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 fut

[cps42]

This. Especially the audio, but in general, any auto-playing video is unwanted.

Translation

[IamTheRealMike]

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?

Vector animation

[tepples]

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.

Re:I think it's hilarious and ironic Facebook

[Billly Gates]

That is because of zombie cookies.

Facebook LOVES FLASH because the cookies are permanently stored in flash and can never be deleted. Advertisers and tracking companies including Facebook love this. Yet another reason to ditch this. However, reality is easier said than done. Man the pc is like the mainframe now where it is old and creaky and no one wants to dare touch or change them or do anything different on them. That is what phones are for etc.

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

[Archangel Michael]

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.