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

[Anonymous Coward]

media.autoplay.enabled = false in firefox, don't know about chrome.

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

[gstoddart]

I don't mind ads (I really don't)

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.