12 ms·

Flash and Chrome

284 points by rayshan 10y ago

aorth 10y ago
The article mentions Flash content slows web page loading and is power inefficient. Flash also has an abysmal security record. Chrome 53 will start blocking certain kinds of Flash usage, and Chrome 55, in December 2016, will go further. Great news!
LeoPanthera 10y ago
Does archive.org archive flash stuff? Decades into the future, playing back archived flash games and animations will be very difficult.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  Yes, archive.org archives Flash and other content, as long as something links to it so the archiver can find it. Standalone flash players exist, and flash-to-HTML translation will continue to improve.
- scrollaway 10y ago
  This is what the Shumway project is for. https://mozilla.github.io/shumway/ https://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- karlding 10y ago
  One problem with archive.org is that it retroactively obeys the robots.txt file, even if the files have been spidered and archived [0]. For example, consider the case when a new domain owner attempts to block all bots from spidering their site, by adding something like this to their robots.txt file User-agent: * Disallow: / This is actually a fairly common case when domain resellers purchase expired domains. Now when you try to visit the archived link, because the live robots.txt file disallows bots, you won't be able to access the archived site (which may have been owned by someone completely different). [0] https://archive.org/post/406632/why-does-the-wayback-machine-pay-attention-to-robotstxt https://archive.org/post/406632/why-does-the-wayback-machine...
  - davegardner 10y ago
    This is true, however they don't purge any of the old archives. If the robots.txt is updated to allow bots again then all of the previous archives will become available again.
    - chii 10y ago
      it seems weird to me to retroactively obey robots.txt for a _different_ version of the site. It makes much more sense to archive the robots.txt along with the content, and use the robots.txt linked with that version of the site. Updating the current robots.txt shouldn't affect a past archive.
      - foldor 10y ago
        I believe the reasoning is that if I accidentally published a public page and didn't realize it but later fixed the problem, I'd like to make sure no one else could see it later. It's probably easier than dealing with all kinds of takedown requests.
micaksica 10y ago
The end of an era, to which all I can say is good riddance. Flash Player has been responsible for 892 published CVEs [1]. The world is safer without it. [1] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...
- webXL 10y ago
  That's like saving good riddance to the internal combustion engine because we would be healthier without it, as if we've had better alternatives all along. If it weren't for Flash, we might all be complaining about Java applets right now.
  - micaksica 10y ago
    > we've had better alternatives all along We've had better alternatives on the desktop for over six years now, since Apple said "No Flash for iOS" in April 2010, when content creators panicked to capture that market and started conversion to HTML5 video. That already was a long time coming. Chrome finally saying farewell to Flash in this manner forces the market to recognize that Flash is no longer an option even on the desktop. As for my security argument: using the link above, if we start with vulnerabilities found in Flash Player after April 2010, that's still 830 of them.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      Video alone isn't all of it though... there were a lot of games, and flash animation was also MUCH lighter than video streaming on bandwidth and cpu overhead. Beyond that, one of the most significant areas of flash as a player is eLearning, training and simulations. Say what you will about a lot of the garbage in player, the authoring tools were some of the best available... though I haven't seen what Adobe has on deck today, it was a very nice experience with nothing comparable for at least until 2012 (last time I worked with flash/flex). What my real hopes were when adobe bought Macromedia, was that they'd open up the format, and convert it to a packaged zip file with a manifest, svg and javascript proper as the language. Allowing for browsers to co-opt and internalize the players. Then adobe could continue to make great tooling and the browser vendors could correct the ship on the players. My dream is pretty close to what Silverlight offered, but that was something nobody was willing to look at for good enough reasons.
piyush_soni 10y ago
Wonder how does Firefox compare with it and what steps it is taking in this direction?
- kijin 10y ago
  Firefox plans to make Flash "click-to-play" by default sometime in 2017. This is similar to Chrome's plan. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-adobe-flash-usage-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-... Meanwhile, it's pretty easy to force Firefox to apply this policy right now. Just go to the Plugins screen and select "Ask to activate" for Flash. I've been using Firefox like this for over two years, and have never been happier with my web experience.
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    Firefox will start blocking the "Flash pixels" too, as noted in the Mozilla blog post.
majestik 10y ago
TLDR: -Flash +HTML5 Also worth mentioning Apple blocked Flash all the way back in 2007 on the original iPhone. Good to see Google doing it now, nine years later.
- kinlan 10y ago
  They will soon be doing it on Safari on desktop too. https://webkit.org/blog/6589/next-steps-for-legacy-plug-ins/ https://webkit.org/blog/6589/next-steps-for-legacy-plug-ins/
- yomly 10y ago
  Maybe we can be grateful for Apple spurring the movement, having no flash whatsoever (in contrast to even "flash-lite" on Android) was really painful on the iphone back then...
- spriggan3 10y ago
  > Also worth mentioning Apple blocked Flash all the way back in 2007 on the original iPhone. Good to see Google doing it now, nine years later. Apple didn't block Flash, that's a lie. It just didn't implement plugins in the iPhone browser. Adobe AIR apps that are running Flash were allowed on iPhone. Games like Machinarium were built with Flash and running on iPhone. So your statement is completely incorrect. I'm no fan of Flash but your statement is bullshit.
  - melling 10y ago
    It was rebuilt as a native app on iOS to improve performance. The initial release didn't support all iPad hardware because it was too slow.
  - Flimm 10y ago
    Apple did not allow alternative browsers with alternative rendering engines and plug-in system that could have supported Flash. So, they did in effect block Flash in browser (if not Flash in an app).
    - 10y ago
profmonocle 10y ago
> In December, Chrome 55 will make HTML5 the default experience, except for sites which only support Flash. For those, you’ll be prompted to enable Flash when you first visit the site. Are they still planning to grant a one-year exemption to the top ten flash-only sites? The article doesn't mention it, but I haven't heard anything about it being cancelled.
- MatekCopatek 10y ago
  As far as I understood, the rumours were blown up. Chrome will show a prompt asking you whether you would like to allow Flash (similar to the one asking you to give permission to access your location) if it's used on the website you just opened. The only exemption those top 10 Flash sites will get is they will have this permission by default, but you should still be able to both permanently add other websites to the whitelist and remove those default ones ones from it. Which, in my book, isn't nearly as bad as Apple's hardcoded support for FairPlay + DASH in Safari only on netflix.com. I could be wrong though, there could be more stages where it gets harsher and what I described is only the first step.
anaclet0 10y ago
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Steve Jobs, April 2010
cookiecaper 10y ago
So what specifically is going to happen? Instead of a click-to-play box, you'll get an HTML5 version of the content if the site is serving one, and if the site isn't serving one, you get a button to click to enable Flash content on that domain? Seems a little unclear to me and not much different from click-to-play. It sounds like Flash will continue to work with a clickthrough, which is the status quo.
grav 10y ago
They need a more technical description of "default experience". How is Chrome supposed to know if a site only supports Flash? I've tried several sites that require Flash, but only until I change the user agent to a mobile browser. Will Chrome try messing with the user agent in this case?
- chii 10y ago
  If the site is so poorly done that you have to fiddle with the user agent to get it to work, I'd say good riddance to that site. Sites like that need a market pressure to become good, and you quitting said site is a vote in the right direction.
  - LukeB_UK 10y ago
    You're assuming that the site is still actively maintained.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  Chrome (and Firefox [1]) will hide Flash from navigator.plugins so that sites will think Flash is not installed. Sites that have an HTML5 alternative will fall back to that. Sites that don't will display show a "Please install Flash" error message. Chrome and Firefox can show an in-browser prompt to allow Flash, which will allow the page to continue. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1186948 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1186948
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
Surprised they didn't just ban it from the browser outright, like they did with Unity.
- wyqydsyq 10y ago
  They didn't ban Unity. The legacy NPAPI extension format (which the Unity web player plugin was built on) was deprecated in favour of PPAPI. NPAPI was outdated, unperformant and insecure, the goal of PPAPI was to address those issues. All that would be needed for Unity web player to work out-of-the-box in Chrome again is for it to be ported to PPAPI
