6 ms·

Movement to get rid of Adobe Flash started 3 years ago. Flash is still alive

44 points by laex 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
MichaelCrawford 12y ago
My favorite Quicktime of Ill Repute website, despite promising that it serves up naught but ill-reputed Quicktime, now tells me that I don't have Flash installed.
hunt 12y ago
I find it strange Flash is still around, given that iOS and Android don't support Flash anymore and that YouTube has made a lot of video content available as HTML5. I thought that other sites would have followed suit. Is there evidence of a mass exodus from Flash?
- jinushaun 12y ago
  There is way more to Flash than video. You see a lot of Flash silently running invisible in the background to enable modern web app features that aren't yet possible or easily achieved with standard HTML and JS. For example, Flash was used for web sockets before web sockets was a thing. Flash was also used to facilitate uploads.
  - Chordless 12y ago
    There's also way more to Flash than websites. Using Adobe AIR, developers can take their content created in Flash, and package it into apps for iOS, Android, and also for Windows and Mac.
  - chriswarbo 12y ago
    This is definitely true, given how often I've had my keyboard become unresponsive, only to find out that some little Flash widget had the focus and completely bypassed the browser, requiring me to use the pointer to click on some (hopefully) empty area of the page. I will say that Flash isn't usually required for most of these uses; just like Javascript it should degrade gracefully to a fallback (eg. a POST form for uploads). Except for web sockets, if they're powering something fundamental (which is the same for JS). The only time I've added a Flash widget to a page without a fallback has been "copy to clipboard" buttons, which didn't have a decent alternative. In those cases the button just doesn't show at all.
- tim333 12y ago
  A gentle decline rather than an exodus. Roughly 12% of websites use it today down from 16% a year ago. http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-flash/all/all http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-flash/all/all
  - hunt 12y ago
    Thanks for the link, that's more steady than I had expected. It's a shame that website doesn't have graphs from the time that Android and iOS announced they wouldn't support flash - it would be interesting to see if there was a noticeable bump.
tyho 12y ago
I never install flash on any computer I own. I don't run any closed source software outside of a VM. It is very possible to get by without flash. In the rare cases where flash is essential to view a video, for example the SpaceX livestream a short while ago, I stick the url into `youtube-dl` and I have yet to experience a situation where it is not supported. In the case of the livestream, You can do: $ youtube-dl -o- $URL | mplayer - To stream it yourself. This is how I watch iPlayer. As a side note, I found this humorous: > It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Google is your ISP (Fiber), Google makes your hardware (Pixel & Nexus), Google maintains your OS (ChromeOS & Android), Google made your browser (Chrome), Google strong arms web standards (http2), Google Decides what you see (Search), and places ads on it. To confine `unilateral corporate control of web technology` to the past is laughable.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  youtube-dl is great. It has a bunch of functionality, like "-x" to extract audio via ffmpeg (very useful for saving space). I also like the "whitey" CLI interface to youtube, which uses youtube-dl to get the video URL and can either download it, or feed it straight into mplayer. For iplayer, there's also get-iplayer ( http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html ), which is pretty fantastic; except that sometimes they enable some new feature by default, which breaks the old behaviour (eg. automatically transcoding everything to the same format, which is IMHO a waste of time and quality). Unfortunately the BBC have recently removed the programme feed that get-iplayer uses, so it's no longer possible to list available programmes as text (useful, eg., for grep). Instead you have to actually visit the iPlayer Web site and navigate around to find each programme, which is a pain. If the worst comes to the worst, it's usually possible to find the URL of a Flash video using a Web inspector tool like Firebug, and perhaps a bit of URL-unescaping. Protip: lots of Web sites don't care about user agents other than (the most popular) Web browsers, so set the user agent of your download tool (wget, cURL, etc.) to match some version of Firefox, to avoid inconsistent behaviour.
  - tyho 12y ago
cm2187 12y ago
Flash AND java (and one can argue javascript too...)
- calibwam 12y ago
  Please do argue javascript. How else could you do dynamic and logical operations in the browser presently?
  - cm2187 12y ago
    I think like Flash and Java, javascript should not be removed from the browser. Some websites do have a need for flash (for streaming for example). I think the problem is rather that flash, java and javascript are all enabled by default, allowing any site and all the associated advertisement websites to execute code without the user consenting or being aware. This is a major security and privacy problem. The model should rather be per-website opt-in of javascript if required (and most websites don't need it). And even in that scenario enforcing a same source policy, ie only javascript hosted on the domain visited would be enabled, not third party javascript. To me the current model is like windows XP's autorun. It is just designed to be a perpetual source of security and privacy breaches until someone finally takes the decision to kill it.
