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The irony is that while they recommend converting ads to html5 (or auto convert them with swiffy), the performance goes to shit as well, arguably even worse tha

The irony is that while they recommend converting ads to html5 (or auto convert them with swiffy), the performance goes to shit as well, arguably even worse than flash would have been, at least on mobile. - http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/google-now-automatically-converts-flash-ads-to-html5/ http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/google-now-automatically-c... - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=467709 https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=467709 - https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/MtcZGJprWje https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/MtcZGJprWje

harigov 11y ago
Just out of curiosity - could there be issues other than just performance here? For ex., could it be that Flash based ads can identify user/device contributing to privacy issues?
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Flash provides much more identifiable fingerprinting information (e.g. detailed information about your system fonts) and looser "Flash cookie" (Local Shared Objects) restrictions than JavaScript. https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes
  - exodust 11y ago
    Did you read their conclusions? Javascript is most certainly a method for fingerprinting, regardless of Flash presence. "Browser developers should also consider what they can do to reduce fngerprintability, particularly at the JavaScript API level." "We identified only three groups of browser with comparatively good resistance to fngerprinting: those that block JavaScript, those that use TorButton, and certain types of smartphone." Not having Flash doesn't mean you're immune to fingerprinting. That said, it would be nice if Adobe prevented system font lists via Flash.
    - cpeterso 11y ago
      That is true. Not having Flash does not mean you're immune to fingerprinting, but having Flash does mean more (a lot more) unique fingerprinting data is available to trackers. I wonder if browsers' plugin sandboxes could block Flash from calling the OS API to enumerate system fonts.
- awalton 11y ago
  Or possibly the constant stream of Flash security vulnerabilities that Adobe can't seem to patch out.
- kevinchen 11y ago
  Flash also has a ton of vulnerabilities and a huge codebase, and according to Apple, caused a ton of crash reports from their computers.
  - dogma1138 11y ago
    TBH if a Flash crash or any other user space application crash causes a system crash it's an issue with the OS. Steve Jobs at the time said that every time MacOS crashes it's more often than not Flash's fault, which wasn't really true and would only speak "wonders" of how well MacOS isolates user space applications... On the security issues it's some what true because the nature of Flash, applications like these are almost impossible to sandbox properly unless you have an operating system that sandboxes everything by default. Flash it self these days is pretty much code execution as a service it can do pretty much everything you want some browsers sandbox it better than others but it's still intended to pull code from the ether and run it and when you have a setup like that you will never be able to limit it effectively. Flash can be phased out only because it's mostly used to play various forms of media, but any other use of it cannot be converted to HTML5. If Javascript (as it's parsed and executed in browsers) will ever get to the point of being as flexible and powerfull as Flash is today you'll see browser based RCE vulnerabilities skyrocket also, JS is safe to use only because the browsers restrict it, Flash and AIR are intended to support everything from an animated ad to a full desktop application. Just look at Node.JS (and many NoSQL DB's that used JS) in it's early years almost every (non-DOM based) cross-site scripting vulnerability in a Node.JS application could result in remote code execution on the server, even today you can still easily cause it if you don't handle the code properly one stupid eval in your node code which was there for lazy debugging can lead to your box getting owned in minutes.
    - Arcanum-XIII 11y ago
      They're not system crash but application crash, both are reported on MacOS X. So no, Flash didn't crash the OS, only apps like Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Isn't it enough ?
      - 11y ago
- tyingq 11y ago
  I'll suffer the downvotes, but going forward "Flash Ads" == non-Google provided ads. It doesn't hurt Google to hobble ads from competing networks.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    The other ad networks likely won't be using Flash anymore either, which makes blocking ads more difficult - and that is a good thing to ad networks in general. Thus I won't say it's Google against others, and while it may seem so in the short term, in the long term Google and other ad networks benefit from it (while the users suffer...?)
paulirish 11y ago
Swiffy has been getting massive improvements recently, so expect perf wins in this area. That said, two of the biggest web browsers have not natively supported flash ads for years. So I'm puzzled that ads are still being produced in 2015 for a dying runtime.
Dorian-Marie 11y ago
So, in general, swiffy appears to be a relatively heavyweight solution that is not (yet?) optimized for mobile devices. Morever, there are 4 (yes 4!) giant swiffy ads on the landing page of androidpolice.com, each of which consumes more than half the viewport, all of which are dynamic.
userbinator 11y ago
arguably even worse than flash would have been I'm not surprised. As someone who has worked with it (and even written pieces of a simple Flash renderer), SWF was designed to be an extremely compact format and is far simpler to parse and render than the HTML + CSS + SVG + JS replacement that's being promoted. In that respect, all the complaints about Flash and mobile battery life should be attributable to the mere presence of Flash content. The reason why disabling Flash improves battery life is because the content doesn't get rendered. If the same content were present and rendered with HTML5 it would require more computing power, because the overhead of parsing (several!) text-based formats and using a complex rendering model originally designed for static documents compared to a binary format and rendering model designed for interactive animations, simply cannot be eliminated. I suppose new standards for documents, vector images, and scripting could be designed (WebAssembly comes to mind), but at that point you'll just be reinventing Flash/SWF... For that reason, disable JS and you will get improved battery life too: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2lent3/fwiw_disabling_javascript_significantly_improved/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2lent3/fwiw_disablin...
- acdha 11y ago
  The part about the file format is quite true but it's not the only thing to compare since there are so many features in either runtime and Flash has been used for so many different things. The most relevant example here was the way Adobe made only half-hearted attempts to optimize video playback, which is where I saw the battery life discussion really get started as more people noticed that playing H.264 video back in Flash took an entire CPU core and still dropped frames while playing the same file in <video> or the Windows/OS X media frameworks took less than 10% for perfect playback.
  - zwetan 11y ago
    half-hearted attempts to optimize video playback ? the Flash Player plugin can render hardware accelerated video since v10.2 (released early 2011). http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/02/flash-player-10-2-launch.html http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/02/flash-player-10-2... "For example, using Flash Player 10.2 with Stage Video hardware acceleration, we’ve tested a Mac Mini released two years ago and a low-powered GPU-enabled Windows netbook playing smooth full HD 1080p video using less than 8% of the CPU; more powerful computers use even less."