  - Klathmon 10y ago
    And they were given a 4 year heads up that chrome was going to remove it. Instead Java used that time to build several help pages that showed you how to install other browsers then made a shitty anti-chrome campaign when it was finally removed, and unity just sat there and did nothing the whole time.
    - Dylan16807 10y ago
      Here's what a Unity dev said: "I don't expect Chrome to keep supporting PPAPI native plugins for any longer then they have to (in order to support Flash), because it has the same security issues as NPAPI. And, porting the plugin to PPAPI would be far from trivial, and not be compatible with existing content anyways" Is any of that fundamentally wrong? They decided it was a better use of their time to go right to WebGL.
      - Klathmon 10y ago
        Honestly I'm not that sure, and that was a shitty way for me to word it about Unity. The big thing with PPAPI is that it can be much more sandboxed than NPAPI ever could, which means it already has a big step up in security, but obviously anything whose purpose is to circumvent the restrictions put in place for the browser is going to be inherently less secure than just running a website. In the end PPAPI could let you run code from a webpage as "root" on your computer, and there is nothing Chrome or anyone else can do to stop that. That being said, I think Unity is going in the right direction trying to get away from plugins altogether. They are trying (successfully IMO) to compile to "true" web technologies and let the game be exported as HTML5 and javascript which is the right choice.
dandare 10y ago
As a former Flash animator and ActionScript programmer I appreciate the tone of the post. Flash sucks by today's standards but it played its crucial role in the history of the internet. Farewell.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Agreed... nothing compared to Flash's tooling at the time, and when Apple started the fist volley that started sinking flash, there really wasn't anything comparable, or having the reach of the tooling for authors. I haven't had to deal with that kind of content for quite a while now, but I would think some of the authoring has gotten better. It's a bit of a shame though as flash animation projects were so much lighter than video streaming.
Jemaclus 10y ago
I updated my Chrome today (Mac OSX) and the graphics took a huuuuge step backward. Almost like someone accidentally published the Linux build to the Mac link. A couple of my friends have reported the same experience, but I don't see anything official about this. Am I going to have to attempt to downgrade to get the better UI back?
- sunnyps 10y ago
  Can you please file a bug at crbug.com/new ?
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    Why would he file a bug for a UI change?
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  https://chrome.googleblog.com/2016/08/flash-and-chrome.html?google_comment_id=z124fncznsmhxbizv04cjz1rfxb3x1lav2w https://chrome.googleblog.com/2016/08/flash-and-chrome.html?... also echoes what you say: I don't know what you guys changed under the hood, but I'm experiencing the exact opposite of your first paragraph claims: most videos don't work, and it's draining my macbook's battery at an unprecedented rate. I can live with my flash videos not working, but the reduced battery life is making chrome unusable.
- nateguchi 10y ago
  I'm getting frequent graphics glitches on my MbP
- alexcroox 10y ago
  It's the new "material design". You can disable it in chrome://flags to get the non Windows 95 style back. I too hate it. Not sure what the recent design trend of sucking all colour from UIs is hoping to achieve.
  - MrBuddyCasino 10y ago
mxxx 10y ago
Am I the only one who feels like this has been talked about for a long, long time? I actually already thought that Flash had been just about eradicated from the major browsers.
dredmorbius 10y ago
Flash has one key advantage over HTML5 video. Flash can be blocked, through browser extensions, CSS, or simply by removing the !@#$%^&*() Flash plugin, disabling all autoplay video. HTML5 has no such similar functionality. This feature of Flash is very sorely missed. (/etc/hosts or similar blocklists of all known video service providers is an effective and reasonably concise, if not entirely perfect, alternative. I recommend it.)
- nateguchi 10y ago
  It wouldn't be that hard to make a chrome extension for that....
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Try for Android.
- viraptor 10y ago
  That's not really correct. It can be blocked both by extensions (ABP and uBlock), and by CSS (just hide <video> or other containing element).
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    My experience on hiding video was that the video was hidden, yes, but the audio continued to play and video content, I believe, was being downloaded. I've yet to find an extension which blocks all video effectively. Or prevents autoplay. Chome/Android doesn't support extensions at all. So there's that. Flash, by its very blobbiness, had an effective defeat mechanism: remove the blob. Again, for video, especially autoplay sources, I've found blackholing the video platform provider's hosts or domain quite effective. It's still only a handful for most offenders. And if the practice spreads we may see pressure from the providers themselves to defeat autoplay. Though those of us blocking will be beyond caring.
- wtbob 10y ago
  Which is probably why Google don't mind seeing it go — they use JavaScript for all their privacy violations.
rbosinger 10y ago
I was a Flash developer. It blows my mind how far and wide this plugin went. We're still dealing with a transition out years after it fell out of favour. It's kind of neat and a good reminder that if people start using a technology it's not so easy to simply move away from it. Very similar to the days of IE 5,6,7,8 (and yes I know that's not "over" either... but a lot less of a concern than it was). Still, faults aside, Flash was awesome. It was an advanced "Hypercard" (which I learned to build things in as a kid). I hope we don't completely lose some of the good aspects of these technologies.
- spriggan3 10y ago
  Flash community was great. It was a real pleasure to work with visual artists and musicians. There will never be anything like it in web development.
justinlardinois 10y ago
> Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. Slightly off topic: I always found the term "block" to be a bit odd in the web browser context. The browser is the ultimate authority on what gets rendered and shown to the user; there's no need to block anything, because it can just not attempt to show it in the first place. The term goes back at least as far as popup blockers. I wonder if it's because early popup blockers were browser plugins, rather than built in features, so they did have to actively intervene in the user experience.
- pdpi 10y ago
  The UA might be the ultimate authority on what gets presented to the user and what doesn't, but, for better or for worse, the policy has been "draw everything" since forever. Given a change in policy that explicitly avoids drawing some specific things, it's fair to call it "blocking" those things.
- countryqt30 10y ago
  I think it is very easy. Your browser BLOCKS the server from delivering something. I think the term "blocking" is perfect here. :)
  - cpeterso 10y ago
    The server is not going to deliver something unless the client requests it (or the client and server are using a protocol like HTTP/2 that can push content from the server).
  - themckman 10y ago
    I think your parent is pointing out that the browser is the one that initiates the fetching of all of this content in the first place. So, there's no need to "block the server from delivering something" as it can decide never to ask the server to deliver that something.
  - Sir_Substance 10y ago
danbolt 10y ago
I hope as the web moves on we find an easy way of preserving a lot of the creative work that's been done in Flash. Some sort of WebGL/asm.js/WebAssembly player for SWFs on the internet archive would be the pipe dream, I think. That way we could watch Strong Bad long after Flash is available in the future.
- JetSpiegel 10y ago
  That's Mozilla's Shumway, a SWF player in Javascript.
  - technojunkie 10y ago
    Shumway's potential is lost now. I would love for Firefox to take on the same model as Chrome and bundle Flash in the browser and Shumway was a half-baked way to do this.
  - spriggan3 10y ago
    Shumway is DOA without the direct help from Adobe. That's not the first time someones tries to develop an open source flash player. They all failed.
    - SXX 10y ago
      There just wasn't enough work and money put into these open source players. For instance there is proprietary Flash implementation called Scaleform used for games UI. Even long ago before Autodesk acquired them it's had both decent compatibility with normal SWF as well as full GPU acceleration for every platform possible include Linux.
      - shinymark 10y ago
        I've used Scaleform a good amount. It's not 100% compatible with stock Flash but it's pretty darn close in the use cases I've been exposed to. Scaleform has a complex code base but clearly it is possible to reverse engineer the Flash runtime and make a compatible player.
gcb0 10y ago
will they address the elephant in the room and also say that Google analytics slow down 90% of the web just for tracking?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 10y ago
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willtim 10y ago
It's great that Google is highlighting the importance of power efficiency as a major part of their justification for killing flash. Now they need to fix Chrome itself: http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/20/11975514/microsoft-chrome-edge-browser-battery-life-tests http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/20/11975514/microsoft-chrome-...