    - LukeB_UK 12y ago
      The problem with disabling javascript by default and making it opt-in, is that most users expect things to just work. If you want to disable javascript yourself, fine, but don't degrade the experience of the web for everyone.
      - cm2187 12y ago
        But there is an over reliance on javascript to make up for the shortcomings of html and css. Most websites should not need javascript. If you look at your own browsing history, how many of these websites genuinely need to run client side logic? If a user ends up on a webmail or an online gaming website, I don't think he will be surprised if he is asked whether he would like to allow this website (not third parties) to execute javascript (and to keep that setting). If that same user goes on any blog, forum, news or ecommerce website, there is really no good reason to execute client side code. Auto completion in a text box (or server validation by input without a full POST) should have been embedded in html a long time ago. And it took 20 years before they finally agreed to add a datepicker tag, not exactly a new problem. Because of the glacial pace of evolution of html, we became used to javascript tricks to make up for what html doesn't do. And flash is mostly used for the same reason. That doesn't mean that flash and javascript don't have any use.
rnhmjoj 12y ago
The only thing I regret is not be able to play nitrome games anymore.
ars 12y ago
Flash is not going away. There is too much content using it, for example there are tons of flash games. And not just little toys, there are some very good games. Also MMO's use it extensively. Some games are transitioning to unity player - you can't really call that much better though.
- Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  Re: unity, maybe a little, since that also implies the game can relatively easily be ported to native platforms (iirc)
  - ars 12y ago
    You are thinking of the unity player rather than the web player which has not been ported to Linux. However I believe the games themselves are cross platform so there is hope. There is an easy to install wine based port of the web player for Linux.
jacquesm 12y ago
Of course it is. The thing those 'movements' don't seem to understand is that budgets are limited and that people (and companies) tend to build websites the way they used to make paintings: once. Then maybe, over time they'll update the content but flash is usually not seen as part of that content but as the infrastructure, or 'deliverable' at the time they commissioned the website. So if it worked at delivery time it is presumed to work for eternity. And so all those flash bits are here to stay, possibly forever. That's why there were a lot of people - me included - that were arguing against things like flash, silverlight, binary components and other web-page plug ins because they will sooner or later end up being unsupported. Besides causing gigantic accessibility issues for the handicapped. So, now we have a mess, and that mess is here to stay. That won't stop large company 'x' from doing this all over again in a few years just because they can but at least there may be a few more voices trying to stop the plug-in madness before it gets out of control. If it isn't in the html spec: don't use it. Welcome to a web full of non-rendering holes that may or may not be functionality and an archive full of websites that nobody will be able to see without powering up a VM circa 2004.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  What you say is correct, but a bit over-the-top. Compared to broken hyperlinks, concerns over missing Flash content is pretty small. It's at least conceivable to automatically load some JS-powered Flash implementation, but if a link's target isn't available in an archive, there's no way to get it back.
  - jacquesm 12y ago
    Plenty of sites that were archived have their whole UI in flash, so for those sites the pages are pretty much empty pages without flash. I'm not aware of any JS-powered flash implementation or how that would solve anything since presumably that would come with all of the drawbacks that the non-JS powered flash implementations of today have (and that we are so keen on getting rid of).
    - fmorel 12y ago
gohwell 12y ago
I wish i could, my jobs require's it to VPN
- mrweasel 12y ago
  WHY! I mean... why? Why would you need Flash to use a VPN? Is it some weird web-login? How do you write a VPN client in Flash? Who thought that requiring Flash for a VPN would be a good idea? Your comment raises so many questions.
  - gohwell 12y ago
    its only used as part of the authentication process. Terrible design I agree
themartorana 12y ago
The movement to get rid of IE 6 took like, 12 years and it's still around in small numbers.
dimsuz 12y ago
What I find funny is that this website uses flash itself.
- jbrackett 12y ago
  I don't think it does. It uses swfobject2 [1], a js project, to detect if flash is installed and give you a frowny face if it is. [1] https://code.google.com/p/swfobject/ https://code.google.com/p/swfobject/
_asciiker_ 12y ago
I don't understand the essence of this movement, by all standards it is the mobile lobby who should be to blame. Killing Flash is like killing the Concorde Airplane, it just means it is too advanced for its time. Everyone who knows anything about Flash and HTML5 knows that in terms of CPU resources HTML5 is still far far far FAR behind on what the Flash plugin can do... yes, even now. HTML5: http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/html/ http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/html/ Flash: http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/ http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/
