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Flash is ridiculous on OS X. It leaks memory like a sieve - I once left a few tabs open overnight with Flash ads and your various bits of Flash-based internet d

Flash is ridiculous on OS X. It leaks memory like a sieve - I once left a few tabs open overnight with Flash ads and your various bits of Flash-based internet detritus, and by the time I woke up my machine was thrashing madly until I manually killed Flash. Its performance is also piss poor even when it isn't leaking your RAM all over the floor. Not to mention it breaks a lot of fundamental browser interactivity - want something to render on top of your Flash applet? FUCK YOU YOU CAN'T. Scrolling happily along with your mousewheel on a page, then you hit a Flash applet. While your cursor is over the applet, your scroll wheel stops working. Why? God knows, because Adobe hates us and Flash is the greatest bit of trolling ever. These aren't new issues - these have been around since the very first days of Flash. Adobe simply has no interest in bringing usability up to the standards of the 21st century. Nor security for that matter - one of my main objections to Flash is that it conveniently circumvents all of the nice security features your browser has painstakingly built into your experience. Incognito mode? Flash won't respect it. Don't like cookies? Well, screw you, Flash will keep its own equivalent anyways. Nice, sandboxed JavaScript runtime? Well, Flash does its own thing (and has its own bugs and security holes... many, many security holes)... I trust Google, Mozilla, et al to do a reasonably good job protecting me online. I do not trust Adobe - both due to their lack of regard for basic product quality (both stability and usability), as well as their poor security track record of having more holes than a beehive. If third parties could actually implement a runtime (one that, say, wouldn't suck) then maybe Flash would be a good idea. At least there would be a way to work around a single vendor's supremely shitty implementation. I don't deny the need and desire for a highly interactive technology like what Flash wants to be (and sometimes is)... but this is not the answer.

danenania 15y ago
There are some types of apps that are in demand and flash is well equipped to build. Users don't care about any of this stuff. They just want something that works and is useful or fun. It doesn't have to be an arch philosophical issue. When people like you rant about flash, it just demonstrates you've never built the sort of app that flash excels at. Sure, flash has its problems, but there are some tasks that javascript simply can't do, or can't do nearly as well as flash. Flash has done some things wrong, but it's also done a lot of things right and helped pushed the web forward. Get off your soapbox!
- bad_user 15y ago
  The issue here isn't that Flash is useless. Of course it is useful for some apps, especially the ones that are dealing with audio/video streams. The issue here is that Flash got used in all the wrong places. Lots and lots of websites use it for all the wrong reasons, and while you can blame the websites developers for that, the fact of the matter is that Flash scripts are everywhere and regular users don't even notice it. Because of that, on Android at least your browser experience gets a lot worse -- browser is noticeably slower and it bleeds your battery life like crazy. And users will just blame their phones. The worst thing about all this - besides the fact that Adobe couldn't pull their shit together to create a version truly optimized for mobiles - because Flash is not an open-standard like HTML5, the others cannot fix it for them. It's not like Google can come up with a new VM (like they did with Chrome), or like how Apple came up with a kick-ass rendering engine like WebKit, that eventually became the norm for mobiles - they can't do that. That's why standards are better and that's why Flash needs to go and be replaced by web standards. If Flash sucks, nobody but Adobe can improve it and judging by their history Adobe is really week in that department. And of course, as I said, at the same time Flash is useful for some apps - of course it is, ActiveX was useful too.
- gaius 15y ago
  I don't think that's true. Find an ordinary user who likes Flash intros on websites, or who likes attention-seeking Flash ads disturbing them while reading an article. The only thing that Flash is used for that real people (as opposed to marketing twerps) actually like is cheesy little games, and they can be done perfectly well without Flash these days.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    Simply not true. Gmail calling is not possibly in HTML/js. There are a lot of cool websites that use Flash for more than games and video these days. Qwiki won TechCrunch Disrupt last year. Beatlab is a super cool music creation app. And Flash will likely always be the standard for DRM Video on the web. Being an open standard, HTML5 can never include DRM. I see Flash's place is as a stopgap for features that haven't been standardized/implemented yet. It does those very well.
mrj 15y ago
You forgot this, on all OSes: http://www.publicstatic.net/media/adminfiles/flash_not_relevant.png http://www.publicstatic.net/media/adminfiles/flash_not_relev... Still waiting, all this time later. The killed the beta some time ago that ran on Linux. It seems there's some hard problem they're unable to solve, or just don't care.
Flow 15y ago
This is Flash after running in Safari one of those genetic vehicle experiments, only 2 hours or so: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/876475/Fun/FlashMemoryHog.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/876475/Fun/FlashMemoryHog.png I have 12GB in the machine, but it saw the need coming and prepared for it. :-/
saint-loup 15y ago
To be fair with Adobe, the focus problem may be a problem with Firefox, if this is the browser you're using. https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/restore-window-focus-after-fla/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/restore-window-f...