anotheryou 10y ago
Since recently flash in chrome makes my computer reset after 3s of video playback...
- poppysan 10y ago
  What kind of system are you working on?? That is ridiculous. Flash has never made any computer that I have ever owned reset.
  - hutzlibu 10y ago
    And anecdotal evidence of what never happened to you, still works best, to ridiculise other peoples experience, right?
  - anotheryou 10y ago
    This is new to me too. My laptop is dying of old age it seems.
manish7 10y ago
Its nice.
Nux 10y ago
"This kind of Flash slows you down" .. Shame they apply the "block" only to "this kind of flash".
bad_user 10y ago
Flash has also been used to circumvent some of the browser protections, especially for older browsers. For example it has been the way to achieve cross-origin http requests (CORS) for browsers that don't support it, like IExplorer < 9 (or 8?) and even IExplorer 9 because the CORS support is shit for that one. On one hand it's been cool for developers to be able to do such things, but on the other hand it makes your browser less secure. Anyway, I'm a Firefox user and I don't have Flash installed. The web works just fine without it. One less plugin to worry about.
timeu 10y ago
I can't be happier that Flash is bein removed except that I a heavily use Google's own MotionChart[1] which is built using Flash and there seems to be no HTML5 alternative yet available [2] (although google internally seems to be uing a HTML5 version of it [3]):-( [1] https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/motionchart https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery... [2] https://github.com/google/google-visualization-issues/issues/1046 https://github.com/google/google-visualization-issues/issues... [3] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ltjib1m1uf3pf_#!ctype=m&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_s=incinequal_t1g&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&idim=country:KOR:JPN:ISL:IRL:GBR:FRA&ifdim=country:country_group:oecd&hl=de&dl=de&ind=false https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ltjib1m1uf3pf_#...
- nileshtrivedi 10y ago
  MotionChart is being rebuilt in HTML5. See demo here: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/bubbles https://www.gapminder.org/tools/bubbles I believe this is the library: http://vizabi.org/examples/bubble-chart.html http://vizabi.org/examples/bubble-chart.html
bahadirbozdag 10y ago
great decision, it is time to move forward. i believe flash will cease to exist in 5 years
Heliosmaster 10y ago
Can we have then a decent alternative to "Copy to clipboard button" that does not use flash? :(
- scarlac 10y ago
  document.execCommand('copy') seems to be decently supported (Chrome, FF, IE9+, Safari 10) by now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/execCommand https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ex...
  - hutzlibu 10y ago
    Hm, that's not really the same.
  - kalleboo 10y ago
    Note that Safari 10 hasn't actually been released yet - it's only in a Developer Preview
brakmic 10y ago
Don't want to troll around but it seems to me only two things are inevitable: taxes and Flash Obituaries. ;)
stronglikedan 10y ago
To all those saying Flash is dead or dying, this is simply not so. Mainstream use of Flash may be on it's way out, but browsers will continue to support it in one way or another for the foreseeable future. Why? As I've said before, and will say again: A lot of enterprisey applications have tools developed in Flash/Flex. Mostly internal and B2B tools, but tools nonetheless. It's not likely that they will be replaced anytime soon, because no one is going to authorize the budget for replacing something that still works, so Flash will be around in one form or another for a long while.
- bradleyjg 10y ago
  The same is true for java applets. There are still lots of LOB applications that depend on it. Nonetheless, chrome removed support, firefox said they will by the end of this year, and Edge has no support. Companies still using them are now in the same position as those using active-X, they need IT to deploy special measures for users that need to access them. I think it's fair to sum up this situation by saying that java applets are dead or dying. Flash may well be in the same position in 3-4 years.
  - stronglikedan 10y ago
    I was going to counter by saying that our MIS displays some reports using a java applet, and I can still access them in Chrome. However, I just attempted to run one of those reports, and it turns out that the latest version of our MIS no longer offers the java applet as a display option. Therefore, I must concede. TIL.
lbill 10y ago
When I clicked on the link, I expected to see something like "Flash is an abomination and shouldn't exist, that's why we are killing it". I was wrong and happy to be. Today "Flash" means "problems", but I remember the time where it meant "modernity" and "Improved user experience": I'm glad to witness that Google discards Flash while honoring its legacy!
TeMPOraL 10y ago
> This kind of Flash slows you down I wonder if Flash is still slower than the current JS bloat of the "modern web". My intuition says, probably not.
- wvh 10y ago
  And funnily enough, Google itself is behind a lot of that JS bloat and background tracking. They are probably not the ones that should be pointing fingers at Flash.
andrewvijay 10y ago
Even then Chrome's battery usage is pathetic. I sincerely hope you guys get it right in battery consumption from within chrome rather than blaming on flash! Please! It hurts.
amelius 10y ago
> Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. I'm all against Flash. But this argument sounds silly. Why not handle this like any decent OS, and "nice" the Flash portion of the page, so that it takes only cycles (or bandwidth) which are otherwise left unused?
- foldor 10y ago
  Because that's not really the reason behind the change, it's just a convenient argument to use.
cdevs 10y ago
I use Linux, what's flash? Joking, but seriously I would like HBO now to finally work on my Linux boxes.
wvh 10y ago
I'm happy to see Flash on its way out – I haven't even tried to install it the last few years. Native browser support tends to work and integrate much better on Linux than having to depend on a third party to deliver up-to-date software. The only site I visit that still seems to require Flash is the BBC, for video fragments. There's some irony with Google blaming Flash for being spammy; I recently inspected what's probably the biggest shopping website in the EU because it slowed my computer to a crawl and noticed at least 30 to 40 outgoing connections, a lot of them to Google and its diverse ad, tracker and analytics properties.
- anexprogrammer 10y ago
  Also if you want to stream BBC radio in browser it still insists on using Flash to do it. My concern is with the way Google tend to do things in Chrome (Aunty Google knows best, please do as I say) I might not even be able to continue to use flash for the very few sites I'd like to, or have to. e.g. I tried to download an mp3 of a radio show from bbc.co.uk earlier today and "download blocked" with no option to override. I have all the protect me from myself settings firmly off. chrome help says it's Internet Settings. Internet settings says it's fine to download, and I've downloaded dozens of other mp3s flawlessly. mp3 actually downloads if you paste the button url in a new tab rather than click the button. I've had similar issues with other, innocent and harmless, files in the past. Well, since they brought in their cleverness and download "protections". I forsee similar issues with flash as it goes through its deprecation.
  - Shank 10y ago
    If Chrome blocks a download, you can always go to chrome://downloads (or click the 'see all downloads' link) and unblock it manually there.
- Silhouette 10y ago
  There's some irony with Google blaming Flash for being spammy You're being a little kind; this is not so much irony as outright hypocrisy. Apple did something similar with iOS, refusing to support the plugins arguing that they were insecure and so on, and then promptly using one of their own for HTML5 media elements that broke all kinds of functionality, as well as ignoring the related Web standards whenever it suited them, and then locking up their ecosystem so no-one else could offer an alternative browser that handled these issues better. The problem with modern browser developers is that they seem to have decided their job isn't just to present the content of the Web but to try to influence and curate it on behalf of their user bases. Google gets extra demerits because it is also trying to do the same through its control of the dominant search engine. I don't think this amount of concentrated power is even remotely a healthy trend for the future of the Web.
TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
I find it a bit funny and ironic that the only app I regularly use which prompts me to install Flash [0] is Google Music. On both Safari and Safari Technology Preview! I'm all for killing Flash, but if even Google is unable to completely do away with it, doesn't that mean that it might be a premature move? I don't have any interest in seeing Flash kept around. In fact, I'm quite happy to see it die. But do we actually have working alternatives for the problems it currently solves? I don't ask this rhetorically, I'm very curious if there's still problems which HTML5 is unable to reasonably solve. [0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/f52ew4wpwcmt1dr/Screenshot%202016-08-10%2005.25.48.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/f52ew4wpwcmt1dr/Screenshot%202016-...
- drewg123 10y ago
  That is ... strange. I run chromium on FreeBSD without flash, and Google Play Music works well for me (as opposed to Amazon Music, which wants flash). Perhaps it is something about safari vs chrome?
  - m45t3r 10y ago
