A Farewell To Flash

An anonymous reader writes: The decline of Flash is well and truly underway. Media publishers now have no choice but to start changing the way they bring content to the web. Many of them are not thrilled about the proposition (change is scary), but it will almost certainly be better for all of us in the long run. "By switching their platform to HTML5, companies can improve supportability, development time will decrease and the duplicative efforts of supporting two code bases will be eliminated. It will also result in lower operating costs and a consistent user experience between desktop and mobile web." This is on top of the speed, efficiency, and security benefits for consumers. "A major concern for publishers today is the amount of media consumption that's occurring in mobile environments. They need to prioritize providing the best possible experience on mobile, and the decline of Flash and movement to HTML5 will do just that, as Flash has never worked well on mobile."

Comments

Looking at you, BBC...

[mccalli]

Go to the BBC site with a desktop browser, it's Flash all the way. Now go on iOS (I would guess also Android) and magically it's HTML 5. Set the user agent to identify as an iPad and you get the identical layout to the desktop browsers but HTML 5 media.

Now why on earth is that? That's actually more effort to maintain than just doing it right in the first place. OK so you have older version browser support, but there are better ways to identify those than just "are you a desktop OS trying to access me?".

Browsers should have EnableVideo code

[WillAffleckUW]

All HTML5 browsers should have an EnableVideo code setting.

So that I can turn it off.

I don't need your video. I don't want your video. I don't want it to autoplay.

If you have an ad, you can show it in text, and stop sucking up bandwidth.

Now, if you want to give me a box that I can right click on to "play video", great.

But as Leelu would say "Not without my permission!"

Think of the children...

[userw014]

For all that I've hated Flash for years (for idiosyncratic reasons), and loathe Flash now (for all the usual reasons), there is a great deal of (old) content dependent on Flash. Will that content (like a Flash version of Portal) become inaccessible?

Archivists are probably dreading dealing with this.

Am I the only one that sort of liked Flash?

[Gordo_1]

By having the majority of undesirable web content stuck in easy-to-flag Flash buckets, it was inherently simple to block that content. I could simply whitelist a handful of sites whose flash content I wanted to see (e.g. Youtube) and block it pretty much everywhere else.

Now with everything moving to HTML5, I fear the necessary blocking ruleset will gets many times more complicated and with more false positives and negatives to boot. Am I wrong?

Re:Now we need a NoHTML5Media plugin

[Anonymous Coward]

Always wondered how the piracy sites were getting content that is "supposedly protected"

Guess we'll just have to force DRM on all video streams so that potential blockers can't tell ads from content.

Re:Now we need a NoHTML5Media plugin

[Megane]

the FCC mandates a 1-frame black burst before and after commercial breaks

Tell that to at least one of my local TV stations that does a multi-frame fade between one of their self-advertisements and the program being returned to. Yes, prime-time on a major US broadcast network. I don't have cable (antenna-only), and it's not the only channel that does a quick fade in and out of programs. The good news is that more often than not, there's usually at least one black key frame between commercials and program.

I don't trust my MythTV box's ability to detect commercials, but I've got pretty good at manually snipping them from the shows that I want to keep around. But I still let it run so that the little flag icon is there to remind me to remove them myself. (yes, it's shameful)