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Google Chrome: Flash Usage Declines from 80% in 2014 to Under 8% Today
- greedo 9y agoI wish the plethora of enterprise software I have to deal with on a daily basis didn't require Flash (I'm looking at you, ADP).
- hartator 9y agoI don’t fully get the hate on Flash. We have shifted the CPU usage from the extension to the browser, with less capabilites than Flash. No sure if the web is a winner here.
- clouddrover 9y ago> with less capabilites than Flash In what way less?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- recursive 9y agoCould write to the clipboard I guess.
- dozzie 9y agoWrite-ish. I always had problems with how it worked.
- taeric 9y agoJust going off the games and how much faster the video capabilities were in Flash, I'd have to assume that it was in fact more capable. It could have just been the tooling? (That is a genuine question.) The alternatives are catching up, no doubt. But flash was way ahead in those areas and is easily the reason it took so long to deprecate it.
- clouddrover 9y ago> Just going off the games The games I've seen in WebGL match and exceed anything I ever saw in Flash. You can still use Adobe's software to publish to HTML5 if you want. Game engines like Unity and Unreal also support publishing to HTML5: https://unity3d.com/ https://unity3d.com/ https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/what-is-unreal-engine-4 https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/what-is-unreal-engine-4
- taeric 9y agoThe modern games I've seen are. It took a long time to get there. And many of these won't work well on older phones that actually could handle the flash stuff decently.
- clouddrover 9y ago> It took a long time to get there. It didn't. Here are some examples. HexGL has been around for 5 and a half years: http://bkcore.com/blog/3d/hexgl-webgl-racing-game-html5.html http://bkcore.com/blog/3d/hexgl-webgl-racing-game-html5.html Pirates Love Daisies has been around for 7 years: http://blog.gskinner.com/archives/2010/12/pirates-love-daisies-html5-game-launches.html http://blog.gskinner.com/archives/2010/12/pirates-love-daisi... You can go all the way back to DHTML Lemmings which has been around for 15 years: https://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer.html https://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer...
- taeric 9y agoI don't know what to say. Demos were working fine for a long time. However, I still haven't seen people actually playing HTML games like they did flash ones. Some of that, I presume, is just where I look. That said, I feel like flash games were played. HTML has largely missed the boat to native phone apps. Were people able to make the games? At an absolute level? I guess. Could have done it with Java applets, as well. By and large, that didn't happen. I'm curious why.
- grzm 9y agoIt generally boils down to one or more of: - closed and proprietary - has vulnerabilities - could be resource intensive Here's an article (from 2015) which discusses it more. https://www.wired.com/2015/07/adobe-flash-player-die/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/adobe-flash-player-die/
- oldcynic 9y agoNow we have web assembly and EME for closed and proprietary blobs, and JS for hogging resource. Flash was a mess, but the sunlit uplands after Flash aren't looking especially sunny!
- koolba 9y agoThat second one needs to be in all caps, bold, and repeated about a dozen times.
- taeric 9y agoI'm curious that we couldn't harden flash runtimes.
- y4mi 9y agobecause it was > - closed and proprietary
- taeric 9y agoPretty sure the format was more open than this statement makes it sound. More, I doubt it would have been too expensive (compared to the alternative costs, it isn't like the other formats have been free), to make open. And, there were certainly some features that were insecure by design. I cannot defend all of it. Nor am I intending to really defend any of it. However, there are more than a few warts in in HTML/JavaScript that were insecure-ish by design.
- exodust 9y agoright because vulnerabilities don't exist anywhere else, only Flash. funny how people jump up and down about how vulnerable Flash was, but when you try to find one single person you know whose computer was actually compromised via Flash, you get nothing.
- tigershark 9y agoFlash was much more heavy than JavaScript, especially on Mac/Linux.
- ComputerGuru 9y agoThat’s a blanket statement that needs to be qualified. I’m sure it was possible for good flash devs to write applets much lighter than JS used in production today. And I’m sure a talented developer could minify that further in JS or any language of their choice similarly tightly integrated in the browser.
