Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

End of Flash? Its Usage Among Chrome Users Has Declined From 80% in 2014 to Under 8% as of Early 2018 (bleepingcomputer.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the good-riddance dept.

An anonymous reader writes: The percentage of daily Chrome users who've loaded at least one page containing Flash content per day has gone down from around 80% in 2014 to under 8% in early 2018. These statistics on Flash's declining numbers were shared with the public by Parisa Tabriz, Director of Engineering at Google, one of the Google bigwigs in charge of Chrome's security. Google plans to ship Flash disabled-by-default with Chrome 76 (July 2019) and remove it completely in Chrome 87 (December 2020).

2 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Still required by public schools in the US by acroyear · · Score: 5, Informative

    We're hitting the same issue, where the schools are currently dependent on learning games written in flash. Also my kid's favorite "safe" game platform is Friv, and they run on flash as well.

    Then there's the entire kids programming language Scratch from MIT, which still does not have a non-flash version online (a download, yeah, but it uses adobe air I think, so there we go - still has a flash-based runtime).

    So there's still work to go to get rid of it, and unfortunately these types of sites don't have the financial resources to go and rewrite everything they have, as opposed to some huge corporate website that just needed to replace their splash screen with something less obnoxious.

    --
    "But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
    -- Joe
  2. Re:Former professional Flash/AS developer here ... by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 4, Informative

    They should've FOSSed... Flash was the only proprietary tech I used and it will remain the only one.

    Point of fact, Adobe offered w3c control of Flash as a successor/extension to Javascript. To that end, they opensourced AS3 a long, long time ago. Possibly even pre-iPhone 1. There are GPL implementations of the Flash engine and everything.

    Flash died because Steve Jobs wanted a walled garden on the cell phone. If HTML5 had been as far along then, he would have killed that too.

    But I too morn Flash. And, possibly most obnoxiously, because of banner ads. When Flash was based on a specific type of object (plugin or not), I could whitelist it easily. Flash died, and as a result the obnoxious things moved out of the sandbox and into the browser proper.

    --
    Your ad here. Ask me how!