harigov 11y ago

Just out of curiosity - could there be issues other than just performance here? For ex., could it be that Flash based ads can identify user/device contributing to privacy issues?

cpeterso 11y ago
Flash provides much more identifiable fingerprinting information (e.g. detailed information about your system fonts) and looser "Flash cookie" (Local Shared Objects) restrictions than JavaScript. https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes https://panopticlick.eff.org/index.php?action=log&js=yes
- exodust 11y ago
  Did you read their conclusions? Javascript is most certainly a method for fingerprinting, regardless of Flash presence. "Browser developers should also consider what they can do to reduce fngerprintability, particularly at the JavaScript API level." "We identified only three groups of browser with comparatively good resistance to fngerprinting: those that block JavaScript, those that use TorButton, and certain types of smartphone." Not having Flash doesn't mean you're immune to fingerprinting. That said, it would be nice if Adobe prevented system font lists via Flash.
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    That is true. Not having Flash does not mean you're immune to fingerprinting, but having Flash does mean more (a lot more) unique fingerprinting data is available to trackers. I wonder if browsers' plugin sandboxes could block Flash from calling the OS API to enumerate system fonts.
awalton 11y ago
Or possibly the constant stream of Flash security vulnerabilities that Adobe can't seem to patch out.
kevinchen 11y ago
Flash also has a ton of vulnerabilities and a huge codebase, and according to Apple, caused a ton of crash reports from their computers.
- dogma1138 11y ago
  TBH if a Flash crash or any other user space application crash causes a system crash it's an issue with the OS. Steve Jobs at the time said that every time MacOS crashes it's more often than not Flash's fault, which wasn't really true and would only speak "wonders" of how well MacOS isolates user space applications... On the security issues it's some what true because the nature of Flash, applications like these are almost impossible to sandbox properly unless you have an operating system that sandboxes everything by default. Flash it self these days is pretty much code execution as a service it can do pretty much everything you want some browsers sandbox it better than others but it's still intended to pull code from the ether and run it and when you have a setup like that you will never be able to limit it effectively. Flash can be phased out only because it's mostly used to play various forms of media, but any other use of it cannot be converted to HTML5. If Javascript (as it's parsed and executed in browsers) will ever get to the point of being as flexible and powerfull as Flash is today you'll see browser based RCE vulnerabilities skyrocket also, JS is safe to use only because the browsers restrict it, Flash and AIR are intended to support everything from an animated ad to a full desktop application. Just look at Node.JS (and many NoSQL DB's that used JS) in it's early years almost every (non-DOM based) cross-site scripting vulnerability in a Node.JS application could result in remote code execution on the server, even today you can still easily cause it if you don't handle the code properly one stupid eval in your node code which was there for lazy debugging can lead to your box getting owned in minutes.
  - Arcanum-XIII 11y ago
    They're not system crash but application crash, both are reported on MacOS X. So no, Flash didn't crash the OS, only apps like Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Isn't it enough ?
    - 11y ago
tyingq 11y ago
I'll suffer the downvotes, but going forward "Flash Ads" == non-Google provided ads. It doesn't hurt Google to hobble ads from competing networks.
- userbinator 11y ago
  The other ad networks likely won't be using Flash anymore either, which makes blocking ads more difficult - and that is a good thing to ad networks in general. Thus I won't say it's Google against others, and while it may seem so in the short term, in the long term Google and other ad networks benefit from it (while the users suffer...?)

