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

Again?

[Lumpio-]

How many times have we already said farewell to Flash and it still refuses to die...

Re:Again?

[grimmjeeper]

I predict we will only see the true end of Flash after we see COBOL finally retired...

Re:Again?

[halivar]

I'll believe it when NetCraft confirms it.

Re:Again?

[squiggleslash]

Yup. Besides, HTML5 has to match the critical features that attracted certain types of website to Flash in the first place.

1. It has to support streaming. There's no universally supported protocol for streaming right now, not RTMP, not HLS, nothing.
2. It has to be hard to rip the stream. There's kinda-sorta DRM in HTML5, but it requires plug-ins (actually, worse than that, in practice it requires the plug-ins be compiled into the browser executable. No more using unofficial Firefox builds), which means it has the same damned problem Flash had in the first place.

Those are just the headline issues.

We'll get there, eventually. But the DRM thing in particular isn't doing anyone any favors.

Re:Again?

[grimmjeeper]

YouTube moving away was indeed a big step. The bigger step that is needed will be when porn moves away from Flash. Until they do, the installed base of flash will not significantly diminish and there will be little incentive for anyone else to move away.

Re:Again?

[MickyTheIdiot]

If you can watch it on a screen you can rip it... even if it means you point a videocamera at the screen you can rip it.

Your comment is flawed for the same reason DRM is flawed. The only way to NEVER be able to copy digital content is to not allow anyone to see it.

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?".

Re:Looking at you, BBC...

[dcavanaugh]

Yes, there are better ways to use browser agent id. But keeping Flash on the desktop means their HTML5 code does not need to be validated on lots of browsers. If the BBC implementation of HTML5 turned out to be buggy, the damage would be limited to platforms that couldn't run Flash anyway.

If I were in charge at BBC, I would use mobile/portable devices as a beta test for implementing HTML5. Sooner or later, they have to bring HTML5 to the desktop, but it can wait until more of the obsolescent browsers are gone. Maybe the next project is to implement adaptive style sheets to get one code base that suits all browsers on all devices. At that point, Flash can finally take its rightful place in the Recycle Bin.

When you have a huge user base and many of them are technologically illiterate, you end up doing things that are far from elegant. In a large organization, it takes longer than you would expect to get anything done.

Any HTML5 blockers?

[sinij]

Any HTML5 blockers out there, because we know the scum from marketing department will have us Punching Monkeys in HTML5 in no time.

Tell your story walking.

[nimbius]

flash is an inextricable touchstone of practically every KVM in the datacenter that doesnt show up on a rickety cart.

Flash is the mandatory model of how VMWare has decided (infuriatingly and incorrectly i might stress) we shall all interact with their products.

Flash still powers billboards and advertisement hardware for countless products.

and most important: Flash is still required to view a substantial amount of internet pornography.

Re:Now we need a NoHTML5Media plugin

[ArchieBunker]

You realize its only a matter of time until companies splice ads into the content itself so filtering will be impossible.

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.

Change is Scary

[phantomfive]

Many of them are not thrilled about the proposition (change is scary),

More like change is expensive. It has nothing to do with scary.

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:Am I the only one that sort of liked Flash?

[swillden]

You can thank Google for that. They tricked the majority of web masters into using third party domains for essential parts of the web site, so blocking all third party content is no longer feasible. There is no good technical reason for doing it, but Google's recommendations made sure that unwanted content is now mixed into a sea of necessary assets loaded from separate domains.

I don't know what recommendations you're speaking of, but there are actually very good security reasons for using separate domains wherever possible. The Same Origin policy implemented by all modern browsers enables the use of domains as client-side content sandboxes of a sort. You can safely load content, including scripts, from one domain with good reason to believe it cannot access or manipulate content from another domain.

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/8264/why-is-the-same-origin-policy-so-important

And, yes, Google does this extensively with its own web properties, using different domains to carefully separate components unless the components have specific and valid reasons to interact. Not because Google thinks that one of its components might be malicious, but because subtle and unanticipated interactions can cause unexpected problems and leaks.

Slashdot ads

[wikthemighty]

Here's why I disable ads on Slashdot: VIDEO!

If all their ads were static, I would be happy to uncheck Disable Ads...

Re:Slashdot ads

[WillAffleckUW]

Here's why I disable ads on Slashdot: VIDEO!

If all their ads were static, I would be happy to uncheck Disable Ads...

Agreed. Same here. Back in the days of flat banner ads - which could be "click to follow link that will play video" - I let the ads display. But sound and giant honking autoplay downloads mean I disable advertising on Slashdot.

If advertising behaved, I'd turn it on again.

Re:Now we need a NoHTML5Media plugin

[Anonymous Coward]

In the US, at least, that happens only because the FCC mandates a 1-frame black burst before and after commercial breaks, and none in the middle of commercial breaks. Obviously, anyone can pick up on this and snip everything between them. Of course, networks now like to introduce them into the middle of programming to throw the count off and hopefully trick some DVR's into ruining a recording to teach the dirty rotten content thieves a lesson (or something). Most DVR's have a few other tricks up their sleeves to make sure they don't fall for it, though.

The point, though, is that no such requirement to insert those start/stop markers exists for web video delivery. Your MythTV box would struggle quite a bit if it didn't have those convenient markers. It's like, instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack using a magnet, trying to find a toothpick in an uncut piece of lumber that is about to be used to make toothpicks. With a magnet. In other words, good luck with that.

Uninstalled in 2009

[xororand]

I uninstalled Flash in 2009 and for some reason I'm still alive! :-O

youtube-dl downloads and streams video and audio from about 500 legacy sites in the quality of your choice.

livestreamer streams live video from about 70 legacy sites such as the popular "Twitch".

VLC and mpv also can play video from some sites directly, e.g. YouTube.

Re:Now we need a NoHTML5Media plugin

[jason.sweet]

Failing that I will wget it and do it myself.

If you are manually editing content just to eliminate something you could have easily spent 30 seconds ignoring, then you are in serious need fo some therapy.

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)