- tigershark 9y agoIf the flash plugin was a huge pile of shit I can’t see how good flash dev could produce something lighter than anything running on the modern highly optimised JavaScript engines.
- 0xCMP 9y agoWas never really about the CPU. Flash wasn't designed to be for any device (mobile/tablet/desktop UI) and the pattern of plugins exposed the user to too many security flaws which could not be patched quickly enough.
- ogurechny 9y agoFlash Lite worked on mobile phones before iPhone was a thing. I think it still runs in great many applications for mobile and stationary devices as embedded graphical toolkit. On the other side of the spectrum, some AAA games have in-game UIs made in Flash. The only thing I remember about using Web technology in games is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV7ei1Z40fQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV7ei1Z40fQ
- megaman22 9y agoIf they'd just done Java applets right, we could have avoided 20 years of wheelmaking in web development. Might have gotten out of dealing with JavaScript a long time ago too...
- adrianmonk 9y agoEssentially it meant that your OS / browser combination couldn't be a first-class citizen on the web unless Adobe felt it was important enough to port Flash to it. I definitely don't think Adobe wanted to use this to squash alternatives, but it still had that effect.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- askafriend 9y agoThis post right here is a classic: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/ https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
- koonsolo 9y agoApple had their own agenda with the app store, so this is not really an objective source.
- nkristoffersen 9y agoCorrect me if I'm wrong, but not allowing flash was before the app store was even an idea.
- hyperdimension 9y agoI agree that we didn't know about the app store before we knew that flash wouldn't be supported by the iphone, but surely that was a part of Apple's strategy, right?
- golergka 9y agoFlash was infamous of it's constant security vulnerabilities. I don't think that JS virtual machines have nearly as many
- opencl 9y agoI'm not convinced that the JS virtual machines are any better. https://www.cvedetails.com/product/6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html?vendor_id=53 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.h... https://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html?vendor_id=452 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html... https://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?vendor_id=1224 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?...
- golergka 9y agoThat's a whole browser you're comparing Flash to, not just V8. And still, Chrome has 10 times less code execution vulnerabilities than Flash.
- ogurechny 9y agoIt is quite clear if you look at the source of the data. Flash is (was) Adobe's own rich content creation and distribution system with lots of investment on many different sides. Adobe can make the rules and implement anything it wants at its own pace in its self-contained product, unlike Google and Apple that have to feign “innovating the Web together” while actually solving their own problems. As they got their own sheep to shear (smartphone consumers), it was decided to strangle the competitor. I should remind you how many years it took to make HTML5 video work for everyone on Youtube. I should also point that on older systems Flash video player works (worked) noticeably better than HTML5 video player, making it clear that “open standard” does not, in fact, need less resources. Next time you wonder why modern web is so taxing on multi-core multi-gigabyte system, look this way, among others. As for security, Flash was as broken as any complex system of its age. Most of the attention to its security can be attributed to the fact that corporations only care about security if that's of someone's data they can benefit from. Oh, and it's the same with governments — they don't care about the abstract security for everyone. And any talk about “openness” accompanied by what Google does with Chrome on desktop and mobile is just pathetic. TL;DR It's corporate cool-aid.
- ehfeng 9y agoTestament to Google Finance's abandonment: still using Flash.
- cjhanks 9y agoYeah, a real shame too. I really liked the simplicity of `finance.google.com`. It appears new development has been done at `google.com/finance`... a different interface with less information. And it surprisingly still uses flash. So.. who knows when it will die?
- payne92 9y agoOpen always wins, given enough time.
- megaman22 9y agoWell, it helps when one major player unilaterally chooses not to allow support for the closed thing.
- mrlatinos 9y ago*Google always wins, given enough market share.
- clouddrover 9y agoNot really. For example, I wouldn't call Native Client a success. asm.js and WebAssembly won out over it. Here's the Native Client deprecation announcement: https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/migration https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/migration
- hungerstrike 9y agoNo it doesn't.
- bearcobra 9y agoChromes click-to-run model is broken for half the sites where I still need flash. I've almost switched to Firefox to deal with it