Slashdot Mirror
Senator Asks US Agencies To Remove Flash From Government Websites (bleepingcomputer.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a letter sent today, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden asked officials from three government agencies (NIST, NSA, DHS) to come up with solutions and procedures that mandate the removal of Adobe Flash content from all US government websites by August 1, 2019. The Senator is urging US government officials to act in light of Adobe's Flash end-of-life date scheduled for the end of 2020, after which Adobe announced it would cease to provide any technical support for the software.
Senator Wyden is hoping to avoid a situation like the one of Windows XP, which US government agencies still use, despite Microsoft retiring the operating system back in 2014. Besides removing Flash from its websites, the Senator would also want Flash removed from computer of employees by the same August 1, 2019 deadline.
Senator Wyden is hoping to avoid a situation like the one of Windows XP, which US government agencies still use, despite Microsoft retiring the operating system back in 2014. Besides removing Flash from its websites, the Senator would also want Flash removed from computer of employees by the same August 1, 2019 deadline.
Hold on there, the actual story is nuanced.
Designers, marketers, and bosses loved it because you had WYSIWYG control over everything. You were not dependent on gijillion browser brand and version combinations all rendering placements differently or having different JavaScript bugs. You saw the preview and it worked just about the same way on every user's PC.
And end-users didn't really care as long as it worked and Flash applications loaded relatively quick. Installation and upgrade steps and problems got to them sometimes, and reports of security problems combined with these installation headaches finally made it not worth it to them. That's when the slow decline started. Adobe using upgrades to sneak junkware onto PC's via sneaky prompts didn't help matters.
Some slick games and gizmos used Flash. HTML5/JS versions of equivalent still seem glitchy and browser-version-sensitive to me. Whether it will eventually settle, or some new trend/fad will break it worse is hard to say.
Dealing with ever-mutating fat clients (browsers) is still an ongoing pain and a yuuuge IT labor drain. It's job security for us IT workers, but you do have to marvel at the jillions of hours of diddling and fiddling it causes. The first generation wasted time replacing mainframe vacuum tubes, the current generation wastes time testing & debugging on myriad browser variations.
Every generation will probably be a slave to its own tech limitations. In the minicomputer era, I remember how we spent a lot of time babysitting modem-related problems. In the desktop era, we had installation problems such as DLL-Hell (DLL version conflicts). At least in the minicomputer and desktop era, once the app got running, you usually had consistent front-end rendering.
Table-ized A.I.