4 ms·

A Month Without Adobe Flash Player

9 points by panarky 11y ago

kozak 11y ago
I'm without the Flash player for about half a year. The only thing that really doesn't work is Facebook's native video ("YouTube in a Facebook post" works fine). Modern internet has a surprisingly small dependency on Flash.
- chriswarbo 11y ago
  > Modern internet has a surprisingly small dependency on Flash. It depends what you do. I've not used Flash for about 10 years, and never really missed it. The most common use of Flash these days is for video players, which is the easiest use-case to work around since it doesn't actually require any Flash-specific capabilities; wget and VLC are a fine replacement, and the URLs can be extracted using Firefox addons, greasemonkey scripts, commandline tools, digging around in Firebug, or just Googling around to find an alternative source. I don't know about videos on facebook.com, since I've never had reason to visit that site. "Real" uses of Flash (like newgrounds.com which I used to visit obsessively) are basically impossible to work around. None of the FOSS reimplementations (LightSpark, Gnash, swfdec, etc.) is any good, although swfdec seemed the least-bad in my experience. On the other hand, such usage is rarely critical. There are very few "giant Flash file" sites around these days, and most of those that used to exist could be either safely ignored (eg. games) or worked around (eg. emailing the owner to obtain whatever info you need).
_jomo 11y ago
I have set Flash to click-to-play for at least a year now, maybe more. I'm using the "HTML5 Video Everywhere" extension [0], which covers some websites. Many other websites have a link to the mp4 video or an RTMP stream in the flashvars. It takes at most a minute to find it. Whenever I come across a website that requires Flash, I usually decide to not watch it and eventually complain about them via twitter or something. There's also youtube-dl [1] which has the -g option to print a direct link to the video. The name is a bit misleading, it actually supports over 500 websites. And there is livestreamer [2] which gives you links for live streams with over 60 different services. BTW, an issue with click-to-play is that websites can detect it. For example, SoundCloud asks you to enable it when click-to-play is active, but often works fine when it's completely disabled. I asked their support 2 times about this, but I didn't really get anywhere. However, there are extensions that add a button to enable/disable Flash completely. 0: https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere 1: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl 2: https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer

9 points by panarky 11y ago

kozak 11y ago

I'm without the Flash player for about half a year. The only thing that really doesn't work is Facebook's native video ("YouTube in a Facebook post" works fine). Modern internet has a surprisingly small dependency on Flash.

chriswarbo 11y ago
> Modern internet has a surprisingly small dependency on Flash. It depends what you do. I've not used Flash for about 10 years, and never really missed it. The most common use of Flash these days is for video players, which is the easiest use-case to work around since it doesn't actually require any Flash-specific capabilities; wget and VLC are a fine replacement, and the URLs can be extracted using Firefox addons, greasemonkey scripts, commandline tools, digging around in Firebug, or just Googling around to find an alternative source. I don't know about videos on facebook.com, since I've never had reason to visit that site. "Real" uses of Flash (like newgrounds.com which I used to visit obsessively) are basically impossible to work around. None of the FOSS reimplementations (LightSpark, Gnash, swfdec, etc.) is any good, although swfdec seemed the least-bad in my experience. On the other hand, such usage is rarely critical. There are very few "giant Flash file" sites around these days, and most of those that used to exist could be either safely ignored (eg. games) or worked around (eg. emailing the owner to obtain whatever info you need).

_jomo 11y ago

I have set Flash to click-to-play for at least a year now, maybe more. I'm using the "HTML5 Video Everywhere" extension [0], which covers some websites. Many other websites have a link to the mp4 video or an RTMP stream in the flashvars. It takes at most a minute to find it. Whenever I come across a website that requires Flash, I usually decide to not watch it and eventually complain about them via twitter or something. There's also youtube-dl [1] which has the -g option to print a direct link to the video. The name is a bit misleading, it actually supports over 500 websites. And there is livestreamer [2] which gives you links for live streams with over 60 different services. BTW, an issue with click-to-play is that websites can detect it. For example, SoundCloud asks you to enable it when click-to-play is active, but often works fine when it's completely disabled. I asked their support 2 times about this, but I didn't really get anywhere. However, there are extensions that add a button to enable/disable Flash completely. 0: https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere https://github.com/lejenome/html5-video-everywhere 1: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl 2: https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer