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Media The Internet

A Farewell To Flash 202

Posted by Soulskill from the not-a-decade-too-soon dept.
An anonymous reader writes: The decline of Flash is well and truly underway. Media publishers now have no choice but to start changing the way they bring content to the web. Many of them are not thrilled about the proposition (change is scary), but it will almost certainly be better for all of us in the long run. "By switching their platform to HTML5, companies can improve supportability, development time will decrease and the duplicative efforts of supporting two code bases will be eliminated. It will also result in lower operating costs and a consistent user experience between desktop and mobile web." This is on top of the speed, efficiency, and security benefits for consumers. "A major concern for publishers today is the amount of media consumption that's occurring in mobile environments. They need to prioritize providing the best possible experience on mobile, and the decline of Flash and movement to HTML5 will do just that, as Flash has never worked well on mobile."
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A Farewell To Flash More

A Farewell To Flash

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  • Again? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lumpio- ( 986581 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:14PM (#50381343)
    How many times have we already said farewell to Flash and it still refuses to die...

    • Re:Again? (Score:5, Funny)

      by grimmjeeper ( 2301232 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:18PM (#50381401) Homepage
      I predict we will only see the true end of Flash after we see COBOL finally retired...

    • Re:Again? (Score:5, Funny)

      by halivar ( 535827 ) <bfelger@gmai l . com> on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:32PM (#50381567)

      I'll believe it when NetCraft confirms it.

    • I doubt if Flash will ever go away completely. However, youtube moving away from Flash was a HUGE push to making Flash go away.

      .
      At some point, however, the number who bother to load Flash into their browsers will be a small percentage of web users. That means if you have content that requires Flash, you've just reduced your audience very significantly.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      it ain't going anywhere anytime soon. there is way too much content in flash already that exists on the internet. much of it cant be converted or would be too costly to convert to another technology.

      flash ain't the evil monster it's made out to be either. it's only real problem is adobe being only slightly better than oracle/sun at producing clean bug-free code for their browser plugins. adobe is the monster here, not flash. face it. if there wasn't a new 'flash exploit of the week' every week, flash wouldn

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @01:15PM (#50382011)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by MickyTheIdiot ( 1032226 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @01:57PM (#50382481) Homepage Journal

        If you can watch it on a screen you can rip it... even if it means you point a videocamera at the screen you can rip it.

        Your comment is flawed for the same reason DRM is flawed. The only way to NEVER be able to copy digital content is to not allow anyone to see it.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • The only way to NEVER be able to copy digital content is to not allow anyone to see it.

          And the only way to have every studio in Hollywood pull all their content from Netflix, Hulu, etc. is to tell them they can't put any DRM on it.

      • You forgot to add that legacy corporate apps will require flash for years to come. A lot of corporate training is still flash based.

    • I don't want it to die. I just want most people to stop using it.

      Enough with the battle calls to kill Flash. I still want all those cartoons and games I downloaded to work.

    • Flash is the inverse Linux on desktop.

  • Looking at you, BBC... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mccalli ( 323026 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:16PM (#50381363) Homepage
    Go to the BBC site with a desktop browser, it's Flash all the way. Now go on iOS (I would guess also Android) and magically it's HTML 5. Set the user agent to identify as an iPad and you get the identical layout to the desktop browsers but HTML 5 media.

    Now why on earth is that? That's actually more effort to maintain than just doing it right in the first place. OK so you have older version browser support, but there are better ways to identify those than just "are you a desktop OS trying to access me?".

    • Re:Looking at you, BBC... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dcavanaugh ( 248349 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:49PM (#50381717) Homepage

      Yes, there are better ways to use browser agent id. But keeping Flash on the desktop means their HTML5 code does not need to be validated on lots of browsers. If the BBC implementation of HTML5 turned out to be buggy, the damage would be limited to platforms that couldn't run Flash anyway.

