6 ms·

I understand why people are still up in arms, because it must be annoying (at the very list) to see eleven years pass without fixing this. However, I find it ev

I understand why people are still up in arms, because it must be annoying (at the very list) to see eleven years pass without fixing this. However, I find it even more annoying that after eleven years people haven't learned that you can't solve the problem by yelling at people "BAD BOY! FLASH BAD!" I know really well what the allure of Flash is. I tried my hand at developing casual Web games and that's done in Flash. The following are the reasons, in what I believe is the order of importance: 1) Adoption: When it comes to users, everyone and their grandmother has Flash. Even if they don't, getting it and installing it is usually really easy. When it comes to development, you find that casual Web game portals (such as Kongregate, Newgrounds and Armor Games) are Flash-oriented and you even have sites like Flash Game License and Flash Game Art. 2) Ease of Development: I've seen games that were obviously made by people who have a considerable talent for art and so little talent for coding that they should have a court restraint to keep them away from development tools. Guess what? They work anyway and are popular. Yes, you have to learn ActionScript, but that's pretty much all. 3) Good Free Toolchain: You don't really have to shell out 600 dollars for Flash. You can get your stuff done for free, using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK. Anyway, my point is that it's widespread, it's easy and it gets shit done. For those who think nagging is the solution, for those who rubbed their hands when Apple said it wasn't going to support Flash, here's the crucial question: can you show people an alternative that satisfies their requirements as well or better? In this case, Adobe is the metaphorical Microsoft: their stuff is out there and they make it easy for people to use it. As the history has proven, the solution is not to call people sheep because they use Flash; the solution is to provide the metaphorical Mac and metaphorical Firefox and metaphorical Ubuntu -- stuff that's so good, that people will switch in droves without looking back.

