The Agonizingly Slow Decline of Adobe's Flash Player 220
harrymcc writes: Security and performance issues with Adobe's Flash Player have led to countless calls for its abandonment. But a significant percentage of major sites still use it--and many of those companies aren't eager to explain why. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman investigates why Flash won't disappear from the web anytime soon. From the article:
Despite the pressure from tech circles, the sites I spoke with said they simply weren’t able to start moving away from Flash until recently, when better technology become available. And even now, it’s going to take time for them to finish building the necessary tools.
"Originally, Flash was necessary to solve a couple problems," says Adam Denenberg, chief technical officer for streaming music service iHeartRadio. "Streaming was difficult, especially for live stations, and there were no real http-supported streaming protocols that offered the flexibility of what was required a few years back."
I think it's hilarious and ironic Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
called for an end-of-life date on Flash, and wants Adobe to commit to it, yet they're one of the worst offenders for requiring Flash to play videos when h.264 and WebM exist......
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Not quite sure what you're referring to as I don't have Flash Player installed and videos play perfectly fine...
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Videos on Facebook play back just fine on my non-Flash-enabled PC and on my iOS devices.
Re:I think it's hilarious and ironic Facebook (Score:5, Informative)
Interesting, on my home PC, just upgraded to Windows 10 and Edge, I disabled Flash. Youtube works fine playing HTML 5 videos, but clicking on videos in Facebook opens up the modal interface and the "get Flash!" logo shows up.
Opening facebook with Chrome or Firefox, both of which have the FF add-on, videos play fine.
-Rick
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I purposely use safari with out flash as my main browser and keep chrome for google apps and flash. At least until Google kills flash in chrome.
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Re: I think it's hilarious and ironic Facebook (Score:2, Informative)
One word: tracking.
Html by itself cannot set persistent cookies.
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Cookies aren't even required anymore for tracking. Data can be stored in local storage, global storage, indexed DB, even in your web history and as RGB color values in Canvas-generated PNG images. Google "Evercookie" to see examples.
Unless you have a huge library of flash videos and just need time to convert them, there are virtually no valid reasons to continue using flash, not even nefarious reasons like persistent tracking.
Re:I think it's hilarious and ironic Facebook (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe it detects that Flash is installed and tries to use it but then can't. i've noticed that that is how Youtube seems to work. If there is Flash I get one interface (complete with Full Screen support). If there is no Flash I get a different one (still no Full Screen damnit!)
Re:I think it's hilarious and ironic Facebook (Score:5, Interesting)
That's how business works. Can't justify spending money to replace Flash when it isn't going away any time soon. The moment Adobe put an EOL date on it Facebook can justify spending the money and telling all other companies that provide content for them (mostly PTW games) that they have to as well.
It's stupid but Facebook has shareholders now.
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My sentiments exactly. I have the Flash plugin 'Ask to activate' and on FB, videos won't even try to play. The bar doesn't even pop up, like it does on other sites. I switch to 'Always Activate' and it works. =/
Flash needs to die. It's incredibly insecure, unstable and a total resource hog. It has no place in 2015.
Flash isn't so bad, really (Score:5, Interesting)
Flash needs to die. It's incredibly insecure, unstable and a total resource hog. It has no place in 2015.
People keep saying this, and yet...
To my knowledge, there is no actual evidence to show that browsers are significantly better on security. The major ones all fix critical vulnerabilities regularly, it just doesn't get as widely publicised. (Don't believe me? Go check the changelogs for recent releases of your browser of choice.) Moreover, if browsers do start to offer all the same functionality as Flash but natively, they'll also increase their attack surface accordingly. Of course if you compare a browser against the same browser with a plugin then the second combination has a larger attack surface, but right now that is an apples-to-oranges comparison.
I see little evidence of Flash being unstable, and haven't for years. It's much harder than it used to be to hang or crash browsers generally these days, too, but when it does happen it's almost invariably a glitch in the browser itself. (This assessment is based on building various web applications for a living, and the reasonable assumption that consistent trends shown across long-term bug tracking for a variety of otherwise unrelated projects is probably quite accurate. YMMV.)
