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."

Comments

Re:hope there's a "no videos" flag in HTML5's futu

[meta-monkey]

Devours your soul.

Re:real-time adaptive video playback

[gsslay]

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Have some capital letters on me. You seem to have run out.

Cold turkey

[Tough Love]

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.

Re:real-time adaptive video playback

[sysrammer]

Nonsense, that's socialism. He should have to work hard to acquire capital.