- bshimmin 12y ago
  I don't think those benchmark links are really furthering your argument; in both Chrome and Safari on my Mac I get roughly twice the FPS with the HTML5 version...
SG- 12y ago
This new MacBook I got last month didn't come with Flash and I decided to not install it. I also decided to switch to Safari from Chrome. I was surprised how many sites and embedded video now offers HTML5, obviously Youtube and Vimeo have been working for years, but just video on news sites that use their own video solution work. The biggest surprise was visiting twitch.tv and seeing the live video stream work in HTML5 (only in Safari, not Chrome).
- thisishugo 12y ago
  I've had a similar experience, for even longer. I haven't had Flash installed on my MacBook since I got it in early 2013, and I primarily use Safari. For a while it was annoying that Netflix didn't work, and I used to run Chrome exclusively for that purpose, but since OS X 10.10 Netflix works natively in Safari, which is nice.
- kevincennis 12y ago
  Safari can stream live video because it supports HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), which is Apple's own thing. Sadly, there's still no good way to stream live video across multiple browsers without Flash. Eventually, this will be possible via the Media Source Extensions API, but even then, you'll still probably have the issue of different browsers supporting different containers and codecs - which will lead to people doing crazy things like converting MPEG2-TS to MP4 in JavaScript web workers. I had to keep a pretty close eye on all of this stuff when I worked at Aereo, and it always bummed me out to think about the fact that it's still not really possible to stream live video in a web browser without plugins.
iqonik 12y ago
The only thing I use Flash for is to allow a user to easily get something to their clipboard. (http://zeroclipboard.org/ http://zeroclipboard.org/) - until that is possible, afraid I will still be using it.
upofadown 12y ago
Yeah, but at least flash is way less alive than it was three years ago. I rarely encounter the need for flash these days.
laex 12y ago
The website for Occupy Flash has outbound link to http://ie6funeral.com/ http://ie6funeral.com/. Apparently, some Japanese funeral company has bought the domain. I find that quite funny.
th3iedkid 12y ago
"Help*less technically-oriented people understand and uninstall Flash Player" Funny , remove the space and it looks a lot more different !
alkonaut 12y ago
Has there been any serious attempts at creating a flash or a SilverLight killer? Let's face it: flash and SL exist almost exclusively because of video (yes I know there are other uses but most of them like sockets etc can be done in other ways today, I'm talking about why it's still deployed for new sites). Every other kind of snazzy desktop-like animated experience can be created in js, and if you dread using js you can write them in another language and compile to js. The js runtimes are fast enough these days. But: video. Especially live broadcast video. What is the best attempt a replacing flash/SL there? The rights for sports events are worth billions, and a single game can sell for $20-50, so an open unencrypted video service just will.not.happen. The rights holders would rather retreat to cable. Whatever the solution is will have to have the same features in terms of DRM and other protection that flash has. EDIT: just realized the solution is quite simple: just get off the web and let those who want to watch e.g NHL Game Center use a special application, not a web browser.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  I earned my bread and butter for well over 15 years with just that: plug-in free video. It's always been a hack and audio is harder than video (though you can hack your way around that as well). So yes, those attempts have been made and it was pretty successful. But, ironically, mass adoption of flash killed it and now that flash is being killed there is nothing left to really replace it (except maybe to revive jpeg-push for live streams but that's also not really an option...). This Nov. 2013 post from wowza (one of the better streaming platforms available today) is a good read: http://www.wowza.com/blog/a-note-on-html5 http://www.wowza.com/blog/a-note-on-html5
  - alkonaut 12y ago
    DRM extensions for html5-video could help, but at this point I'm actually inclined to say keep html (and the web) clean from that and just use custom applications for DRM video.
dennisbest 12y ago
I generally don't install Flash on my machines but recently I installed it because a major financial site that my employer uses (I know, WTF!?, right?) required it. I set the plugin to ask for permission every time and, holy cow, nearly every site, particularly news sites, requested it. It's a key part of the Web's advertising infrastructure.
bshimmin 12y ago
I have a potential client project coming up where they will need to access a user's webcam and record video and audio from it. They'll want this to work in modern desktop browsers (let's say latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE10+). At this point in time I don't believe it's possible to do this with HTML5 technologies alone.
billconan 12y ago
a while ago, I wanted to create a real-time broadcasting website. I explored all sorts of technologies, like webrtc, mediasource ... none seems to be suitable for what I wanted. then, I asked how twitch does it? it's flash. what html5 can do is what flash can do long time ago. the motivation for replacing flash must not be technical but perhaps political. why didn't adobe release flash as opensource to push it as a standard.