AndrewDucker 15y ago
Agreed. When it's as easy to write your game in HTML5+JS as it is in Flash then people will switch, and not one minute before.
- ehsanu1 15y ago
  I don't know why it would be considered more difficult to use canvas/dom for rendering + JS. I've been working on a simple JS (well, CoffeeScript really) game, and it hasn't been very difficult at all. But then again, I do lot of JS and never touched flash.
  - gosh 15y ago
    Your game wont work on my Windows and IE... flash does though.
    - nikcub 15y ago
      there are a number of projects that fix this. explorercanvas from google, which can be autoinstalled and doesn't require admin. then you have the SWF converters, and the live shims. IE not implementing the tag isn't a big deal, since they expose the drawing (directx) interfaces anyway I got a press release yesterday that said jquery was now more common than flash across the top websites. the 'flash is everywhere' argument is a bit 2004 and isn't true anymore . javascript is everywhere
      - untog 15y ago
        "I got a press release yesterday that said jquery was now more common than flash across the top websites. the 'flash is everywhere' argument is a bit 2004 and isn't true anymore . javascript is everywhere" That's not the same, though. Of course JavaScript is everywhere- it always has been, because it comes with browsers. The point is that Flash is also everywhere, because everyone has it installed.
      - nl 15y ago
        explorercanvas from google, which can be autoinstalled and doesn't require admin I think you mean Chrome frame here? explorercanvas is an implementation of Canvas on top of SVG for IE.
        nikcub 15y ago
        That is what I meant, couldn't edit to fix the mistake
fkhafdkjh 15y ago
You seem to be ignoring the fact that Flash doesn't work properly on Linux, Android and iOS. Unless Adobe does something about it soon, Flash is going the way of the dodo.
- watty 15y ago
  Flash works great for me on Droid X and HP TouchPad (only devices I own). You seem to be ignoring the fact that older (and even current) browsers, tablets, and phones have varying support for HTML5.
- lostmypw 15y ago
  Please define "properly", at least regarding Linux. There is a performance hit under Linux, sure, but beyond that? I'm using Linux myself full-time, but for flash games I might even consider Linux irrelevant if there is no way of getting good performance. The by far biggest part of the audience still uses windows and that probably won't change for quite a while.
  - dredmorbius 15y ago
    The general issues I've had: Flash is installed outside the package management system (particularly on distros emphasizing Free Software: Debian, Ubuntu, etc.). This has improved through packaged installers (the plug-in's still fetched from outside of repos), but only in very recent times. Flash content fails to load at all. I actually have this problem on several platforms, presumably because I limit JavaScript execution, and many sites now rely on third-party scripts for content generation (hello, Gawker, yes, you). The player is very resource-heavy. I'll browse with several score tabs open. On a sufficiently beefy box, that's tenable, but with flash, memory and CPU utilization go through the roof. The browser plug-in crashes, frequently requiring a browser restart to restore it. Given that Flash is virtually always at best ancillary to my browsing session (where I use it it's almost exclusively as a video player), my preference would be to have an external video player (I have several excellent free ones at my disposal). The crashes are addressed in Chrome as tabs and plug-ins run as separate threads/processes, but this still affects Firefox/Iceweasel. There are numerous security and privacy issues with Flash, for which we're wholly dependent on Adobe to please, eventually, maybe address these. 64 bit Linux support was a long, long, long time in coming (and IIRC it's still weak). Until Linux itself got 32/64 bit library support sorted (again, only in recent years), this was a significant PITA. Given Nielsen's criticisms (which address Flash as a website UI element, not such things as Flash video and games), yes, Flash is at least 99% bad. Most use is still advertising (yuk) and idiotic slideshows (infuriating). Its valid uses (videos, maybe games) would still be better addressed through standalone utilities rather than in-browser plug-ins, IMO. I use my browser for work and information, not entertainment. I keep a lot of state in my browser sessions, and they tend to live for days if not weeks. All in all, as a Linux user, up until 2008/2009, Flash was sufficiently a pain in the ass that I'd generally just not bother installing it. I install it now (it's gotten easy enough) but block the hell out of it, with my rare use-case being YouTube videos and the very occasional informational graphic which makes valid use of Flash.
cpenner461 15y ago
3) Good Free Toolchain: You don't really have to shell out 600 dollars for Flash. You can get your stuff done for free, using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK. Interesting, I always assumed you had to buy the full Flash IDE to do anything. Granted, I never really looked into it at, but I wonder how widely known this is? Am I just ignorant? :)
- benologist 15y ago
  It's pretty widely known. FlashDevelop is very popular, and then on top of that there are other non-Adobe IDEs as well.
- CodeMage 15y ago
  I don't think it's widely known outside the circles of Flash game development. Most people who develop Flash games do it as a hobby and/or out of passion. Sure, you can make some money out of it, but if you want to make money, there are better ways to do it. I guess that's why it's a lot more important for us to find a free alternative.
- rampr 15y ago
  FlashDevelop is a widely known alternative, just that it is available only for Windows and not the MAC.
  - georgemcbay 15y ago
    FlashDevelop is the IDE though, the important bit is the Flex SDK which is Java based and runs on virtually anything. Write your code in TextMate or Sublime Text or vi or emacs or whatever and then compile it with the Flex SDK. FlashDevelop is great, but it isn't an essential piece any more than Eclipse is an essential piece for building Java apps.
- evilduck 15y ago
  It's been a few years I've worked with Flash so I can't recall all the details, but we were doing nightly Ant builds of Flash projects with their SDK. We only used the official Flash IDE for building animations, for programming, it all too easily allows for code to be flung everywhere and creates debugging nightmares (Flex and Flex Builder is a slightly different story).
ecaradec 15y ago
To all of those who believe that html5 can replace flash for web games have a look at : http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush and some other games on armorgames or kongregate and stop propagating rumors about HTML5 replacing flash for games. The performance of HTML5+JS is not there yet, unless you talk about tic-tac-too games and the like. If flash is going to be replaced by something it would be by unity3d not by HTML5 or might be chrome native client. Adobe would be smart to secure this game thing because ads, video, etc, will probably be less and less. I'd love to see a cheap flash console where indies could publish games and sell games. That said I'm happy to see flash beeing kicked out of website design, when flash is mixed with html it sucks.
tjoff 15y ago
If flash was just unstable, unbelievable demanding on system resources and a user experience mess that would've been fine. What you are missing is that flash is not much more than a cross platform security hole and an open door to a large percentage of all general purpose devices in existence (only surpassed by PDF, but luckily there are non-adobe readers for PDF). Any alternative to showing videos on the web will obliterate the need for flash for pretty much all users, and it's hard to imagine any alternative actually being worse for that (but deciding on format sure seems tricky).
- Lagged2Death 15y ago
  The security liability Flash presents is an important and under-appreciated issue today. I guess it wasn't on the radar so much when Nielsen wrote this article. I didn't know until today that this spring's RSA hack used Flash: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2927996 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2927996
  - 9999 15y ago
    The guys that did the RSA hack would have found another attack vector even if Flash wasn't installed. Maybe they would have gone for a Java applet based attack, or perhaps in the future they'll target WebGL. The more complex your browser's capabilities are, the more surface area you have exposed to attack. Even if you reduce that surface area considerably, for example, by switching over to text only browsing for all of your employees, a motivated attacker would probably just find some way to cause a buffer overflow in the browser's text parser... Where there is a will, there is a way.
    - Lagged2Death 15y ago
      The guys that did the RSA hack would have found another attack vector even if Flash wasn't installed ... The more complex your browser's capabilities are, the more surface area you have exposed to attack. Perhaps, but interestingly enough the attack wasn't against a web browser, but against Excel running a Flash applet. Maybe that path was chosen because it's less carefully examined by security policy and security software; I don't know. In any case, it's certainly true that this pathway wouldn't have been available if not for the unnecessary use of Flash in places where it doesn't belong, i.e., Excel. Which ties into the theme here rather nicely; Flash used unnecessarily is worse than Flash eschewed entirely.
rampr 15y ago
Your points are valid and I think the article is referring to websites created in flash not games. For now, I think using flash for games is okay.
seanalltogether 15y ago
There are a couple reasons Flash was well ahead of both java and html for many years. 1. Creating Hello World was dead simple. Just like photoshop, it was as easy as selecting the text tool, typing out what you wanted and hitting publish. Instant visual feedback for what you were creating. 2. Flash swf startup is measured in milliseconds, java applet startup is measured in seconds. Sun never seemed to care about "visual java" and they suffered for it. 3. Single vendor control. For years Macromedia and Adobe were giving devs and designers the apis they wanted, rather then being stuck in design-by-commitee hell. 4. Many new devs don't realize this, but even as recently as 2005 there was a significant amount of online geeks that were very anti-javascript. If you wanted to build something interactive, Flash was always your best bet for the first half of the decade. 5. Absolute layout. While html developers were complaining about box models, flash developers were building things to look exactly as they wanted them to.
- willyt 15y ago
  Re point 1: see http://www.tumultco.com/hype/ http://www.tumultco.com/hype/ for html+js+canvas equivalent (nearly).
- wnight 15y ago
  4 I still disable js by default. Even still it usually doesn't add much to my browsing experience. It could, but I've rarely met a web designer who actually cared about the user's goals - almost every one of them was intent on using their favorite flashiness with no regard usability. 4.1 Who blocks JS without also blocking Flash? 5 This is what I'm talking about. Flash devs were busy building exactly what they wanted while HTML developers - by virtue of not using absolute layout, etc, were delivering what users could actually use.