    Google Play Music supports HTML5, however I think it works better (i.e. more tested) with Flash or something. So Flash is still the default, while HTML5 is the fallback. And btw, GPM seems to use a similar DRM method as the one supported in Netflix, so if your browser does not support DRM, you're out of luck [1]. [1]: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com.br/2016/04/google-play-music-still-requires-flash.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com.br/2016/04/google-play-musi...
    - drewg123 10y ago
      I only use GPM for DRM-free music that I've uploaded, so that must be why I'm not noticing any issues.
    - TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
      It's a bit frustrating, because it's the only remaining reason I have for installing Flash. There's some superb wrapper apps [0], but they apparently use WebKit.framework, so it still prompts you to install Flash. Although I just discovered that the Radiant Player people are working on an Electron version [1], which is very exciting! [0] https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-mac https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-mac [1] https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-electron https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-electron
Siecje 10y ago
The only site I visit that still uses Flash is https://twitch.tv/ https://twitch.tv/
- ascagnel_ 10y ago
  And Twitch is actively working on an HTML5 player: https://blog.twitch.tv/html5-beta-access-expands-99554ea982e4#.8l57amkv6 https://blog.twitch.tv/html5-beta-access-expands-99554ea982e...
- relearn 10y ago
  That was the case for me as well until I started utilizing Livestreamer [0]. [0]- http://docs.livestreamer.io/ http://docs.livestreamer.io/
KallDrexx 10y ago
As happy as I am overall about the death of Flash I will say that at least Flash being a plugin meant it was trivial to control. The amount of auto-play videos (both ads and non-ads) is extremely obnoxious and I haven't found a good way to prevent that them yet.
- tkinom 10y ago
  Just use firefox with noscript! I never have any issue with any auto-play videos at all. The performance on the good old FF 30 is N*10 times better than latest chrome browser.
  - IntelMiner 10y ago
    Firefox 30? isn't that extremely outdated however?
drdaeman 10y ago
Good. Maybe that'd force Facebook to update their OpenGraph video embedding. Right now it essentially requires an URL that's either application/x-shockwave-flash or video/mp4 (with undocumented <iframe> embedding for chosen parties), which doesn't really cover all the cases for online videos (e.g. live streaming with DASH or HLS).
BatFastard 10y ago
This seems to me to be an obvious power play by google. Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from. When the analytics are in flash, google has no insight, but when forced into js they have full visibility into everything a developer does.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  > Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from. I doubt that very much - Google has been extracting data from and indexing Flash content for close to a decade[1]. If they wanted to reverse-engineer the behaviour of flash code, they could run it as blackbox code in a Flash sandbox 1. http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing-flash-content-14299 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing...
- tobz 10y ago
  Why would Google themselves care about what developers are reporting back? It's not as if they don't have insight into the types of analytics people care about: Google Analytics is very large.
- pcwalton 10y ago
  > Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from. When the analytics are in flash, google has no insight, but when forced into js they have full visibility into everything a developer does. The bytecode format and semantics of both AVM1 and AVM2 (the VMs used in Flash) are common knowledge.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- f137 10y ago
  Not only that. I believe the main purpose of the whole war agains flash is to kill the online games ecosystem, from which neither Apple nor Google make profit, and move gamers to appstores.
tbrock 10y ago
Remember when this was a selling point for android devices? I think everyone that owned one pretty much touted it as the killer feature.
- bobbyi_settv 10y ago
  At the time, it was a killer feature.
- untog 10y ago
  "Everyone that owned one" feels like kind of an exaggeration, but it was a big feature at the time. I found it very useful for video players and was glad my phone could plug the gap while the web caught up to HTML5.
- PhasmaFelis 10y ago
  I thought it was a killer feature right up until I actually tried to play a five-year-old Flash game on my brand-new, cutting-edge Galaxy Nexus and got like 3FPS. All that left was Flash video (very easy to replace server-side, just switch to an HTML5 player and all the videos on your site are good to go) and sites with Flash-only interfaces (good riddance, for the most part). I guess it would be nice to watch Homestar videos on my phone browser instead of having to find them on YouTube, but that's literally the only other use case I had.
knodi 10y ago
For years!!! we been waiting for Flash to be kicked to the curb.
okonomiyaki3000 10y ago
Some of the comments on that page are just sad. I didn't realise Flash still had so many fans.
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
Thank god. The nightmare is ending.
neovive 10y ago
Although Flash's heyday is long gone, let's not forget how much Flash brought to the table back in the late 90's and early 2000's: animation, sound, games, and scaleable vector graphics and more. Macromedia's purchase of FutureSplash and subsequent release of the ubiquitous Flash player was a game changer for the web. Being able to download and play real games and experience interactive websites over slow dial-up connections was amazing and changed people's perspectives of the web. The FLV format also finally made streaming video a seamless experience for the end user; leading to the creation of Youtube and other streaming video services. Like all technologies, Flash was overused in places (pre-loaders, rotating 3d logos, banner ads) and Adobe's push towards Flex and RIA's took Flash away from of it's roots in animation for quite a few years. However, it will be interesting to see if the equivalent HTML5 stack follows a similar timeline-- minus the website pre-loaders...of course.
cableshaft 10y ago
I used to make and release flash games and still have them on my website. Is there a good low-to-moderate effort way to convert them to HTML5? A couple of the games used a ton of frame by frame animation with large sprites, so they probably wouldn't convert to spritesheets very well and should stay vector graphics. Example: https://youtu.be/Qk9HlXbqRTQ?t=43s https://youtu.be/Qk9HlXbqRTQ?t=43s
- f137 10y ago
  No, there is not a simple way to convert flash to html5. I say from experience, we look for it for years. Moreover, you can rewrite a game in html5 from scratch, if it is simple enough, but it will be slower, less smooth, and require some latest browser versions to run at all.
- NoGravitas 10y ago
  You could see if it will run in Shumway?
- MattGrommes 10y ago
  It's definitely not a "converter" for Flash but I really like the javascript framework Phaser for small games.
f137 10y ago
I wonder, does anybody here plays online games? I wonder, further, is there anyone who thinks HTML5 is even close to Flash for games creation?
xiaoma 10y ago
Looks like https://google.com/finance https://google.com/finance didn't get the memo. "Adobe Flash Player is required for interactive charts."
adrianratnapala 10y ago
There seems to be a lot of people saying "ohh people thing flash is bad now, but once upon a time it was really a useful thing." That time was the 90s and early 2000s. And in that time, I avoided pages with Flash because they were painful. They are still a little painful now. If Flash was transformative, I think it was that it introduced the kind of bloat and intrusiveness that we now take for granted on the web.
zwetan 10y ago
Flash is definitively the perfect scapegoat whatever your problem: slow machine, battery, security, etc. it's all its fault seriously, if everyone have already moved to HTML5, how come we are still blaming Flash for those daily petty problems ? It's not used so let's block it but it is still responsible for the majority of problems ... nobody notice the ambiguity of the argument ? It's quite painful to see such arguments from Google, I thought they would be smart enough to understand that any popular technology get hacked, the problem is not really Flash, its the browser itself (and the advertising networks that are perfect to distribute dodgy payloads to tons of users). The other sad point is the amalgam of everything, for some ppl Flash equals advertising, and that's bad so Flash is bad, and they don't want to think further than that. The choice of the users ? The tons of SWF content (that will probably not be ported to HTML5) ? nobody care apparently And about throwing everything in the same bag, so apparently if Flash is dead then ActionScript is dead too right ? nope Flash is just 1 runtime running in the browser, there are other runtimes: Adobe AIR for desktop and mobile, and also Redtamarin [1] for the command-line / server-side. [1]: https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin
pvdebbe 10y ago
I still use Flash for youtube (with an add-on that enforces it) because Firefox doesn't seem to be able to handle my 4-monitor Xmonad setup properly with HTML5 fullscreen video. And the process also locks up my soundcard until I kill the process. Flash behaves much better. After youtube ditches its Flash player altogether, I guess it's chromium for YT then. No biggie.
- zokula 10y ago
  Same with me as well, Firefox or Chrome both are slower with HTML5 media versus flash. Flash video runs faster than HTML5 and also has hardware acceleration which HTML5 fails at on my hardware, a couple of laptops and a desktop rig.