44 points by laex 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

My favorite Quicktime of Ill Repute website, despite promising that it serves up naught but ill-reputed Quicktime, now tells me that I don't have Flash installed.

hunt 12y ago

I find it strange Flash is still around, given that iOS and Android don't support Flash anymore and that YouTube has made a lot of video content available as HTML5. I thought that other sites would have followed suit. Is there evidence of a mass exodus from Flash?

jinushaun 12y ago
There is way more to Flash than video. You see a lot of Flash silently running invisible in the background to enable modern web app features that aren't yet possible or easily achieved with standard HTML and JS. For example, Flash was used for web sockets before web sockets was a thing. Flash was also used to facilitate uploads.
- Chordless 12y ago
  There's also way more to Flash than websites. Using Adobe AIR, developers can take their content created in Flash, and package it into apps for iOS, Android, and also for Windows and Mac.
- chriswarbo 12y ago
  This is definitely true, given how often I've had my keyboard become unresponsive, only to find out that some little Flash widget had the focus and completely bypassed the browser, requiring me to use the pointer to click on some (hopefully) empty area of the page. I will say that Flash isn't usually required for most of these uses; just like Javascript it should degrade gracefully to a fallback (eg. a POST form for uploads). Except for web sockets, if they're powering something fundamental (which is the same for JS). The only time I've added a Flash widget to a page without a fallback has been "copy to clipboard" buttons, which didn't have a decent alternative. In those cases the button just doesn't show at all.
tim333 12y ago
A gentle decline rather than an exodus. Roughly 12% of websites use it today down from 16% a year ago. http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-flash/all/all http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cp-flash/all/all
- hunt 12y ago
  Thanks for the link, that's more steady than I had expected. It's a shame that website doesn't have graphs from the time that Android and iOS announced they wouldn't support flash - it would be interesting to see if there was a noticeable bump.

