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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).

3 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Former professional Flash/AS developer here ... by Qbertino · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I had my last Flash project back in 2011. Never did anything with Flash since.

    To be clear: Flash is super-dead.

    Which is a crying shame. And please spare me the Flash banner ad whining. ... Flash was *at* *least* 15 years ahead technology wise. You could do many things with Flash that JS/WebGL/CSS still struggle to achieve today on computers orders of magnitude faster than anything we had back then.

    Adobe screwed this up big time. Flash could've been the brave new resolution-independent vector graphic world of retina displays and mobile devices. What do we have instead? React and React Native and awkward SVG and canvas hacks using transpiled JS and whatnot. Laughable compared to even the simplest Flash/AS client/server setup and way more difficult to handle. With Flash/AS you could whip up an interactive map or some other gadget in a coffee break, async data with the server included. Adobe screwed it up big time. They should've FOSSed it when the touch-mobile revolution started - that was their last chance. Flash is dead and Adobe alone is to blame.

    I don't use Adobe products anymore. Flash was the only proprietary tech I used and it will remain the only one. Flash was worth it. Very neat tech. Hope we get there once again sometime in the future. Until then it's HTML canvas, TypeScript, WebGL and Web Asssembly. ... Yeah, just great.

    --
    We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
  2. Re:Well, of course by Alwin+Henseler · · Score: 1, Interesting

    (..) I only use Chrome when I specifically need to access a site which still uses Flash.

    No such use case here. If a site 'needs' Flash, I don't 'need' that site.

  3. Re:RIP Flash ? by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Adobe was actually working to phase it out with HTML5 implementation becoming common. Apple and Adobe working closely together. I expect that when Jobs approached Adobe, they were not willing to give a full effort in Flash support for the iPhone, that would meed Jobs standards, because Adobe (and Jobs probably too) knew this technology was on its way out and there is no long term plan with it.
    So Jobs did what jobs does. Talks around limitations on its device and says it is what the future holds.

    However the smartphone market for consumers in general accelerated flashes demise. As average guy would be doing bulk of their browsing on it, and less with a more powerful computer.

    Well, what really helped were two things.

    1) Most legit uses of flash were to watch YouTube videos, and the iPhone came with a YouTube app.

    2) Most other users of flash were ads. iPhones not supporting Flash thus had a small advantage in well, getting a faster web browsing experience. For a time Adobe tried to convince everyone Flash was necessary (it was used on 99% of websites - yes, it was true, since 99% of them had flash ads) and offered an Android version, but while you could use it to view other video websites (great!), it meant you also got all the flash ads and they bogged your phone down.

    By the time the iPhone came out, people were disabling flash to avoid ads