284 points by rayshan 10y ago

aorth 10y ago

The article mentions Flash content slows web page loading and is power inefficient. Flash also has an abysmal security record. Chrome 53 will start blocking certain kinds of Flash usage, and Chrome 55, in December 2016, will go further. Great news!

LeoPanthera 10y ago

Does archive.org archive flash stuff? Decades into the future, playing back archived flash games and animations will be very difficult.

JoshTriplett 10y ago
Yes, archive.org archives Flash and other content, as long as something links to it so the archiver can find it. Standalone flash players exist, and flash-to-HTML translation will continue to improve.
scrollaway 10y ago
This is what the Shumway project is for. https://mozilla.github.io/shumway/ https://mozilla.github.io/shumway/
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
karlding 10y ago
One problem with archive.org is that it retroactively obeys the robots.txt file, even if the files have been spidered and archived [0]. For example, consider the case when a new domain owner attempts to block all bots from spidering their site, by adding something like this to their robots.txt file User-agent: * Disallow: / This is actually a fairly common case when domain resellers purchase expired domains. Now when you try to visit the archived link, because the live robots.txt file disallows bots, you won't be able to access the archived site (which may have been owned by someone completely different). [0] https://archive.org/post/406632/why-does-the-wayback-machine-pay-attention-to-robotstxt https://archive.org/post/406632/why-does-the-wayback-machine...
- davegardner 10y ago
  This is true, however they don't purge any of the old archives. If the robots.txt is updated to allow bots again then all of the previous archives will become available again.
  - chii 10y ago
    it seems weird to me to retroactively obey robots.txt for a _different_ version of the site. It makes much more sense to archive the robots.txt along with the content, and use the robots.txt linked with that version of the site. Updating the current robots.txt shouldn't affect a past archive.
    - foldor 10y ago
      I believe the reasoning is that if I accidentally published a public page and didn't realize it but later fixed the problem, I'd like to make sure no one else could see it later. It's probably easier than dealing with all kinds of takedown requests.

micaksica 10y ago

The end of an era, to which all I can say is good riddance. Flash Player has been responsible for 892 published CVEs [1]. The world is safer without it. [1] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...

webXL 10y ago
That's like saving good riddance to the internal combustion engine because we would be healthier without it, as if we've had better alternatives all along. If it weren't for Flash, we might all be complaining about Java applets right now.
- micaksica 10y ago
  > we've had better alternatives all along We've had better alternatives on the desktop for over six years now, since Apple said "No Flash for iOS" in April 2010, when content creators panicked to capture that market and started conversion to HTML5 video. That already was a long time coming. Chrome finally saying farewell to Flash in this manner forces the market to recognize that Flash is no longer an option even on the desktop. As for my security argument: using the link above, if we start with vulnerabilities found in Flash Player after April 2010, that's still 830 of them.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    Video alone isn't all of it though... there were a lot of games, and flash animation was also MUCH lighter than video streaming on bandwidth and cpu overhead. Beyond that, one of the most significant areas of flash as a player is eLearning, training and simulations. Say what you will about a lot of the garbage in player, the authoring tools were some of the best available... though I haven't seen what Adobe has on deck today, it was a very nice experience with nothing comparable for at least until 2012 (last time I worked with flash/flex). What my real hopes were when adobe bought Macromedia, was that they'd open up the format, and convert it to a packaged zip file with a manifest, svg and javascript proper as the language. Allowing for browsers to co-opt and internalize the players. Then adobe could continue to make great tooling and the browser vendors could correct the ship on the players. My dream is pretty close to what Silverlight offered, but that was something nobody was willing to look at for good enough reasons.

piyush_soni 10y ago

Wonder how does Firefox compare with it and what steps it is taking in this direction?

kijin 10y ago
Firefox plans to make Flash "click-to-play" by default sometime in 2017. This is similar to Chrome's plan. https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-adobe-flash-usage-in-firefox/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2016/07/20/reducing-... Meanwhile, it's pretty easy to force Firefox to apply this policy right now. Just go to the Plugins screen and select "Ask to activate" for Flash. I've been using Firefox like this for over two years, and have never been happier with my web experience.
- cpeterso 10y ago
  Firefox will start blocking the "Flash pixels" too, as noted in the Mozilla blog post.

majestik 10y ago

TLDR: -Flash +HTML5 Also worth mentioning Apple blocked Flash all the way back in 2007 on the original iPhone. Good to see Google doing it now, nine years later.

kinlan 10y ago
They will soon be doing it on Safari on desktop too. https://webkit.org/blog/6589/next-steps-for-legacy-plug-ins/ https://webkit.org/blog/6589/next-steps-for-legacy-plug-ins/
yomly 10y ago
Maybe we can be grateful for Apple spurring the movement, having no flash whatsoever (in contrast to even "flash-lite" on Android) was really painful on the iphone back then...
spriggan3 10y ago
> Also worth mentioning Apple blocked Flash all the way back in 2007 on the original iPhone. Good to see Google doing it now, nine years later. Apple didn't block Flash, that's a lie. It just didn't implement plugins in the iPhone browser. Adobe AIR apps that are running Flash were allowed on iPhone. Games like Machinarium were built with Flash and running on iPhone. So your statement is completely incorrect. I'm no fan of Flash but your statement is bullshit.
- melling 10y ago
  It was rebuilt as a native app on iOS to improve performance. The initial release didn't support all iPad hardware because it was too slow.
- Flimm 10y ago
  Apple did not allow alternative browsers with alternative rendering engines and plug-in system that could have supported Flash. So, they did in effect block Flash in browser (if not Flash in an app).
  - 10y ago

profmonocle 10y ago

> In December, Chrome 55 will make HTML5 the default experience, except for sites which only support Flash. For those, you’ll be prompted to enable Flash when you first visit the site. Are they still planning to grant a one-year exemption to the top ten flash-only sites? The article doesn't mention it, but I haven't heard anything about it being cancelled.

MatekCopatek 10y ago
As far as I understood, the rumours were blown up. Chrome will show a prompt asking you whether you would like to allow Flash (similar to the one asking you to give permission to access your location) if it's used on the website you just opened. The only exemption those top 10 Flash sites will get is they will have this permission by default, but you should still be able to both permanently add other websites to the whitelist and remove those default ones ones from it. Which, in my book, isn't nearly as bad as Apple's hardcoded support for FairPlay + DASH in Safari only on netflix.com. I could be wrong though, there could be more stages where it gets harsher and what I described is only the first step.

anaclet0 10y ago

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ Steve Jobs, April 2010

cookiecaper 10y ago

So what specifically is going to happen? Instead of a click-to-play box, you'll get an HTML5 version of the content if the site is serving one, and if the site isn't serving one, you get a button to click to enable Flash content on that domain? Seems a little unclear to me and not much different from click-to-play. It sounds like Flash will continue to work with a clickthrough, which is the status quo.

grav 10y ago

They need a more technical description of "default experience". How is Chrome supposed to know if a site only supports Flash? I've tried several sites that require Flash, but only until I change the user agent to a mobile browser. Will Chrome try messing with the user agent in this case?

chii 10y ago
If the site is so poorly done that you have to fiddle with the user agent to get it to work, I'd say good riddance to that site. Sites like that need a market pressure to become good, and you quitting said site is a vote in the right direction.
- LukeB_UK 10y ago
  You're assuming that the site is still actively maintained.
cpeterso 10y ago
Chrome (and Firefox [1]) will hide Flash from navigator.plugins so that sites will think Flash is not installed. Sites that have an HTML5 alternative will fall back to that. Sites that don't will display show a "Please install Flash" error message. Chrome and Firefox can show an in-browser prompt to allow Flash, which will allow the page to continue. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1186948 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1186948

PhasmaFelis 10y ago

Surprised they didn't just ban it from the browser outright, like they did with Unity.