tyho 12y ago

I never install flash on any computer I own. I don't run any closed source software outside of a VM. It is very possible to get by without flash. In the rare cases where flash is essential to view a video, for example the SpaceX livestream a short while ago, I stick the url into `youtube-dl` and I have yet to experience a situation where it is not supported. In the case of the livestream, You can do: $ youtube-dl -o- $URL | mplayer - To stream it yourself. This is how I watch iPlayer. As a side note, I found this humorous: > It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Google is your ISP (Fiber), Google makes your hardware (Pixel & Nexus), Google maintains your OS (ChromeOS & Android), Google made your browser (Chrome), Google strong arms web standards (http2), Google Decides what you see (Search), and places ads on it. To confine `unilateral corporate control of web technology` to the past is laughable.

chriswarbo 12y ago
youtube-dl is great. It has a bunch of functionality, like "-x" to extract audio via ffmpeg (very useful for saving space). I also like the "whitey" CLI interface to youtube, which uses youtube-dl to get the video URL and can either download it, or feed it straight into mplayer. For iplayer, there's also get-iplayer ( http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html ), which is pretty fantastic; except that sometimes they enable some new feature by default, which breaks the old behaviour (eg. automatically transcoding everything to the same format, which is IMHO a waste of time and quality). Unfortunately the BBC have recently removed the programme feed that get-iplayer uses, so it's no longer possible to list available programmes as text (useful, eg., for grep). Instead you have to actually visit the iPlayer Web site and navigate around to find each programme, which is a pain. If the worst comes to the worst, it's usually possible to find the URL of a Flash video using a Web inspector tool like Firebug, and perhaps a bit of URL-unescaping. Protip: lots of Web sites don't care about user agents other than (the most popular) Web browsers, so set the user agent of your download tool (wget, cURL, etc.) to match some version of Firefox, to avoid inconsistent behaviour.
- tyho 12y ago

cm2187 12y ago

Flash AND java (and one can argue javascript too...)

calibwam 12y ago
Please do argue javascript. How else could you do dynamic and logical operations in the browser presently?
- cm2187 12y ago
  I think like Flash and Java, javascript should not be removed from the browser. Some websites do have a need for flash (for streaming for example). I think the problem is rather that flash, java and javascript are all enabled by default, allowing any site and all the associated advertisement websites to execute code without the user consenting or being aware. This is a major security and privacy problem. The model should rather be per-website opt-in of javascript if required (and most websites don't need it). And even in that scenario enforcing a same source policy, ie only javascript hosted on the domain visited would be enabled, not third party javascript. To me the current model is like windows XP's autorun. It is just designed to be a perpetual source of security and privacy breaches until someone finally takes the decision to kill it.
  - LukeB_UK 12y ago
    The problem with disabling javascript by default and making it opt-in, is that most users expect things to just work. If you want to disable javascript yourself, fine, but don't degrade the experience of the web for everyone.
    - cm2187 12y ago
      But there is an over reliance on javascript to make up for the shortcomings of html and css. Most websites should not need javascript. If you look at your own browsing history, how many of these websites genuinely need to run client side logic? If a user ends up on a webmail or an online gaming website, I don't think he will be surprised if he is asked whether he would like to allow this website (not third parties) to execute javascript (and to keep that setting). If that same user goes on any blog, forum, news or ecommerce website, there is really no good reason to execute client side code. Auto completion in a text box (or server validation by input without a full POST) should have been embedded in html a long time ago. And it took 20 years before they finally agreed to add a datepicker tag, not exactly a new problem. Because of the glacial pace of evolution of html, we became used to javascript tricks to make up for what html doesn't do. And flash is mostly used for the same reason. That doesn't mean that flash and javascript don't have any use.

rnhmjoj 12y ago

The only thing I regret is not be able to play nitrome games anymore.

ars 12y ago

Flash is not going away. There is too much content using it, for example there are tons of flash games. And not just little toys, there are some very good games. Also MMO's use it extensively. Some games are transitioning to unity player - you can't really call that much better though.