danenania 15y ago

There are some types of apps that are in demand and flash is well equipped to build. Users don't care about any of this stuff. They just want something that works and is useful or fun. It doesn't have to be an arch philosophical issue. When people like you rant about flash, it just demonstrates you've never built the sort of app that flash excels at. Sure, flash has its problems, but there are some tasks that javascript simply can't do, or can't do nearly as well as flash. Flash has done some things wrong, but it's also done a lot of things right and helped pushed the web forward. Get off your soapbox!

bad_user 15y ago
The issue here isn't that Flash is useless. Of course it is useful for some apps, especially the ones that are dealing with audio/video streams. The issue here is that Flash got used in all the wrong places. Lots and lots of websites use it for all the wrong reasons, and while you can blame the websites developers for that, the fact of the matter is that Flash scripts are everywhere and regular users don't even notice it. Because of that, on Android at least your browser experience gets a lot worse -- browser is noticeably slower and it bleeds your battery life like crazy. And users will just blame their phones. The worst thing about all this - besides the fact that Adobe couldn't pull their shit together to create a version truly optimized for mobiles - because Flash is not an open-standard like HTML5, the others cannot fix it for them. It's not like Google can come up with a new VM (like they did with Chrome), or like how Apple came up with a kick-ass rendering engine like WebKit, that eventually became the norm for mobiles - they can't do that. That's why standards are better and that's why Flash needs to go and be replaced by web standards. If Flash sucks, nobody but Adobe can improve it and judging by their history Adobe is really week in that department. And of course, as I said, at the same time Flash is useful for some apps - of course it is, ActiveX was useful too.
gaius 15y ago
I don't think that's true. Find an ordinary user who likes Flash intros on websites, or who likes attention-seeking Flash ads disturbing them while reading an article. The only thing that Flash is used for that real people (as opposed to marketing twerps) actually like is cheesy little games, and they can be done perfectly well without Flash these days.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Simply not true. Gmail calling is not possibly in HTML/js. There are a lot of cool websites that use Flash for more than games and video these days. Qwiki won TechCrunch Disrupt last year. Beatlab is a super cool music creation app. And Flash will likely always be the standard for DRM Video on the web. Being an open standard, HTML5 can never include DRM. I see Flash's place is as a stopgap for features that haven't been standardized/implemented yet. It does those very well.

mrj 15y ago

You forgot this, on all OSes: http://www.publicstatic.net/media/adminfiles/flash_not_relevant.png http://www.publicstatic.net/media/adminfiles/flash_not_relev... Still waiting, all this time later. The killed the beta some time ago that ran on Linux. It seems there's some hard problem they're unable to solve, or just don't care.

Flow 15y ago

This is Flash after running in Safari one of those genetic vehicle experiments, only 2 hours or so: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/876475/Fun/FlashMemoryHog.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/876475/Fun/FlashMemoryHog.png I have 12GB in the machine, but it saw the need coming and prepared for it. :-/

saint-loup 15y ago

To be fair with Adobe, the focus problem may be a problem with Firefox, if this is the browser you're using. https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/restore-window-focus-after-fla/ https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/restore-window-f...