Slashdot Mirror
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."
This. Especially the audio, but in general, any auto-playing video is unwanted.
media.autoplay.enabled = false in firefox, don't know about chrome.
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.
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.