Finally, as for resource hogging, since sites like YouTube went to HTML5 video, I see my graphics card core speed, and consequently its temperature and eventually fan speed, ramp way up just from watching a video. Since web sites started using funky browser-accelerated tricks with modern JS, same result, and often CPU cores ramping up as well. Older sites that use Flash for similar video or graphics demo tricks sit there quite happily, barely troubling either the CPU or GPU for anything it seems. (Again, this is just based on long-term monitoring and performance testing with objective tools. YMMV, but it's hard data from the machines I use for web development work.)
And Flash still has cross-platform consistency and portability that things like HTML5 video are sorely lacking, and still offers some features that the browser-native tools don't.
The dogma that Flash needs to die needs to die. Flash can die when the browser-native alternatives are actually better.
Re:I think it's hilarious and ironic Facebook (Score:5, Insightful)
That is because of zombie cookies.
Facebook LOVES FLASH because the cookies are permanently stored in flash and can never be deleted. Advertisers and tracking companies including Facebook love this. Yet another reason to ditch this. However, reality is easier said than done. Man the pc is like the mainframe now where it is old and creaky and no one wants to dare touch or change them or do anything different on them. That is what phones are for etc.
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Well, not *never* deleted.
Go here & delete:
http://www.macromedia.com/supp... [macromedia.com]
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It's not a tutorial. It's a webpage to delete your local flash cookies. Yes, it requires flash to access flash cookies. That seems more than a bit self evident.
But some sites *want* people like you to go away (Score:2)
For better or worse, your argument is flawed.
You are a statistical anomaly. Even in 2015, a heavy majority of web users don't even have a basic ad blocker installed, which is why on-line advertising is still an extremely profitable industry. Consider a parallel with sites have those really annoying pop-ups when you arrive: enough people actually do sign up for their newsletter that the technique works, even though it might alienate a few people who really will leave... but actually, most people won't, even
hope there's a "no videos" flag in HTML5's future (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't mind ads (I really don't) as long as they stay in the side of the page and don't try to play audio or video. I run Flashblock in all browsers to avoid this type of thing and have started to run ad-blockers just to kill off the videos that are starting to come through HTML5. If there was a common browser option to never play audio/video unless specifically requested (similar to Flashblockers - if you click on it you really want to see it) then I'd be perfectly happy.
Re: hope there's a "no videos" flag in HTML5's fut (Score:5, Insightful)
This. Especially the audio, but in general, any auto-playing video is unwanted.
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But there is or may be some javascript shmoo to load the videos, so it's also about controlling the flow of a computer program not just a document.
In fact we used to have browser options about what javascript can do (resizing windows etc.) now they are gone.
I hope we do get some option eventually. Else I think I'll install an extension that simply blacklist javascript etc. for a news site or other that autoplays video.
Re:hope there's a "no videos" flag in HTML5's futu (Score:5, Informative)
media.autoplay.enabled = false in firefox, don't know about chrome.
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THANK YOU! I've been annoyed for AGES that FF and Chrome to play media WHEN OPENED IN BACKGROUND TABS, i.e., when middle-clicking links in YouTube. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!
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It works for .play() too, as of Fx41.
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...and I meant to add a link to bug 659285 [mozilla.org] there, but I dropped a quote and the entire <a> tag got stripped out, and I somehow missed it in the preview. Sigh.
I don't want to be tracked (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't mind ads (I really don't) as long as they stay in the side of the page and don't try to play audio or video.
But you are ok with them tracking your browsing? Personally I find most ads to be intrusive, annoying and sometimes downright creepy but the tracking is the worst aspect of the whole thing. And the people doing the advertising can't help themselves in trying to track what I'm doing which is why I have AdBlock Plus, BetterPrivacy, PrivacyBadger, Flashblock, etc all installed at the same time. They started this arms race and I'll be damned if I'm going to lose.
I have NO problem paying for a site or service I find valuable and I do pay for some. If they base their business model on pushing annoying ads at me that I can block then that is their problem, not mine.
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>> are ok with them tracking your browsing?
Pretty much comes with the territory if you browse from your home or cell phone.
>> AdBlock Plus, BetterPrivacy, PrivacyBadger, Flashblock, etc all installed at the same time
Remember, they also track by IP address and browser attributes, which often allows advertisers to watch you even if you don't store any cookies. And your browsing is often personally identifiable if you browse from a fixed home location (with registered ownership or renter informati
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Pretty much comes with the territory if you browse from your home or cell phone.
Doesn't mean I'm ok with it. And on a PC my options to block their ads and tracking tools are fairly robust so they'll have a hard time getting useful information from me that way.
Remember, they also track by IP address and browser attributes, which often allows advertisers to watch you even if you don't store any cookies
Even if they track those things they have no business model if they cannot get the ads in front of my face. An IP address doesn't really tell who is behind it and I'm certainly not about to give up and make it easy for them.
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>> Even if they track those things they have no business model if they cannot get the ads in front of my face. An IP address doesn't really tell who is behind it and I'm certainly not about to give up and make it easy for them.
The IP address (or browser spec) mapping can be dug out from your ISP or from affiliate sites (e.g., ever get prompted by a bank on a new browser?) on which you registered (and recorded your IP or browser spec). Since ISPs don't recycle IPs very often, all it takes is some IP c
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They have already won that battle. Try visiting EFF's Panopticlick, and almost invariably, any browser will be unique, because of the order of add-ons installed, the browser's ID, or fonts.
I also use the above mentioned tools (as well as a customized hosts file), but I also run the browser in a VM, just so if something bad gets past the add-ons, it cannot touch the bare metal of the computer, nor affect useful data.
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Re:hope there's a "no videos" flag in HTML5's futu (Score:4, Informative)
I don't mind ads (I really don't) as long as they stay in the side of the page and don't try to play audio or video
You should mind. Ads are a known vector for malware. Whether it bothers you to look at them or not, proper security requires that you block them.
Re:hope there's a "no videos" flag in HTML5's futu (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only are ads a known vector they are quickly becoming the primary vector. Ad companies keep poking security holes in your computer and web pages so they can display more ads. Run Adblock for a week and then switch to IE. The difference is amazing.
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Run Adblock for a week and then switch to IE. The difference is amazing.
What does IE do differently here than any other browser?
Re:hope there's a "no videos" flag in HTML5's futu (Score:5, Funny)
Devours your soul.
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Hence the shrill, eponymous cry of desperation: "Aiiieeeeee!"
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Some people don't realize that ad-blockers for IE exist.
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Ads are a vector for malware, because the ad networks don't actually monitor their ads. IMHO class action lawsuit for Malware distributed by Ad Networks, killing each network that offers up infected ads. Pretty soon, only reliable ad networks (hahaha) will remain.
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Re: hope there's a "no videos" flag in HTML5's fut (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, ad networks should be held accountable for the ads they are dishing out. If they don't want malware, then they should actually do their job and vet the ads before promoting them. THEY are promoting them, right? They are the responsible party.
Re:hope there's a "no videos" flag in HTML5's futu (Score:5, Informative)
And you're OK with the endless stream of analytics companies and other assholes monitoring every site you go to so they can monetize everything you do on the internet.
If the sites in question were serving their own ads, then maybe.
But the 15 or 20 (or sometimes 30 or 40) external websites which come along with those ads are just parasites whose business model is predicted on you being willing to let them know everything you do.
And I'm completely not willing to allow that.
Right now on Slashdot as I type this there's no less than 9 external sites who would be getting requests and running scripts if I wasn't actively blocking them. And Slashdot isn't even the worst site out there.
There's simply no way in hell I'm willing to let a bunch of corporations make money of tracking everything I do on the internet, run scripts, embed ads, deliver malware through shady partners, share that information with anybody they choose because they have an EULA ... none of it.
It's about FAR more than ads staying in nice places on the screen.
In Chrome install something like HTTP Switchboard, and look at the sheer amount of crap embedded in every page. Flash is an open invitation for dozens of sites you aren't even visiting to allow dozens of their affiliates run arbitrary code on your machine.
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I'm a bit shocked that all the replies here latched on to the "I don't mind ads" part, and mostly ignored the rest of the comment - how to block autoplay, audio, and video.
Flash is an open invitation for dozens of sites you aren't even visiting to allow dozens of their affiliates run arbitrary code on your machine.
Whatever.... so is HTML+Javascript. However, the big difference is that you can easily block ALL flash from loading, and selectively load flash elements so that the main content is run (ex. a video or music player), and the ads don't run. AFAICT, that's not so simple under HTML5 (the browser option to disable autoplay disables the autopla
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Flashblock already has the option to block html5 videos. I think it's not enabled by default though.
Just go to "Add-ons" and click "Options" under Flashblock. Tick the "Block HTML5 video as well".
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No, streaming is actually hard. Mostly, it's hard for streaming to be efficient across an active medium like a data network. A passive medium (or one-way medium) is much better suited to streaming. On a data network, the request to receive the stream is usually a two-way handshake over TCP, followed by a UDP video stream. The control connection stays TCP, and is kept open (or at least available) for the entire duration of the UDP stream. (This is the mess that is known as RTP, RTSP, and RTMP. And they're pr
VCenter (Score:2, Interesting)
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Get rid of the Fiber channel switch and SAN, move to Ceph (also web-based admin). Complete free and far more resilient than a centralized SAN.
Modernize and free yourself.
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Use two browsers. One for dirty stuff that requires Flash and Java, another clean one for everything else. You know, like you already do for porn... er, I... I mean, um... gift shopping for your wife. You are married, right?
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Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
Web browser makers are incentivised to make everyone use HTML5, regardless of whether it's a better fit than Flash or not.
Website developers are incentivised to add new features, rather than rewrite their existing codebase from scratch for no gain.
Surprise?
Re:Translationconpl (Score:2)
The question is, what's "modernity"?
Don't forget that Javascript has been called archaic and pronounced dead countless times as well. But it refuses to die either.
Wait until we're all supposed to re-tool for the next great scripting / multimedia platform. How many websites will cling to javascript?
If it ain't broken (for you) (Score:5, Informative)
For many site owners, Flash isn't really broken - their video / audio players, animations, interactive displays and games work with enough users that they don't feel pressured to do them over again. Even video sites that support mobile browsers by serving HTML5 video and direct links to the .mp4 keep their Flash players alive in the full pages.
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many of those companies aren't eager to explain why..
Why would a company eagerly explain anything it is not intending to do?
Re: If it ain't broken (for you) (Score:3)
Assuming it's true and representative of most companies holding onto Flash, who knows.
I'd simply say it's not a priority for us right now, plus HTML5 based solutions have only recent become usable (YouTube still has some snags that require reloading the page).
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What we need is for Google, having the most popular browser, to decide that Flash must die and set it to click-to-play. Web developers will switch to HTML5 to avoid annoying users. Chrome is so popular it can survive the howls of pain from users, unlike say Firefox that would probably just curl up and die.
Unfortunately Google will probably never do that.
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Unfortunately Google will probably never do that.
I don't have expectations of Google ever doing things that would annoy their advertisers. Remember, they are the ones who swore they would ignore "do not track" if it were enabled by default.
I disabled it on my end years ago (Score:2)
There were just too many attacks coming through it.
real-time adaptive video playback (Score:5, Interesting)
i don't know if anyone's really noticed, but flash's real-time adaptive video CODECs are actually incredibly good. i created a video chat site a few years back [tried red5 as the back-end server, and finally got to actually put some reality behind why i detest java. up until then i'd only known *theoretically* why java is a piss-poor language compared to the alternatives...]
anyway, leaving the back-end alone as it's a red herring, i was deeply impressed at how little bandwidth each video window could be given yet still remain audible and actually convey useful video information. i restricted each user to a paltry 10k-bytes (!) of bandwidth - that's for video *and* audio, limited the window size to 240x180, and was absolutely amazed to find that the video would easily recover from drop-outs.
basically what would happen is that during a drop-out, audio would be prioritised, and video would pause. recovery of the video stream (which could be done *precisely because* i had set the bandwidth so low) would literally "unfold" before my eyes, in exactly the same way that you see those 1980s pop video and children's programs "pixellation" effects.
basically they would transmit a crude video image, then send the improvements as a second round, then a third, and so on. now, here's the thing: i have looked for "adaptive video" algorithms in the past, and, whilst there exists an effort to create such a standard as a public standard, it's simply completely behind the times.
adobe managed it *years* ago... yet no open standard exists in common usage which comes even remotely close to successfully replicating this.
i appreciate that technically, it's incredibly challenging to get right. even the team behind skype - when they sold and created a real-time video streaming company "joost" - failed after a few years and gave up.... but what people forget is that *adobe already succeeded*. ... what has been substituted in its place? well, sure, we can do real-time video browser-to-browser.... but the assumption is that there is "perfect conditions". perfect bandwidth. perfect connections. no drop-outs. no brown-outs. zero latency.
adobe's solution isn't perfect: i know from experience that after a few hours, the real-time adaptive video stream *can* get out-of-sync (by over a minute in some cases), and will "recover" in a flurry of fast-forward stop-motion frames. really quite hilarious to witness. but, the only other alternative that i know of which is even *remotely* close to replicating what adobe did is *another* proprietary video codec, behind "zoom.us". it's developed by a former developer behind cisco's real-time video system. which uses flash in some places, and java in others. and is dreadful and unreliable, and has latency often of up to 1..5 seconds. unlike zoom.us which works incredibly well, and has very little latency.
so i'm going to call this article out, as entirely missing the point, namely that there *really* aren't any good alternatives to the core of what flash does really really well, but the problem is that they should have released the entire client and server as software libre under the LGPL a long, _long_ time ago because it just doesn't make them any money, and they just don't have the manpower to keep on fixing the security issues any more.
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Do you know which video codec you're talking about? As far as I can recall, there are a couple of "Flash video" codecs, and none of them are particularly exotic at this point. There was Sorenson Spark, which I believe was essentially H263, and VP6. These days, H264 and VP8 (WebM) are very common, considered to be improvements over previous versions, and not tied to Flash.
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And when will the Sorenson Spark or H263 patents expire? What a shame that html5 video can't use a goddamn codec from the 1990s that's all over the place.
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No, but what about all the old vids? Can't we leave them alone? Google can spend a billion on re-encoding all of theirs and don't care about the expense but I find it a bit pointless. 8-bit ASCII doesn't stop working because we have unicode, or MP3 doesn't stop working because we have something else.
I like my offline xvid files fine for that matter. They look good enough to me, it's the 128K or less soundtrack that sucks and H264 or VP8 files with 128K or less soundtrack aren't any better.
If converting, I a
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Do they need to be embedded in web pages, or can they be made available for download? I believe VLC will play them, for example.
I think it depends on what they are, and who's going to do something with them. Ideally, if it's at all important, we would go back to the original source and re-encode them in a format appropriate for the day. That's part of the reason you should always save your source.
MP3 doesn't stop working because we have something else.
I wouldn't exactly bet on that. MP3 compatibility remains common because people continue to use it. If a r
Re:real-time adaptive video playback (Score:5, Funny)
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Have some capital letters on me. You seem to have run out.
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Nonsense, that's socialism. He should have to work hard to acquire capital.
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and finally got to actually put some reality behind why i detest java.
Sounds interesting, what was wrong with it?
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i don't know if anyone's really noticed, but flash's real-time adaptive video CODECs are actually incredibly good.
I wasn't sure if it was that, or that Youtube's HTML5 player is horribly bad at bandwidth adaptation. In the evenings, if I don't manually choose a lower bandwidth setting, YT will kick my crappy WISP connection right in the colon. Turns it into a semicolon. The flash player used to successfully pick an appropriate bitrate, even usually somewhat gracefully. Sometimes it would buffer once or twice, but it rarely stepped on anything else.
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Then why is is that every single Flash video I see stutters? [1] Skipping video frames instead of pausing is bloody annoying.
1: on big sites like Youtube and DailyMotion, playing back on my 2012 high-end Macbook Pro with a 100 Mbit internet connection. Which has no trouble at all when I download the video and play it back locally.
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"Skipping video frames instead of pausing is bloody annoying."
For isochronous content it is necessary, which is the situation lkcl is talking about.
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but what people forget is that *adobe already succeeded*. ... what has been substituted in its place? well, sure, we can do real-time video browser-to-browser.... but the assumption is that there is "perfect conditions". perfect bandwidth. perfect connections. no drop-outs. no brown-outs. zero latency.
While bandwidth has gotten better, latency has actually gotten worse:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
This makes it hard to make good working protocol which is trying to use the maximum bandwidth. Even just TCP isn't working as it's supposed to most of the time.
Your browser probably includes a WebRTC support, or soon will. And that means support for Opus, it's a state of the art free and open audio codec:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Yes, video still needs to improve and prioritizing audio still needs to
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Not even. Camfrog had these kinds of capabilities before Flash was even gaining ground on the internet.
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Gee, I wonder: Did they call it "Macromedia Flash [archive.org]"?
Don't worry.. (Score:2)
Their is a published EOL data for Flash... unfortunately it's just for Firefox (and other NPAPI browsers) on Linux.
It's approximately February 2017. "Adobe will continue to provide security updates to non-Pepper distributions of Flash Player 11.2 on Linux for five years from its release."
https://www.adobe.com/devnet/f... [adobe.com]
The first step (IMO) to ending Flash is to get it click-to-play. Firefox isn't willing to do this, yet [1].. AFAICT the holdup is Adobe with EME.. *sigh*.
[1] https://groups.google.com/foru.. [google.com]
Vector animation (Score:5, Insightful)
How would a vector animation like Homestar Runner or "Badger Badger Badger" have been created without Flash? With Flash, you can buy an old copy of Adobe Flash and use that. But with HTML5, you have to rent (not buy) Edge Animate on Creative Cloud. Or would you recommend creating the vector animation in Flash, rendering to AVI, and sending that to the viewer as MP4 and WebM? That not only bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests) but also destroys any possibility of interactivity.
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How would a vector animation like Homestar Runner or "Badger Badger Badger" have been created without Flash?
Use SVG [w3schools.com]. There are plenty of tools you can use [codegeekz.com]. There are also flash2html converters.
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Then lament as good ol' slow bloated Flash Player beats the pants off your web browser in performance.
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A factor of ten (Score:2)
Or would you recommend creating the vector animation in Flash, rendering to AVI, and sending that to the viewer as MP4 and WebM? That not only bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests)
You can export directly to other video formats with Flash / ToonBoom (etc) and publish those to YouTube
That's what "bloats the file size by a factor of ten (in my tests)". In an era when more people are browsing the Internet over a connection with a limit of 2, 3, 5, or 10 GB per month, a usable vector animation solution becomes helpful. (I said "rendering to AVI" but meant more generally rendering to any high-quality intermediate that can be transcoded to smaller sizes.)
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If you want vector graphics, there's always SVG. Which can also be animated, by the way.
I'm aware that SVG and Canvas can be animated. But what graphical timeline-based editor should one use to animate them? Edge Animate is rental only.
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Your choice of comparison is poor.
Animated SVG is neither obscure or inconvenient, and is widely supported on many modern browsers.
Ultra recent browser needed (Score:2)
For the last few years there's been a cat and mouse game with HTML5 video, every time it's done there are new extensions or features. A few years ago when there was already slashdot rage about flash needing to die immediately, HTML5 video was to be some raw dump of theora or maybe webm VP8 that you would probably just have been able to save or open in 3rd party video player instead of implementing real support in a browser, now there are "MSE" and "Dash" (if I'm not mistaken) which well, do things.
The silen
What about Shopping Cart Hero? (Score:2)
How will I do my bi-annual binge if no browser supports Flash?
I don't care if it's been slow (Score:2)
As long as it's declining. And I expect that decline to accelerate going forward.
From the content side, even with the lack of browser support it's been relatively easy to start transitioning away from Flash - thanks to Adobe, ironically. In an attempt to future-proof it, they added h.264/mpeg4 playback support to Flash Player some time ago. So we started generating our content as h.264 video quite a few years ago, even though at the time we were still telling browsers to play it back using Flash Player.
Funn
Really? There were no better options? (Score:2)
I worked for a radio station back in the late 90s. I built the streamer and server that put us on the internet. At first it was Real Audio, then Icecast (streaming MP3). Icecast of course opened us up to a whole bunch of listeners who would have never downloaded and installed RealPlayer. But.. we did have quite a following on the RealAudio stream so we actually kept both going for many years.
Once we had Icecast it was easy for the web users. They just clicked the link on the webpage and for the non-techie
when no one is visiting their sites... (Score:2)
Adapt or loose rank (Score:2)
With the mobile emphasis placed by search engines, the fact is it doesn't matter if they do or don't adapt. Currently,
pages whose main content is flash dependent, fail to provide a useful (and usable) results for mobile users and are replaced by others that do. Take a look some time and see how many of the top 10% for basically any query don't have mobile friendly landing pages.
They'll die or they won't. You just won't see them in the top results of a search.