Cthulhu_ 12y ago
Re: unity, maybe a little, since that also implies the game can relatively easily be ported to native platforms (iirc)
- ars 12y ago
  You are thinking of the unity player rather than the web player which has not been ported to Linux. However I believe the games themselves are cross platform so there is hope. There is an easy to install wine based port of the web player for Linux.

jacquesm 12y ago

Of course it is. The thing those 'movements' don't seem to understand is that budgets are limited and that people (and companies) tend to build websites the way they used to make paintings: once. Then maybe, over time they'll update the content but flash is usually not seen as part of that content but as the infrastructure, or 'deliverable' at the time they commissioned the website. So if it worked at delivery time it is presumed to work for eternity. And so all those flash bits are here to stay, possibly forever. That's why there were a lot of people - me included - that were arguing against things like flash, silverlight, binary components and other web-page plug ins because they will sooner or later end up being unsupported. Besides causing gigantic accessibility issues for the handicapped. So, now we have a mess, and that mess is here to stay. That won't stop large company 'x' from doing this all over again in a few years just because they can but at least there may be a few more voices trying to stop the plug-in madness before it gets out of control. If it isn't in the html spec: don't use it. Welcome to a web full of non-rendering holes that may or may not be functionality and an archive full of websites that nobody will be able to see without powering up a VM circa 2004.

chriswarbo 12y ago
What you say is correct, but a bit over-the-top. Compared to broken hyperlinks, concerns over missing Flash content is pretty small. It's at least conceivable to automatically load some JS-powered Flash implementation, but if a link's target isn't available in an archive, there's no way to get it back.
- jacquesm 12y ago
  Plenty of sites that were archived have their whole UI in flash, so for those sites the pages are pretty much empty pages without flash. I'm not aware of any JS-powered flash implementation or how that would solve anything since presumably that would come with all of the drawbacks that the non-JS powered flash implementations of today have (and that we are so keen on getting rid of).
  - fmorel 12y ago

gohwell 12y ago

I wish i could, my jobs require's it to VPN

mrweasel 12y ago
WHY! I mean... why? Why would you need Flash to use a VPN? Is it some weird web-login? How do you write a VPN client in Flash? Who thought that requiring Flash for a VPN would be a good idea? Your comment raises so many questions.
- gohwell 12y ago
  its only used as part of the authentication process. Terrible design I agree

themartorana 12y ago

The movement to get rid of IE 6 took like, 12 years and it's still around in small numbers.

dimsuz 12y ago

What I find funny is that this website uses flash itself.

jbrackett 12y ago
I don't think it does. It uses swfobject2 [1], a js project, to detect if flash is installed and give you a frowny face if it is. [1] https://code.google.com/p/swfobject/ https://code.google.com/p/swfobject/

_asciiker_ 12y ago

I don't understand the essence of this movement, by all standards it is the mobile lobby who should be to blame. Killing Flash is like killing the Concorde Airplane, it just means it is too advanced for its time. Everyone who knows anything about Flash and HTML5 knows that in terms of CPU resources HTML5 is still far far far FAR behind on what the Flash plugin can do... yes, even now. HTML5: http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/html/ http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/html/ Flash: http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/ http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/

bshimmin 12y ago
I don't think those benchmark links are really furthering your argument; in both Chrome and Safari on my Mac I get roughly twice the FPS with the HTML5 version...