AndrewDucker 15y ago

Agreed. When it's as easy to write your game in HTML5+JS as it is in Flash then people will switch, and not one minute before.

ehsanu1 15y ago
I don't know why it would be considered more difficult to use canvas/dom for rendering + JS. I've been working on a simple JS (well, CoffeeScript really) game, and it hasn't been very difficult at all. But then again, I do lot of JS and never touched flash.
- gosh 15y ago
  Your game wont work on my Windows and IE... flash does though.
  - nikcub 15y ago
    there are a number of projects that fix this. explorercanvas from google, which can be autoinstalled and doesn't require admin. then you have the SWF converters, and the live shims. IE not implementing the tag isn't a big deal, since they expose the drawing (directx) interfaces anyway I got a press release yesterday that said jquery was now more common than flash across the top websites. the 'flash is everywhere' argument is a bit 2004 and isn't true anymore . javascript is everywhere
    - untog 15y ago
      "I got a press release yesterday that said jquery was now more common than flash across the top websites. the 'flash is everywhere' argument is a bit 2004 and isn't true anymore . javascript is everywhere" That's not the same, though. Of course JavaScript is everywhere- it always has been, because it comes with browsers. The point is that Flash is also everywhere, because everyone has it installed.
    - nl 15y ago
      explorercanvas from google, which can be autoinstalled and doesn't require admin I think you mean Chrome frame here? explorercanvas is an implementation of Canvas on top of SVG for IE.
      - nikcub 15y ago
        That is what I meant, couldn't edit to fix the mistake

fkhafdkjh 15y ago

You seem to be ignoring the fact that Flash doesn't work properly on Linux, Android and iOS. Unless Adobe does something about it soon, Flash is going the way of the dodo.