Like IE 6 it will be here for 10 more years (Score:3)
The problem is:
1. Too many business apps have flash built into like a dependency such as signing payroll forms, training videos, websites made for older versions of IE (use flash to make up the lack of ability in IE 6 and 7) etc
2. Zombie cookies. These cookies are permanent and can never be deleted. Advertisers LOVE THIS. It means always tracking
3. Mouse and keyboard logging. Yes actionscript can monitor your keywords and mice and sell the data to those who feel it can be useful for more targetted ads.
Advertisers hate HTML 5 and will fight tooth and nail to make sure flash is required on a PC and not play content even if they offer it via IOS. How frustrating :-(
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Advertisers hate HTML 5
Really? Why? I haven't seen any of that.
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HTML 5 won't let you set persistent cookies as deeply as Flash will. When you're tracking click through and then where they continue browsing through to and doing deep analytics on that sort of thing, flash cookies are amazing compared to what flash will do for you.
Games? (Score:2)
There was a comment that went by on Reddit(?), from a flash game dev that basically lamented that the sound and gfx capabilities (or perhaps the dev tools?) of html5 were not up to par yet. I was hoping someone would provide some more insight.
Cold turkey (Score:4, Funny)
Cold turkey works. One day I just removed flash from my tween kid's computer, which means no more flash games, causing much weeping and wailing for a few days. The flash games are social networks you see, which is why the kids keep going to those site, not the crappy retro 2D games.
Fringe benefits: the fan on the laptop isn't going all the time now. Ads are less obnoxious and consume less bandwidth. Hours of mind-numbing wastage on useless grinding-type games becomes available for, you know, education. After a few days of complaints, life goes on, and from where I stand, it's a better life without flash.
Re: (Score:2)
One day I just removed flash from my tween kid's computer, which means no more flash games, causing much weeping and wailing for a few days.
This is still Slashdot, right?
The site where posters are always claiming that a kid can work around any block you put on his PC?
The site where posters complain long and loudly about parents who refuse to let their kids explore the Internet on their own and shape it to their own needs and purpose? The site where posters praise HTML5 to the skies as an all-around replacement for Flash?
Die, Flash, Die. (Score:2)
The sooner Flash dies the better. I run with it turned off unless for some bizarre reason I come across a site with a feature I want that still uses this dinosaur technology that sucks CRU. Then I debate, to Flash them or move on. Usually I move on. They lose.
Die, Flash, Die.
Alternative tech: Greensock and WebRTC (Score:2)
WebRTC is maturing quickly with good vendor support for creating direct audio, video and data connections among browsers with many peer-to-peer possibilities including for example a sort of BitTorrent client: https://github.com/feross/webt... [github.com] . Already WebRTC is the data conveyor for the Facebook Messenger app for example. I have been lucky to attend a couple talks in recent months about this. Be sure to check out Red5 if you are interested in video superpowers: https://github.com/Red5 [github.com]
For flash-like HTML5/J
Re: (Score:2)
It is working fine for me, in fact better than flash did with many tabs open - for that issue, I created a shortcut that runs a second firefox with a different profile just so that people can waste CPU cycles with youtube music and have this "youtube browser" work reliably.
The single one great thing with it is the sound volume control is reliable. Google hasn't found useful to fix it for YEARS on the flash player version.
Re: (Score:2)
Can you make stuff work with the Opus codec? I know, may not solve cell phone too old issue etc.
Also, I've researched the issue and there's a quite heavy handed way : decode the audio stream with javascript. Sounds insane but it does work.
Found this and this.
https://github.com/audiocogs/o... [github.com]
http://audiocogs.org/codecs/mp... [audiocogs.org]
Given that Chrome is that browser that needs gigs of ram to even run it seems fair to waste the user's CPU cycles in that case.. Might be too much on old phone, I don't know.
Re: (Score:2)
So... STOP TRYING TO STREAM USING HTML!
It's pretty fucking simple. Streaming is one problem requiring one solution. Web browsing is a different problem requiring a different solution.
For live stations just set up an icecast server. Put a link to it on your webpage. DONE! And... it works on all sorts of platforms right out of the box. This solutions has been available since the 1990s FCOL!
Are you worried people listening to your stream won't be forced to visit your popup riddled webpage anymore? So what?!