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).

6 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
    1. 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!
  2. Still required by public schools in the US by Kazymyr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My daughter's assignments (public middle school) are on a website that requires flash. Cannot be used in recent Firefox builds. Flash will not go away while it's required by the public school system.

    --
    I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
    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
  3. Re:likely .... by cyberchondriac · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Been there already. I was out in the field, my laptop wouldn't open Vcenter because of the Flash BS.
    Fortunately I could do what I needed to do (shut down VMs) with the HTML5 version, which is still quite limited.

    Death to Flash, and Death to Java too, while we're at it.
    Java is like the new DLL hell with compatibility/security issues.
    I hate how the industry forced us into using browsers as management utilities, and got rid of the solidly working dedicated applications that worked well before under the guise of, "Now you can easily manage xyz from any workstation and no installation necessary!!". Used car salesmen are more truthful.
    Hopefully HTML5 actually backs up some of this promise.

    --

    Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
  4. Re:RIP Flash ? by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The difference is that the authors of many beloved classic Flash cartoons and games aren't around to remake them for HTML5.