      If I were in charge at BBC, I would use mobile/portable devices as a beta test for implementing HTML5. Sooner or later, they have to bring HTML5 to the desktop, but it can wait until more of the obsolescent browsers are gone. Maybe the next project is to implement adaptive style sheets to get one code base that suits all browsers on all devices. At that point, Flash can finally take its rightful place in the Recycle Bin.

      When you have a huge user base and many of them are technologically illiterate, you end up doing things that are far from elegant. In a large organization, it takes longer than you would expect to get anything done.

    • iOS computers all run the same browser and all have a h264 hardware decoder.
      All flash users run the flash plugin, which is (almost) the same regardless of browser, OS or hardware (though here the h264 decoder may be software or hardware).

      So in both cases, you have a single platform effect that makes it easy to run.
      With HMTL 5 on random computers, you do get a lot of variation between software, browser versions. For one thing you will have to support IE 9 till Vista end-of-line in 2017 in the least, which ha

      • For one thing you will have to support IE 9 till Vista end-of-line in 2017 in the least,

        by "support" you mean put up a dialog box stating "please upgrade to a modern browser"

        • I think he actually meant 'get the intranet developers off their lazy asses'.

    • ? That's actually more effort to maintain than just doing it right in the first place

      You assume they're not writing it in Flash and exporting it as HTML5 for mobile. And some people still cannot use HTML5. Heck, I'm doing some work now in Flash for a client that still mandates IE7 on their machines (change is slow).

      But also, Flash is good in many ways. It isolates stuff in a plug-in, and not every site assumes you have it. Unlike JavaScript, which people have started to require to load static pages. F

    • I use a desktop PC to access the BBC, and my PC does not have flash installed. I can't see any of the videos :-) the webpage insists I install flash. which i won't. silly BBC :-)

  • Any HTML5 blockers? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sinij ( 911942 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:21PM (#50381431)
    Any HTML5 blockers out there, because we know the scum from marketing department will have us Punching Monkeys in HTML5 in no time.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:21PM (#50381435)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lisias ( 447563 )

        What the guy is saying is that Flash will not die due that fucking fire!

        • It can if everybody says they refuse to use it ... if people in data centers are stuck with it, that's their damned problem.

          Getting Flash of the human facing internet is important. Because that's where it's the biggest for being malware.

          A jump server keeping it restricted to the data center will at least mean malicious ads and crap can't exploit the vulnerabilities in this pile of crap.

          Flash has been a gaping security hole for as long as it has existed. Removing it from the desktop will be a good start.

          Wh

      • And Flash can die in fucking fire!!!

        I certainly hope it does. I hate Flash!

    • "and most important: Flash is still required to view a substantial amount of internet pornography."

      Correct. Flash will die when YouPorn and XHamster switch to HTML5.

      • We're looking as some loooong path to walk.

      • I'm afraid to ask WTF XHamster is ... and rule #34 says I'm sure as hell not googling it ... so, "la la la" ... not sure I want to know.

        • It's actually not as bad as it sounds in this case. Search for the "Top 20 Best free porn sites" on google. The site you're afraid to ask about has made it to several of those lists, so you can get a synopsis of what it's about and its features without having to do a direct search and risk the rule #34 crosstalk that may occur from a direct search for the site name.

      • They work fine on iOS, so no flash requirements.

    • Nobody cares about all that crap.

      What about Desktop Tower Defense, N Game, Bubble Tanks, and all that?

      Maybe Nintendo will make us a little handheld flash player. And then you can manage your VMs and take it to the bathroom with you...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tepples ( 727027 )

        What about Desktop Tower Defense, N Game, Bubble Tanks, and all that?

        Yeah, what about them? Why aren't they ported to HTML5?

    • Read the comments from VMware here:
      http://blogs.vmware.com/vspher... [vmware.com]
      especially comments from Dennis Lu.

      Essentially, it was either deliver HTML5 code (leaving webUI in v5.1 state) or progress web UI until it was 'good', then move to HTML5. They chose the latter.

      I'm not sure why they didn't do a parallel development. Maybe they have & it's not releasable yet, but that's the state we're in now.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rayd75 ( 258138 )

      flash is an inextricable touchstone of practically every KVM in the datacenter that doesnt show up on a rickety cart.

      Flash is the mandatory model of how VMWare has decided (infuriatingly and incorrectly i might stress) we shall all interact with their products.

      Flash still powers billboards and advertisement hardware for countless products.

      and most important: Flash is still required to view a substantial amount of internet pornography.

      Ironically, I can only find fault with the last point. Internet pornographers are actually surprisingly ahead of the curve here as compared to the likes of VMWare and other IT vendors.

  • Rust in pieces.

    You helped to delay the arrival of a reasonably free and open Web for longer than many Slashdotters have been alive.

    May every proprietary, insecure, single-vendor piece of battery-eating nonsense suffer the same fate or worse.

    • May every proprietary, insecure, single-vendor piece of battery-eating nonsense

      Except the AS engine was opensourced, Adobe offered to merge with JavaScript, and there are (or was, I dunno anymore) an active fork for FireFox.

      Heck, JS irks me a hell of a lot more, because Flash at least didn't try to pretend it was a web site when it was trying to run a ton of code.

  • Browsers should have EnableVideo code (Score:5, Interesting)

    by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:28PM (#50381507) Homepage Journal

    All HTML5 browsers should have an EnableVideo code setting.

    So that I can turn it off.

    I don't need your video. I don't want your video. I don't want it to autoplay.

    If you have an ad, you can show it in text, and stop sucking up bandwidth.

    Now, if you want to give me a box that I can right click on to "play video", great.

    But as Leelu would say "Not without my permission!"

    • Slashdot ads (Score:4, Informative)

      by wikthemighty ( 524325 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @01:21PM (#50382073)

      Here's why I disable ads on Slashdot: VIDEO!

      If all their ads were static, I would be happy to uncheck Disable Ads...

      • Re:Slashdot ads (Score:5, Insightful)

        by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @01:29PM (#50382175) Homepage Journal

        Here's why I disable ads on Slashdot: VIDEO!

        If all their ads were static, I would be happy to uncheck Disable Ads...

        Agreed. Same here. Back in the days of flat banner ads - which could be "click to follow link that will play video" - I let the ads display. But sound and giant honking autoplay downloads mean I disable advertising on Slashdot.

        If advertising behaved, I'd turn it on again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by lgw ( 121541 )

      But as Leelu would say "Not without my permission!"

      Leelu would say "seddan akta gamat": never without my permission.

      I've always been amused that scene, mostly because he asks the priest "what does akta gamat mean" and gets a translation of the whole line - as if Bruce couldn't remember his line and just fudged it. (Much as early Doctor Who gave us "reverse the polarity of the neutron flow", since it has meter and so the actor could easily remember it - though I can't remember whether that was Hartnell or Pertwee).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Eythian ( 552130 )

      Firefox has a config option to force HTML5 video not to autoplay, and the flashblocker I use also has options to block them in the same manner.

  • from TFA:

    >But make no mistake, there are still many Flash-powered multimedia items on the web, including graphics, videos, games and animations, like GIFs, a preferred method of expression for millennials and adults alike.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tepples ( 727027 )

      YTMND uses a Flash preloader to load the audio and then start the GIF and audio at the same time.

  • What I find very curious are the web sites whose home pages are fully and completely written in Flash. If you do not enable flash, you see nothing but a blank page.

    .
    The owners of those websites were probably sold a bill of goods for a "cool website" by the same designers who proffered flaming logos 20 years ago....

    • What I find very curious are the web sites whose home pages are fully and completely written in Flash. If you do not enable flash, you see nothing but a blank page.

      .

      The owners of those websites were probably sold a bill of goods for a "cool website" by the same designers who proffered flaming logos 20 years ago....

      I can name one of the world's largest and best-known automobile manufacturers who did a Flash-only site at a time when I didn't have any Flash-capable computers.

      I bought my new car from one of their competitors who had a site I could actually use.

    • What I find very curious are the web sites whose home pages are fully and completely written in Flash. If you do not enable flash, you see nothing but a blank page.

      The owners of those websites were probably sold a bill of goods for a "cool website" by the same designers who proffered flaming logos 20 years ago....

      Or, the web developer thought it was not a good idea, but the client insisted on Flash. She wouldn't listen to me, and now her site is invisible on mobile....

  • Think of the children... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by userw014 ( 707413 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:35PM (#50381603) Homepage

    For all that I've hated Flash for years (for idiosyncratic reasons), and loathe Flash now (for all the usual reasons), there is a great deal of (old) content dependent on Flash. Will that content (like a Flash version of Portal) become inaccessible?

    Archivists are probably dreading dealing with this.

      • From the upload page [google.com]:

        By selecting the checkbox, you understand that you may not convert content unless you have the right to do so. Uploading content that you do not have the right to convert into HTML5 is a violation of copyright law and against the Google terms of service.

        In other words, the author has to perform the conversion; viewers are forbidden to do so. And for most of the vector animations in SWF format on Newgrounds or Dagobah or Albino Blacksheep, I imagine the author has left the scene and can

      • "It's not hard to convert them to a more usable format."

        It has nothing to do with how hard it is or is not to convert Flash content. Like usual, it's about money. Who's going to do that conversion? How much will it cost? What else will have to change (because there's ALWAYS something else)?

        When the total cost of converting is exceeded by the money lost by not converting, you will see Flash die. I don't expect that day to come any time soon for most Flash content providers.

  • Change is Scary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:40PM (#50381643) Journal

    Many of them are not thrilled about the proposition (change is scary),

    More like change is expensive. It has nothing to do with scary.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by neminem ( 561346 )

      I would include "expensive" quite definitively as a subset of "scary". Imagine someone told you "you are required to do this thing which will cost several million dollars". Wouldn't you be scared? I would be...

      • In that case, it's not the change that's scary, it's the expense.
        When people say "change is scary," they usually mean that the change itself is scary, not the rational assessment of expenses involved.

  • Before Videos, there was Vector Animations (Score:3)

    by Dwedit ( 232252 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @12:43PM (#50381687) Homepage

    I was a big fan and user of flash LONG before it did anything video related. Flash for videos? Let it die, it's awful for that purpose. Flash for anything else? I don't think it's going away any time soon.

    People have been making vector animations in Flash long before anyone thought of ruining web video by using Flash to play it, and Flash excels at that purpose better than anything else.

    • People have been making vector animations in Flash long before anyone thought of ruining web video by using Flash to play it

      Agreed. But a lot of Slashdot users have recommended rendering vector animations to video and serving them to viewers as video, viewer's monthly caps be damned. That's how modern Flash cartoons such as My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic are produced [wikia.com]. Apparently bloating the data size by a factor of ten (in my tests) is worth not having to worry about the speed of the viewer's computer.

      and Flash excels at that purpose better than anything else.

      Do you mean Adobe Flash is better for making them than Adobe Edge Animate, or Flash Player is better for playing them than

  • I did an OS reinstall about a month ago. I just installed flash 2 days ago. I wasn't trying to avoid Flash, its just Saturday was the first day I discovered I needed it for a website I wanted to visit and didn't already have it installed. This is from someone who visits a lot of streaming and game websites. (NPR.org's streams for Wait Wait Don't Tell Me were the culprit, in case you were curious).

    Now the fact that I had to do it tells you flash isn't exactly history. However, in the past I don't believe I'

  • Those where the days when the web was just getting exciting and java applets and gif were exiting. Man did I spend a LOT of time on Macromedia Flash 4 making animations. Still have them on floppies tucked away,not sure if they still work.

    http://www.thevoid.co.uk/ [thevoid.co.uk]
    http://www.nrg.be/archived/ [www.nrg.be]
    http://janit.iki.fi/shit/megac... [janit.iki.fi]

    https://www.adobe.com/showcase... [adobe.com]

  • Am I the only one that sort of liked Flash? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Gordo_1 ( 256312 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @01:05PM (#50381893)

    By having the majority of undesirable web content stuck in easy-to-flag Flash buckets, it was inherently simple to block that content. I could simply whitelist a handful of sites whose flash content I wanted to see (e.g. Youtube) and block it pretty much everywhere else.

    Now with everything moving to HTML5, I fear the necessary blocking ruleset will gets many times more complicated and with more false positives and negatives to boot. Am I wrong?

    • By having the majority of undesirable web content stuck in easy-to-flag Flash buckets, it was inherently simple to block that content. I could simply whitelist a handful of sites whose flash content I wanted to see (e.g. Youtube) and block it pretty much everywhere else.

      Now with everything moving to HTML5, I fear the necessary blocking ruleset will gets many times more complicated and with more false positives and negatives to boot. Am I wrong?

      Well, I disagree. You can still block the ad serving URL. Simply have a block list of the most common ad servers and block them.

      • You can still block the ad serving URL. Simply have a block list of the most common ad servers and block them.

        But then you're specifically blocking ads, which loses the ethical plausible deniability of blocking something that just happens, wink wink nudge nudge, to be correlated with ads.

  • Windows XP is no longer a standard. Doesn't mean I don't use it every goddamn day. An industry website I use weekly just rolled out an update based on flash. They update on an 8 year or so update cycle. I need them, they don't need me. The funny thing about markets is there's almost always a secondary market willing to use and abuse the rest of the world's castoffs.

  • I like Flash because it's easy to disable. Everything that's awful about Flash (i.e. all of it) is now being integrated into HTML, which makes annoying flashy crap much harder to avoid.

    Can we get an EverythingThatUsedToBeInFlashButIsNowInHTML_Block add-on for our browsers?

  • Doesn't the VMware web console still require flash?

  • Uninstalled in 2009 (Score:5, Informative)

    by xororand ( 860319 ) on Monday August 24, 2015 @02:30PM (#50382739)

    I uninstalled Flash in 2009 and for some reason I'm still alive! :-O

    youtube-dl [github.io] downloads and streams video and audio from about 500 legacy sites [github.com] in the quality of your choice.

    livestreamer [livestreamer.io] streams live video from about 70 legacy sites [github.com] such as the popular "Twitch".

    VLC and mpv also can play video from some sites directly, e.g. YouTube.

  • This, and content blocking [thenextweb.com] are going to crater intrusive overbearing advertising. Of course it will take decent ads along for the ride, but hey, the industry refused to even marginally police itself, and abused our goodwill terribly, so here goes...

  • I am all for HTML5 improved support and standard but our experence with various HTML5 implementation is that developpers actually spend a LOT of time accomodating the differences between browsers and browser versions.

    Not only between mobile and desktop but between different browsers and different version of the SAME browser.

    Different implementations of the same standards are almost always breaking the code.

    So on the contrary using HTML5 increases the development time and maintenance cost as web sites or web apps have to be "corrected" to follow browser support or interpretation of HTML5.

    In comparison, such maintenance for flash applications is close to nil even flash was upgraded from version 5 to version 11.

    However, I agree that flash beiing proprietary, it is not the way to go now.

    • I remember when apple rolled out iOS 8 and our web app broke (it was a simple form with buttons !)

      Also when you are using advanced feature such as webrtc, then you have to block users for loading the page with Safari or Internet Explorer. I am sorry but while on paper HTML5 is the best approach, it does not yet offer the uniform API an behavior that web developper need to save time and money.

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