watty 15y ago
Flash works great for me on Droid X and HP TouchPad (only devices I own). You seem to be ignoring the fact that older (and even current) browsers, tablets, and phones have varying support for HTML5.
lostmypw 15y ago
Please define "properly", at least regarding Linux. There is a performance hit under Linux, sure, but beyond that? I'm using Linux myself full-time, but for flash games I might even consider Linux irrelevant if there is no way of getting good performance. The by far biggest part of the audience still uses windows and that probably won't change for quite a while.
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  The general issues I've had: Flash is installed outside the package management system (particularly on distros emphasizing Free Software: Debian, Ubuntu, etc.). This has improved through packaged installers (the plug-in's still fetched from outside of repos), but only in very recent times. Flash content fails to load at all. I actually have this problem on several platforms, presumably because I limit JavaScript execution, and many sites now rely on third-party scripts for content generation (hello, Gawker, yes, you). The player is very resource-heavy. I'll browse with several score tabs open. On a sufficiently beefy box, that's tenable, but with flash, memory and CPU utilization go through the roof. The browser plug-in crashes, frequently requiring a browser restart to restore it. Given that Flash is virtually always at best ancillary to my browsing session (where I use it it's almost exclusively as a video player), my preference would be to have an external video player (I have several excellent free ones at my disposal). The crashes are addressed in Chrome as tabs and plug-ins run as separate threads/processes, but this still affects Firefox/Iceweasel. There are numerous security and privacy issues with Flash, for which we're wholly dependent on Adobe to please, eventually, maybe address these. 64 bit Linux support was a long, long, long time in coming (and IIRC it's still weak). Until Linux itself got 32/64 bit library support sorted (again, only in recent years), this was a significant PITA. Given Nielsen's criticisms (which address Flash as a website UI element, not such things as Flash video and games), yes, Flash is at least 99% bad. Most use is still advertising (yuk) and idiotic slideshows (infuriating). Its valid uses (videos, maybe games) would still be better addressed through standalone utilities rather than in-browser plug-ins, IMO. I use my browser for work and information, not entertainment. I keep a lot of state in my browser sessions, and they tend to live for days if not weeks. All in all, as a Linux user, up until 2008/2009, Flash was sufficiently a pain in the ass that I'd generally just not bother installing it. I install it now (it's gotten easy enough) but block the hell out of it, with my rare use-case being YouTube videos and the very occasional informational graphic which makes valid use of Flash.

cpenner461 15y ago

3) Good Free Toolchain: You don't really have to shell out 600 dollars for Flash. You can get your stuff done for free, using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK. Interesting, I always assumed you had to buy the full Flash IDE to do anything. Granted, I never really looked into it at, but I wonder how widely known this is? Am I just ignorant? :)

benologist 15y ago
It's pretty widely known. FlashDevelop is very popular, and then on top of that there are other non-Adobe IDEs as well.
CodeMage 15y ago
I don't think it's widely known outside the circles of Flash game development. Most people who develop Flash games do it as a hobby and/or out of passion. Sure, you can make some money out of it, but if you want to make money, there are better ways to do it. I guess that's why it's a lot more important for us to find a free alternative.
rampr 15y ago
FlashDevelop is a widely known alternative, just that it is available only for Windows and not the MAC.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  FlashDevelop is the IDE though, the important bit is the Flex SDK which is Java based and runs on virtually anything. Write your code in TextMate or Sublime Text or vi or emacs or whatever and then compile it with the Flex SDK. FlashDevelop is great, but it isn't an essential piece any more than Eclipse is an essential piece for building Java apps.
evilduck 15y ago
It's been a few years I've worked with Flash so I can't recall all the details, but we were doing nightly Ant builds of Flash projects with their SDK. We only used the official Flash IDE for building animations, for programming, it all too easily allows for code to be flung everywhere and creates debugging nightmares (Flex and Flex Builder is a slightly different story).