wyqydsyq 10y ago
They didn't ban Unity. The legacy NPAPI extension format (which the Unity web player plugin was built on) was deprecated in favour of PPAPI. NPAPI was outdated, unperformant and insecure, the goal of PPAPI was to address those issues. All that would be needed for Unity web player to work out-of-the-box in Chrome again is for it to be ported to PPAPI
- Klathmon 10y ago
  And they were given a 4 year heads up that chrome was going to remove it. Instead Java used that time to build several help pages that showed you how to install other browsers then made a shitty anti-chrome campaign when it was finally removed, and unity just sat there and did nothing the whole time.
  - Dylan16807 10y ago
    Here's what a Unity dev said: "I don't expect Chrome to keep supporting PPAPI native plugins for any longer then they have to (in order to support Flash), because it has the same security issues as NPAPI. And, porting the plugin to PPAPI would be far from trivial, and not be compatible with existing content anyways" Is any of that fundamentally wrong? They decided it was a better use of their time to go right to WebGL.
    - Klathmon 10y ago
      Honestly I'm not that sure, and that was a shitty way for me to word it about Unity. The big thing with PPAPI is that it can be much more sandboxed than NPAPI ever could, which means it already has a big step up in security, but obviously anything whose purpose is to circumvent the restrictions put in place for the browser is going to be inherently less secure than just running a website. In the end PPAPI could let you run code from a webpage as "root" on your computer, and there is nothing Chrome or anyone else can do to stop that. That being said, I think Unity is going in the right direction trying to get away from plugins altogether. They are trying (successfully IMO) to compile to "true" web technologies and let the game be exported as HTML5 and javascript which is the right choice.

dandare 10y ago

As a former Flash animator and ActionScript programmer I appreciate the tone of the post. Flash sucks by today's standards but it played its crucial role in the history of the internet. Farewell.

tracker1 10y ago
Agreed... nothing compared to Flash's tooling at the time, and when Apple started the fist volley that started sinking flash, there really wasn't anything comparable, or having the reach of the tooling for authors. I haven't had to deal with that kind of content for quite a while now, but I would think some of the authoring has gotten better. It's a bit of a shame though as flash animation projects were so much lighter than video streaming.

Jemaclus 10y ago

I updated my Chrome today (Mac OSX) and the graphics took a huuuuge step backward. Almost like someone accidentally published the Linux build to the Mac link. A couple of my friends have reported the same experience, but I don't see anything official about this. Am I going to have to attempt to downgrade to get the better UI back?

sunnyps 10y ago
Can you please file a bug at crbug.com/new ?
- wingerlang 10y ago
  Why would he file a bug for a UI change?
0xmohit 10y ago
https://chrome.googleblog.com/2016/08/flash-and-chrome.html?google_comment_id=z124fncznsmhxbizv04cjz1rfxb3x1lav2w https://chrome.googleblog.com/2016/08/flash-and-chrome.html?... also echoes what you say: I don't know what you guys changed under the hood, but I'm experiencing the exact opposite of your first paragraph claims: most videos don't work, and it's draining my macbook's battery at an unprecedented rate. I can live with my flash videos not working, but the reduced battery life is making chrome unusable.
nateguchi 10y ago
I'm getting frequent graphics glitches on my MbP
alexcroox 10y ago
It's the new "material design". You can disable it in chrome://flags to get the non Windows 95 style back. I too hate it. Not sure what the recent design trend of sucking all colour from UIs is hoping to achieve.
- MrBuddyCasino 10y ago

mxxx 10y ago

Am I the only one who feels like this has been talked about for a long, long time? I actually already thought that Flash had been just about eradicated from the major browsers.

dredmorbius 10y ago

Flash has one key advantage over HTML5 video. Flash can be blocked, through browser extensions, CSS, or simply by removing the !@#$%^&*() Flash plugin, disabling all autoplay video. HTML5 has no such similar functionality. This feature of Flash is very sorely missed. (/etc/hosts or similar blocklists of all known video service providers is an effective and reasonably concise, if not entirely perfect, alternative. I recommend it.)

nateguchi 10y ago
It wouldn't be that hard to make a chrome extension for that....
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Try for Android.
viraptor 10y ago
That's not really correct. It can be blocked both by extensions (ABP and uBlock), and by CSS (just hide <video> or other containing element).
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  My experience on hiding video was that the video was hidden, yes, but the audio continued to play and video content, I believe, was being downloaded. I've yet to find an extension which blocks all video effectively. Or prevents autoplay. Chome/Android doesn't support extensions at all. So there's that. Flash, by its very blobbiness, had an effective defeat mechanism: remove the blob. Again, for video, especially autoplay sources, I've found blackholing the video platform provider's hosts or domain quite effective. It's still only a handful for most offenders. And if the practice spreads we may see pressure from the providers themselves to defeat autoplay. Though those of us blocking will be beyond caring.
wtbob 10y ago
Which is probably why Google don't mind seeing it go — they use JavaScript for all their privacy violations.

rbosinger 10y ago

I was a Flash developer. It blows my mind how far and wide this plugin went. We're still dealing with a transition out years after it fell out of favour. It's kind of neat and a good reminder that if people start using a technology it's not so easy to simply move away from it. Very similar to the days of IE 5,6,7,8 (and yes I know that's not "over" either... but a lot less of a concern than it was). Still, faults aside, Flash was awesome. It was an advanced "Hypercard" (which I learned to build things in as a kid). I hope we don't completely lose some of the good aspects of these technologies.

spriggan3 10y ago
Flash community was great. It was a real pleasure to work with visual artists and musicians. There will never be anything like it in web development.

justinlardinois 10y ago

> Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. Slightly off topic: I always found the term "block" to be a bit odd in the web browser context. The browser is the ultimate authority on what gets rendered and shown to the user; there's no need to block anything, because it can just not attempt to show it in the first place. The term goes back at least as far as popup blockers. I wonder if it's because early popup blockers were browser plugins, rather than built in features, so they did have to actively intervene in the user experience.

pdpi 10y ago
The UA might be the ultimate authority on what gets presented to the user and what doesn't, but, for better or for worse, the policy has been "draw everything" since forever. Given a change in policy that explicitly avoids drawing some specific things, it's fair to call it "blocking" those things.
countryqt30 10y ago
I think it is very easy. Your browser BLOCKS the server from delivering something. I think the term "blocking" is perfect here. :)
- cpeterso 10y ago
  The server is not going to deliver something unless the client requests it (or the client and server are using a protocol like HTTP/2 that can push content from the server).
- themckman 10y ago
  I think your parent is pointing out that the browser is the one that initiates the fetching of all of this content in the first place. So, there's no need to "block the server from delivering something" as it can decide never to ask the server to deliver that something.
- Sir_Substance 10y ago

danbolt 10y ago

I hope as the web moves on we find an easy way of preserving a lot of the creative work that's been done in Flash. Some sort of WebGL/asm.js/WebAssembly player for SWFs on the internet archive would be the pipe dream, I think. That way we could watch Strong Bad long after Flash is available in the future.

JetSpiegel 10y ago
That's Mozilla's Shumway, a SWF player in Javascript.
- technojunkie 10y ago
  Shumway's potential is lost now. I would love for Firefox to take on the same model as Chrome and bundle Flash in the browser and Shumway was a half-baked way to do this.
- spriggan3 10y ago
  Shumway is DOA without the direct help from Adobe. That's not the first time someones tries to develop an open source flash player. They all failed.
  - SXX 10y ago
    There just wasn't enough work and money put into these open source players. For instance there is proprietary Flash implementation called Scaleform used for games UI. Even long ago before Autodesk acquired them it's had both decent compatibility with normal SWF as well as full GPU acceleration for every platform possible include Linux.
    - shinymark 10y ago
      I've used Scaleform a good amount. It's not 100% compatible with stock Flash but it's pretty darn close in the use cases I've been exposed to. Scaleform has a complex code base but clearly it is possible to reverse engineer the Flash runtime and make a compatible player.

gcb0 10y ago

will they address the elephant in the room and also say that Google analytics slow down 90% of the web just for tracking?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

willtim 10y ago

It's great that Google is highlighting the importance of power efficiency as a major part of their justification for killing flash. Now they need to fix Chrome itself: http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/20/11975514/microsoft-chrome-edge-browser-battery-life-tests http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/20/11975514/microsoft-chrome-...

anotheryou 10y ago

Since recently flash in chrome makes my computer reset after 3s of video playback...

poppysan 10y ago
What kind of system are you working on?? That is ridiculous. Flash has never made any computer that I have ever owned reset.
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  And anecdotal evidence of what never happened to you, still works best, to ridiculise other peoples experience, right?
- anotheryou 10y ago
  This is new to me too. My laptop is dying of old age it seems.

manish7 10y ago

Its nice.

Nux 10y ago

"This kind of Flash slows you down" .. Shame they apply the "block" only to "this kind of flash".

bad_user 10y ago

Flash has also been used to circumvent some of the browser protections, especially for older browsers. For example it has been the way to achieve cross-origin http requests (CORS) for browsers that don't support it, like IExplorer < 9 (or 8?) and even IExplorer 9 because the CORS support is shit for that one. On one hand it's been cool for developers to be able to do such things, but on the other hand it makes your browser less secure. Anyway, I'm a Firefox user and I don't have Flash installed. The web works just fine without it. One less plugin to worry about.

timeu 10y ago

I can't be happier that Flash is bein removed except that I a heavily use Google's own MotionChart[1] which is built using Flash and there seems to be no HTML5 alternative yet available [2] (although google internally seems to be uing a HTML5 version of it [3]):-( [1] https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/motionchart https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery... [2] https://github.com/google/google-visualization-issues/issues/1046 https://github.com/google/google-visualization-issues/issues... [3] https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ltjib1m1uf3pf_#!ctype=m&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_s=incinequal_t1g&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&idim=country:KOR:JPN:ISL:IRL:GBR:FRA&ifdim=country:country_group:oecd&hl=de&dl=de&ind=false https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ltjib1m1uf3pf_#...

nileshtrivedi 10y ago
MotionChart is being rebuilt in HTML5. See demo here: https://www.gapminder.org/tools/bubbles https://www.gapminder.org/tools/bubbles I believe this is the library: http://vizabi.org/examples/bubble-chart.html http://vizabi.org/examples/bubble-chart.html

bahadirbozdag 10y ago

great decision, it is time to move forward. i believe flash will cease to exist in 5 years

Heliosmaster 10y ago

Can we have then a decent alternative to "Copy to clipboard button" that does not use flash? :(

scarlac 10y ago
document.execCommand('copy') seems to be decently supported (Chrome, FF, IE9+, Safari 10) by now: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/execCommand https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ex...
- hutzlibu 10y ago
  Hm, that's not really the same.
- kalleboo 10y ago
  Note that Safari 10 hasn't actually been released yet - it's only in a Developer Preview

brakmic 10y ago

Don't want to troll around but it seems to me only two things are inevitable: taxes and Flash Obituaries. ;)

stronglikedan 10y ago

To all those saying Flash is dead or dying, this is simply not so. Mainstream use of Flash may be on it's way out, but browsers will continue to support it in one way or another for the foreseeable future. Why? As I've said before, and will say again: A lot of enterprisey applications have tools developed in Flash/Flex. Mostly internal and B2B tools, but tools nonetheless. It's not likely that they will be replaced anytime soon, because no one is going to authorize the budget for replacing something that still works, so Flash will be around in one form or another for a long while.

bradleyjg 10y ago
The same is true for java applets. There are still lots of LOB applications that depend on it. Nonetheless, chrome removed support, firefox said they will by the end of this year, and Edge has no support. Companies still using them are now in the same position as those using active-X, they need IT to deploy special measures for users that need to access them. I think it's fair to sum up this situation by saying that java applets are dead or dying. Flash may well be in the same position in 3-4 years.
- stronglikedan 10y ago
  I was going to counter by saying that our MIS displays some reports using a java applet, and I can still access them in Chrome. However, I just attempted to run one of those reports, and it turns out that the latest version of our MIS no longer offers the java applet as a display option. Therefore, I must concede. TIL.

lbill 10y ago

When I clicked on the link, I expected to see something like "Flash is an abomination and shouldn't exist, that's why we are killing it". I was wrong and happy to be. Today "Flash" means "problems", but I remember the time where it meant "modernity" and "Improved user experience": I'm glad to witness that Google discards Flash while honoring its legacy!

TeMPOraL 10y ago

> This kind of Flash slows you down I wonder if Flash is still slower than the current JS bloat of the "modern web". My intuition says, probably not.

wvh 10y ago
And funnily enough, Google itself is behind a lot of that JS bloat and background tracking. They are probably not the ones that should be pointing fingers at Flash.

andrewvijay 10y ago

Even then Chrome's battery usage is pathetic. I sincerely hope you guys get it right in battery consumption from within chrome rather than blaming on flash! Please! It hurts.

amelius 10y ago

> Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. I'm all against Flash. But this argument sounds silly. Why not handle this like any decent OS, and "nice" the Flash portion of the page, so that it takes only cycles (or bandwidth) which are otherwise left unused?

foldor 10y ago
Because that's not really the reason behind the change, it's just a convenient argument to use.

cdevs 10y ago

I use Linux, what's flash? Joking, but seriously I would like HBO now to finally work on my Linux boxes.

wvh 10y ago

I'm happy to see Flash on its way out – I haven't even tried to install it the last few years. Native browser support tends to work and integrate much better on Linux than having to depend on a third party to deliver up-to-date software. The only site I visit that still seems to require Flash is the BBC, for video fragments. There's some irony with Google blaming Flash for being spammy; I recently inspected what's probably the biggest shopping website in the EU because it slowed my computer to a crawl and noticed at least 30 to 40 outgoing connections, a lot of them to Google and its diverse ad, tracker and analytics properties.

anexprogrammer 10y ago
Also if you want to stream BBC radio in browser it still insists on using Flash to do it. My concern is with the way Google tend to do things in Chrome (Aunty Google knows best, please do as I say) I might not even be able to continue to use flash for the very few sites I'd like to, or have to. e.g. I tried to download an mp3 of a radio show from bbc.co.uk earlier today and "download blocked" with no option to override. I have all the protect me from myself settings firmly off. chrome help says it's Internet Settings. Internet settings says it's fine to download, and I've downloaded dozens of other mp3s flawlessly. mp3 actually downloads if you paste the button url in a new tab rather than click the button. I've had similar issues with other, innocent and harmless, files in the past. Well, since they brought in their cleverness and download "protections". I forsee similar issues with flash as it goes through its deprecation.
- Shank 10y ago
  If Chrome blocks a download, you can always go to chrome://downloads (or click the 'see all downloads' link) and unblock it manually there.
Silhouette 10y ago
There's some irony with Google blaming Flash for being spammy You're being a little kind; this is not so much irony as outright hypocrisy. Apple did something similar with iOS, refusing to support the plugins arguing that they were insecure and so on, and then promptly using one of their own for HTML5 media elements that broke all kinds of functionality, as well as ignoring the related Web standards whenever it suited them, and then locking up their ecosystem so no-one else could offer an alternative browser that handled these issues better. The problem with modern browser developers is that they seem to have decided their job isn't just to present the content of the Web but to try to influence and curate it on behalf of their user bases. Google gets extra demerits because it is also trying to do the same through its control of the dominant search engine. I don't think this amount of concentrated power is even remotely a healthy trend for the future of the Web.

