html
Recent versions of Firefox and Chrome show you which tabs are playing media.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"Jared Newman investigates why Flash won't disappear from the web anytime soon."
..
Because the media companies won't spend money on the alternative
Actually for the Linux user Flash is a dead fish. For the rest of the world is not so dead.
There are a lot of "free" Flash replacement tools but they demand that you code an animation (just a motion, nothing fancy) like a C program, and the compile it like a gcc tool and face a console window. Yer sure...
When I did work in a marketing company I could enter in the Graphic Design dept being a C coder for one reason, tell the word "variable" to Graphic Designers and they explode in fear. I was "the guy that add the variables to my animation" for them. Forget made them to explain something like an IF ELSE.
Unless somebody creates a SWF (which oddly is Open source format) in a IDE friendly for Graphic Designers, Flash won die. Even me looking to these tools, think "they are insane" and just install my old CS2 Flash version. Made the tool, people reall want to seek options that are not the Linux shoe (code, compile, see odd warning errors). Or you will live in the denial of "GIMP do not need to use CYMK because I DO NOT PRINT IMAGES"?
Have fun!
"Jared Newman investigates why Flash won't disappear from the web anytime soon."
Because the media companies won't spend money on the alternative ..
That's actually not true.
They are willing to spend a crap-ton of money on the alternative. It's just neither of the two competing HTML standards camps is willing to implement their draconian DRM demands for them, or deal with their "commercial insertion problem", other than making it a server side problem, where it has to be placed into the content stream, and the user of the browser then has the option of skipping it by jumping ahead in the buffer.
No forced commercials means they will not be moving their content to HTML5 soon.
NB: One company was even demanding that they be able to implement "pause on mute" within the streaming protocol, so that not only did you have to *watch* the commercial to watch the next section of content, you had to *hear* it as well.
There are still lots of people out there running IE 6, 7, and 8, none of which support HTML 5 video. My company's site still sees about 10% if its traffic coming from IE 8 or older. If you are running a site that people actually want to visit, you don't tell your visitors they have to upgrade their browser, you make sure that your site will work on whatever they have. Most people have Flash installed, so it solves an important problem for these sites.
If you're not already using something like No Script (firefox extension) to whitelist javascript on a per-domain basis, you're (IMHO) doing it (the web) wrong.
I know Chrome had an extension called 'noisy tabs' or similar, I have not seen one on Firefox. I use 'Tree Style Tab' on Firefox, It may be the addon, but there is no distinction between video and regular tabs. If I have to choose I'll stick with the Tree Style as I really like the way it displays.
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
Flash drives me crazy. Financial sites like to use it for graphs and charts and I can't install it on my Samsung tablet. Yes I know there are tricks with alternate browsers etc but I bought a damn tablet to be easy. Most of these sites have apps, but almost inevitably they are less full featured than the website.