Adobe Flash Now Officially a Part of Google Chrome 168
MacGene noted that Google has announced plans to include Flash with Chrome. This step will make Chrome easier for Mom & Pop to use, but comes with a host of issues that have been discussed here before. I expect them to announce Silverlight Thursday.
I'm ok with it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:hopefully.. (Score:1, Insightful)
For me, I find its interface still wanting and wish they (Google folks) adopted the "search within a page" functionality found in Firefox where I can simply start typing my search term or start the search process with a "/" - configurable by the way!
Stupid Media Spin To This Story (Score:5, Insightful)
So here's the story; Google releases a new Chromium build [chromium.org] that does three things:
1) A copy of the Flash plugin gets installed when Chrome/Chromium is installed, regardless of whether you already have it.
2) Chrome/Chromium now runs its copy of the Flash plugin in a sandbox, so that malicious Flash content can't access your computer.
3) Chrome/Chromium will now auto-scan for updates to the Flash plugin and install them in an automated fashion upon launch.
So basically, the real story is that this is a security update for Chromium, mitigating many of the vulnerabilities with the current setup of having the Flash runtime be run with user privileges from a central location for all browsers, and managed by no one at all.
There's also an announcement of a partnership between Google, Mozilla and Adobe to work on a new API for browser plugins, presumably involving browsers taking a more active role in managing their plugins, and allowing certain features like sandboxing and implementation of some type of common interface standards.
What we get instead is reporting of Google thwarting Apple's putative war on Flash, somehow breathing new life into the beleaguered standard, where Apple would surely do the opposite of whatever Google is doing. I'd not be surprised to see Safari adopt some very similar features in the near future, as they all make pretty good sense, at least for their desktop browser. If only these "journalists" knew enough about what they were reporting to recognize their need to eat crow at that point.
The problem is that it promotes the use of Flash. (Score:1, Insightful)
Flash should not be promoted, especially by a company like Google. Flash is not an example of a beneficial technology. It is nothing but a horrible bandage over the crippled client-side web "platform".
Technologies like Flash, Silverlight, and Java applets need to die out. They should not be used, and companies like Google, who have lots of intelligent engineering talent, should not be pressing for its use.
I would rather have seen Google embed Python in their browser, and let us have a real scripting environment. It'd be much better for large-scale software development than JavaScript, and would promote the development of higher-quality web apps that aren't restricted to the small number of platforms that Flash supports.
April Fool's Day (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:The problem is that it promotes the use of Flas (Score:1, Insightful)
What are you talking about. Flash, silverlight and java have there place.
The issue is when people abuse the technology and overuse it or use it where its not needed.
There great for complex things like games and complicated applications, but simple things like menus and page content is were i draw the line. There is no reason to make half your site flash based.
Re:I'm ok with it. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's definitely made-up, but I am not at all convinced it's an exaggeration. Flash is damn-near ubiquitous for any web user who isn't an engineer. Just how many MySpace users do you think exist for each slashdot user?
Re:The problem is that it promotes the use of Flas (Score:3, Insightful)
Javascript, over the years, has become extremely good at graceful degradation [wikipedia.org]. Toolkits such as JQuery really stress the fact that Javascript should be used to augment a user's experience [wikipedia.org], without making support for said toolkit or language a requirement.
A common example of this are menus which show will display a submenu when hovered, but still work as a proper HTML link if clicked (intentionally or because the user's browser is unable to display the submenu). I have seen quite a few websites where the navigation relied extensively on Flash, and there was no way to browse anything else than the index if Flash was unavailable.
I think everyone realises that Flash is a dying technology. Its proprietary nature, lack of openness, CPU-hungry cycles and history of poor design have made it the black sheep of webdesign; the only reason it still is popular is because of YouTube. As a few in here have said, Joe Bloggs doesn't care about what technology powers the fancy and shiny flashing buttons on the interwebs. So, whether it's Flash or something else, they'll adopt anything as long as it just works. We just need to wait for websites to stop providing it.
Unless we're talking about very fancy vector drawing, there rarely is anything about content disposition in Flash that provides an advantage over HTML/Javascript. A few examples of this are LivePipe [livepipe.net] and JQuery Tools [flowplayer.org]. Most of these are available through Content Delivery Networks, which drastically reduces load times.
Re:The problem is that it promotes the use of Flas (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that the only viable alternative to Flash is Canvas.
Internet Explorer doesn't support it except through a plugin
Firefox supports it, but it's about 70% the speed of Chrome
Chrome supports it, runs it the fastest (as far as I can tell anyway) but it's still about half as fast (Atleast) as an equivalent thing made in Flash.
Javascript needs a serious kick up the arse from where it is now to even think of taking on Flash. It also needs a decent Developer GUI that can be handled by Artists (like Flash has)
I love Canvas, and I love Javascript. But for ease of use, and for rapid development, I use Flash.
Also, AS3 has a much better custom class syntax than JS that's much more similar to C++/C#.