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A Farewell To Flash

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-a-decade-too-soon dept.

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."

3 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Looking at you, BBC... by mccalli · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?".

  2. Browsers should have EnableVideo code by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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!"

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    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  3. Am I the only one that sort of liked Flash? by Gordo_1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?