paulirish 11y ago

Swiffy has been getting massive improvements recently, so expect perf wins in this area. That said, two of the biggest web browsers have not natively supported flash ads for years. So I'm puzzled that ads are still being produced in 2015 for a dying runtime.

Dorian-Marie 11y ago

So, in general, swiffy appears to be a relatively heavyweight solution that is not (yet?) optimized for mobile devices. Morever, there are 4 (yes 4!) giant swiffy ads on the landing page of androidpolice.com, each of which consumes more than half the viewport, all of which are dynamic.

userbinator 11y ago

arguably even worse than flash would have been I'm not surprised. As someone who has worked with it (and even written pieces of a simple Flash renderer), SWF was designed to be an extremely compact format and is far simpler to parse and render than the HTML + CSS + SVG + JS replacement that's being promoted. In that respect, all the complaints about Flash and mobile battery life should be attributable to the mere presence of Flash content. The reason why disabling Flash improves battery life is because the content doesn't get rendered. If the same content were present and rendered with HTML5 it would require more computing power, because the overhead of parsing (several!) text-based formats and using a complex rendering model originally designed for static documents compared to a binary format and rendering model designed for interactive animations, simply cannot be eliminated. I suppose new standards for documents, vector images, and scripting could be designed (WebAssembly comes to mind), but at that point you'll just be reinventing Flash/SWF... For that reason, disable JS and you will get improved battery life too: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2lent3/fwiw_disabling_javascript_significantly_improved/ https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2lent3/fwiw_disablin...

acdha 11y ago
The part about the file format is quite true but it's not the only thing to compare since there are so many features in either runtime and Flash has been used for so many different things. The most relevant example here was the way Adobe made only half-hearted attempts to optimize video playback, which is where I saw the battery life discussion really get started as more people noticed that playing H.264 video back in Flash took an entire CPU core and still dropped frames while playing the same file in <video> or the Windows/OS X media frameworks took less than 10% for perfect playback.
- zwetan 11y ago
  half-hearted attempts to optimize video playback ? the Flash Player plugin can render hardware accelerated video since v10.2 (released early 2011). http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/02/flash-player-10-2-launch.html http://blogs.adobe.com/flashplayer/2011/02/flash-player-10-2... "For example, using Flash Player 10.2 with Stage Video hardware acceleration, we’ve tested a Mac Mini released two years ago and a low-powered GPU-enabled Windows netbook playing smooth full HD 1080p video using less than 8% of the CPU; more powerful computers use even less."