SG- 12y ago

This new MacBook I got last month didn't come with Flash and I decided to not install it. I also decided to switch to Safari from Chrome. I was surprised how many sites and embedded video now offers HTML5, obviously Youtube and Vimeo have been working for years, but just video on news sites that use their own video solution work. The biggest surprise was visiting twitch.tv and seeing the live video stream work in HTML5 (only in Safari, not Chrome).

thisishugo 12y ago
I've had a similar experience, for even longer. I haven't had Flash installed on my MacBook since I got it in early 2013, and I primarily use Safari. For a while it was annoying that Netflix didn't work, and I used to run Chrome exclusively for that purpose, but since OS X 10.10 Netflix works natively in Safari, which is nice.
kevincennis 12y ago
Safari can stream live video because it supports HLS (HTTP Live Streaming), which is Apple's own thing. Sadly, there's still no good way to stream live video across multiple browsers without Flash. Eventually, this will be possible via the Media Source Extensions API, but even then, you'll still probably have the issue of different browsers supporting different containers and codecs - which will lead to people doing crazy things like converting MPEG2-TS to MP4 in JavaScript web workers. I had to keep a pretty close eye on all of this stuff when I worked at Aereo, and it always bummed me out to think about the fact that it's still not really possible to stream live video in a web browser without plugins.

iqonik 12y ago

The only thing I use Flash for is to allow a user to easily get something to their clipboard. (http://zeroclipboard.org/ http://zeroclipboard.org/) - until that is possible, afraid I will still be using it.

upofadown 12y ago

Yeah, but at least flash is way less alive than it was three years ago. I rarely encounter the need for flash these days.

laex 12y ago

The website for Occupy Flash has outbound link to http://ie6funeral.com/ http://ie6funeral.com/. Apparently, some Japanese funeral company has bought the domain. I find that quite funny.

th3iedkid 12y ago

"Help*less technically-oriented people understand and uninstall Flash Player" Funny , remove the space and it looks a lot more different !

alkonaut 12y ago

Has there been any serious attempts at creating a flash or a SilverLight killer? Let's face it: flash and SL exist almost exclusively because of video (yes I know there are other uses but most of them like sockets etc can be done in other ways today, I'm talking about why it's still deployed for new sites). Every other kind of snazzy desktop-like animated experience can be created in js, and if you dread using js you can write them in another language and compile to js. The js runtimes are fast enough these days. But: video. Especially live broadcast video. What is the best attempt a replacing flash/SL there? The rights for sports events are worth billions, and a single game can sell for $20-50, so an open unencrypted video service just will.not.happen. The rights holders would rather retreat to cable. Whatever the solution is will have to have the same features in terms of DRM and other protection that flash has. EDIT: just realized the solution is quite simple: just get off the web and let those who want to watch e.g NHL Game Center use a special application, not a web browser.

jacquesm 12y ago
I earned my bread and butter for well over 15 years with just that: plug-in free video. It's always been a hack and audio is harder than video (though you can hack your way around that as well). So yes, those attempts have been made and it was pretty successful. But, ironically, mass adoption of flash killed it and now that flash is being killed there is nothing left to really replace it (except maybe to revive jpeg-push for live streams but that's also not really an option...). This Nov. 2013 post from wowza (one of the better streaming platforms available today) is a good read: http://www.wowza.com/blog/a-note-on-html5 http://www.wowza.com/blog/a-note-on-html5
- alkonaut 12y ago
  DRM extensions for html5-video could help, but at this point I'm actually inclined to say keep html (and the web) clean from that and just use custom applications for DRM video.

dennisbest 12y ago

I generally don't install Flash on my machines but recently I installed it because a major financial site that my employer uses (I know, WTF!?, right?) required it. I set the plugin to ask for permission every time and, holy cow, nearly every site, particularly news sites, requested it. It's a key part of the Web's advertising infrastructure.

bshimmin 12y ago

I have a potential client project coming up where they will need to access a user's webcam and record video and audio from it. They'll want this to work in modern desktop browsers (let's say latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE10+). At this point in time I don't believe it's possible to do this with HTML5 technologies alone.

billconan 12y ago

a while ago, I wanted to create a real-time broadcasting website. I explored all sorts of technologies, like webrtc, mediasource ... none seems to be suitable for what I wanted. then, I asked how twitch does it? it's flash. what html5 can do is what flash can do long time ago. the motivation for replacing flash must not be technical but perhaps political. why didn't adobe release flash as opensource to push it as a standard.