ecaradec 15y ago

To all of those who believe that html5 can replace flash for web games have a look at : http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush http://armorgames.com/play/12141/kingdom-rush and some other games on armorgames or kongregate and stop propagating rumors about HTML5 replacing flash for games. The performance of HTML5+JS is not there yet, unless you talk about tic-tac-too games and the like. If flash is going to be replaced by something it would be by unity3d not by HTML5 or might be chrome native client. Adobe would be smart to secure this game thing because ads, video, etc, will probably be less and less. I'd love to see a cheap flash console where indies could publish games and sell games. That said I'm happy to see flash beeing kicked out of website design, when flash is mixed with html it sucks.

tjoff 15y ago

If flash was just unstable, unbelievable demanding on system resources and a user experience mess that would've been fine. What you are missing is that flash is not much more than a cross platform security hole and an open door to a large percentage of all general purpose devices in existence (only surpassed by PDF, but luckily there are non-adobe readers for PDF). Any alternative to showing videos on the web will obliterate the need for flash for pretty much all users, and it's hard to imagine any alternative actually being worse for that (but deciding on format sure seems tricky).

Lagged2Death 15y ago
The security liability Flash presents is an important and under-appreciated issue today. I guess it wasn't on the radar so much when Nielsen wrote this article. I didn't know until today that this spring's RSA hack used Flash: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2927996 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2927996
- 9999 15y ago
  The guys that did the RSA hack would have found another attack vector even if Flash wasn't installed. Maybe they would have gone for a Java applet based attack, or perhaps in the future they'll target WebGL. The more complex your browser's capabilities are, the more surface area you have exposed to attack. Even if you reduce that surface area considerably, for example, by switching over to text only browsing for all of your employees, a motivated attacker would probably just find some way to cause a buffer overflow in the browser's text parser... Where there is a will, there is a way.
  - Lagged2Death 15y ago
    The guys that did the RSA hack would have found another attack vector even if Flash wasn't installed ... The more complex your browser's capabilities are, the more surface area you have exposed to attack. Perhaps, but interestingly enough the attack wasn't against a web browser, but against Excel running a Flash applet. Maybe that path was chosen because it's less carefully examined by security policy and security software; I don't know. In any case, it's certainly true that this pathway wouldn't have been available if not for the unnecessary use of Flash in places where it doesn't belong, i.e., Excel. Which ties into the theme here rather nicely; Flash used unnecessarily is worse than Flash eschewed entirely.

rampr 15y ago

Your points are valid and I think the article is referring to websites created in flash not games. For now, I think using flash for games is okay.

seanalltogether 15y ago

There are a couple reasons Flash was well ahead of both java and html for many years. 1. Creating Hello World was dead simple. Just like photoshop, it was as easy as selecting the text tool, typing out what you wanted and hitting publish. Instant visual feedback for what you were creating. 2. Flash swf startup is measured in milliseconds, java applet startup is measured in seconds. Sun never seemed to care about "visual java" and they suffered for it. 3. Single vendor control. For years Macromedia and Adobe were giving devs and designers the apis they wanted, rather then being stuck in design-by-commitee hell. 4. Many new devs don't realize this, but even as recently as 2005 there was a significant amount of online geeks that were very anti-javascript. If you wanted to build something interactive, Flash was always your best bet for the first half of the decade. 5. Absolute layout. While html developers were complaining about box models, flash developers were building things to look exactly as they wanted them to.

willyt 15y ago
Re point 1: see http://www.tumultco.com/hype/ http://www.tumultco.com/hype/ for html+js+canvas equivalent (nearly).
wnight 15y ago
4 I still disable js by default. Even still it usually doesn't add much to my browsing experience. It could, but I've rarely met a web designer who actually cared about the user's goals - almost every one of them was intent on using their favorite flashiness with no regard usability. 4.1 Who blocks JS without also blocking Flash? 5 This is what I'm talking about. Flash devs were busy building exactly what they wanted while HTML developers - by virtue of not using absolute layout, etc, were delivering what users could actually use.