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.

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!"

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: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.

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.