TheAceOfHearts 10y ago

I find it a bit funny and ironic that the only app I regularly use which prompts me to install Flash [0] is Google Music. On both Safari and Safari Technology Preview! I'm all for killing Flash, but if even Google is unable to completely do away with it, doesn't that mean that it might be a premature move? I don't have any interest in seeing Flash kept around. In fact, I'm quite happy to see it die. But do we actually have working alternatives for the problems it currently solves? I don't ask this rhetorically, I'm very curious if there's still problems which HTML5 is unable to reasonably solve. [0] https://www.dropbox.com/s/f52ew4wpwcmt1dr/Screenshot%202016-08-10%2005.25.48.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/f52ew4wpwcmt1dr/Screenshot%202016-...

drewg123 10y ago
That is ... strange. I run chromium on FreeBSD without flash, and Google Play Music works well for me (as opposed to Amazon Music, which wants flash). Perhaps it is something about safari vs chrome?
- m45t3r 10y ago
  Google Play Music supports HTML5, however I think it works better (i.e. more tested) with Flash or something. So Flash is still the default, while HTML5 is the fallback. And btw, GPM seems to use a similar DRM method as the one supported in Netflix, so if your browser does not support DRM, you're out of luck [1]. [1]: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com.br/2016/04/google-play-music-still-requires-flash.html http://googlesystem.blogspot.com.br/2016/04/google-play-musi...
  - drewg123 10y ago
    I only use GPM for DRM-free music that I've uploaded, so that must be why I'm not noticing any issues.
  - TheAceOfHearts 10y ago
    It's a bit frustrating, because it's the only remaining reason I have for installing Flash. There's some superb wrapper apps [0], but they apparently use WebKit.framework, so it still prompts you to install Flash. Although I just discovered that the Radiant Player people are working on an Electron version [1], which is very exciting! [0] https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-mac https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-mac [1] https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-electron https://github.com/radiant-player/radiant-player-electron

Siecje 10y ago

The only site I visit that still uses Flash is https://twitch.tv/ https://twitch.tv/

ascagnel_ 10y ago
And Twitch is actively working on an HTML5 player: https://blog.twitch.tv/html5-beta-access-expands-99554ea982e4#.8l57amkv6 https://blog.twitch.tv/html5-beta-access-expands-99554ea982e...
relearn 10y ago
That was the case for me as well until I started utilizing Livestreamer [0]. [0]- http://docs.livestreamer.io/ http://docs.livestreamer.io/

KallDrexx 10y ago

As happy as I am overall about the death of Flash I will say that at least Flash being a plugin meant it was trivial to control. The amount of auto-play videos (both ads and non-ads) is extremely obnoxious and I haven't found a good way to prevent that them yet.

tkinom 10y ago
Just use firefox with noscript! I never have any issue with any auto-play videos at all. The performance on the good old FF 30 is N*10 times better than latest chrome browser.
- IntelMiner 10y ago
  Firefox 30? isn't that extremely outdated however?

drdaeman 10y ago

Good. Maybe that'd force Facebook to update their OpenGraph video embedding. Right now it essentially requires an URL that's either application/x-shockwave-flash or video/mp4 (with undocumented <iframe> embedding for chosen parties), which doesn't really cover all the cases for online videos (e.g. live streaming with DASH or HLS).

BatFastard 10y ago

This seems to me to be an obvious power play by google. Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from. When the analytics are in flash, google has no insight, but when forced into js they have full visibility into everything a developer does.

sangnoir 10y ago
> Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from. I doubt that very much - Google has been extracting data from and indexing Flash content for close to a decade[1]. If they wanted to reverse-engineer the behaviour of flash code, they could run it as blackbox code in a Flash sandbox 1. http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing-flash-content-14299 http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing...
tobz 10y ago
Why would Google themselves care about what developers are reporting back? It's not as if they don't have insight into the types of analytics people care about: Google Analytics is very large.
pcwalton 10y ago
> Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from. When the analytics are in flash, google has no insight, but when forced into js they have full visibility into everything a developer does. The bytecode format and semantics of both AVM1 and AVM2 (the VMs used in Flash) are common knowledge.
deleted 10y ago
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f137 10y ago
Not only that. I believe the main purpose of the whole war agains flash is to kill the online games ecosystem, from which neither Apple nor Google make profit, and move gamers to appstores.

tbrock 10y ago

Remember when this was a selling point for android devices? I think everyone that owned one pretty much touted it as the killer feature.

bobbyi_settv 10y ago
At the time, it was a killer feature.
untog 10y ago
"Everyone that owned one" feels like kind of an exaggeration, but it was a big feature at the time. I found it very useful for video players and was glad my phone could plug the gap while the web caught up to HTML5.
PhasmaFelis 10y ago
I thought it was a killer feature right up until I actually tried to play a five-year-old Flash game on my brand-new, cutting-edge Galaxy Nexus and got like 3FPS. All that left was Flash video (very easy to replace server-side, just switch to an HTML5 player and all the videos on your site are good to go) and sites with Flash-only interfaces (good riddance, for the most part). I guess it would be nice to watch Homestar videos on my phone browser instead of having to find them on YouTube, but that's literally the only other use case I had.

knodi 10y ago

For years!!! we been waiting for Flash to be kicked to the curb.

okonomiyaki3000 10y ago

Some of the comments on that page are just sad. I didn't realise Flash still had so many fans.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

Thank god. The nightmare is ending.

neovive 10y ago

Although Flash's heyday is long gone, let's not forget how much Flash brought to the table back in the late 90's and early 2000's: animation, sound, games, and scaleable vector graphics and more. Macromedia's purchase of FutureSplash and subsequent release of the ubiquitous Flash player was a game changer for the web. Being able to download and play real games and experience interactive websites over slow dial-up connections was amazing and changed people's perspectives of the web. The FLV format also finally made streaming video a seamless experience for the end user; leading to the creation of Youtube and other streaming video services. Like all technologies, Flash was overused in places (pre-loaders, rotating 3d logos, banner ads) and Adobe's push towards Flex and RIA's took Flash away from of it's roots in animation for quite a few years. However, it will be interesting to see if the equivalent HTML5 stack follows a similar timeline-- minus the website pre-loaders...of course.

cableshaft 10y ago

I used to make and release flash games and still have them on my website. Is there a good low-to-moderate effort way to convert them to HTML5? A couple of the games used a ton of frame by frame animation with large sprites, so they probably wouldn't convert to spritesheets very well and should stay vector graphics. Example: https://youtu.be/Qk9HlXbqRTQ?t=43s https://youtu.be/Qk9HlXbqRTQ?t=43s

f137 10y ago
No, there is not a simple way to convert flash to html5. I say from experience, we look for it for years. Moreover, you can rewrite a game in html5 from scratch, if it is simple enough, but it will be slower, less smooth, and require some latest browser versions to run at all.
NoGravitas 10y ago
You could see if it will run in Shumway?
MattGrommes 10y ago
It's definitely not a "converter" for Flash but I really like the javascript framework Phaser for small games.

f137 10y ago

I wonder, does anybody here plays online games? I wonder, further, is there anyone who thinks HTML5 is even close to Flash for games creation?

xiaoma 10y ago

Looks like https://google.com/finance https://google.com/finance didn't get the memo. "Adobe Flash Player is required for interactive charts."

adrianratnapala 10y ago

There seems to be a lot of people saying "ohh people thing flash is bad now, but once upon a time it was really a useful thing." That time was the 90s and early 2000s. And in that time, I avoided pages with Flash because they were painful. They are still a little painful now. If Flash was transformative, I think it was that it introduced the kind of bloat and intrusiveness that we now take for granted on the web.

zwetan 10y ago

Flash is definitively the perfect scapegoat whatever your problem: slow machine, battery, security, etc. it's all its fault seriously, if everyone have already moved to HTML5, how come we are still blaming Flash for those daily petty problems ? It's not used so let's block it but it is still responsible for the majority of problems ... nobody notice the ambiguity of the argument ? It's quite painful to see such arguments from Google, I thought they would be smart enough to understand that any popular technology get hacked, the problem is not really Flash, its the browser itself (and the advertising networks that are perfect to distribute dodgy payloads to tons of users). The other sad point is the amalgam of everything, for some ppl Flash equals advertising, and that's bad so Flash is bad, and they don't want to think further than that. The choice of the users ? The tons of SWF content (that will probably not be ported to HTML5) ? nobody care apparently And about throwing everything in the same bag, so apparently if Flash is dead then ActionScript is dead too right ? nope Flash is just 1 runtime running in the browser, there are other runtimes: Adobe AIR for desktop and mobile, and also Redtamarin [1] for the command-line / server-side. [1]: https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin

pvdebbe 10y ago

I still use Flash for youtube (with an add-on that enforces it) because Firefox doesn't seem to be able to handle my 4-monitor Xmonad setup properly with HTML5 fullscreen video. And the process also locks up my soundcard until I kill the process. Flash behaves much better. After youtube ditches its Flash player altogether, I guess it's chromium for YT then. No biggie.

zokula 10y ago
Same with me as well, Firefox or Chrome both are slower with HTML5 media versus flash. Flash video runs faster than HTML5 and also has hardware acceleration which HTML5 fails at on my hardware, a couple of laptops and a desktop rig.