7 ms·

God will Flash just die already. Firefox is my primary browser and I run it without Flash. On the very odd occasion I need it I have IE in protected mode which

God will Flash just die already. Firefox is my primary browser and I run it without Flash. On the very odd occasion I need it I have IE in protected mode which has Flash built in. If a site does use Flash I will seek an alternative though as I hate it that much. On a side note Firefox without Flash is so much smoother. IMHO it is the fastest and most stable browser when it doesn't have Flash bogging it down.

paganel 11y ago
> God will Flash just die already. 5 to 7 years ago I would have said the same thing, I hated Flash with a passion. But now, when it's almost gone for good, I see that it had its reasons. For example the new Google Street View is many times slower and lags so much as to give me motion sickness (when it's not blocking my browser) compared to the previous version, which was Flash-based, and which used to work like a charm.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  The new Google Maps is also dramatically slower, laggier, and buggier than the old version which was a regular web app built to work on browsers from 2005. I think the terribleness of recent Google web front-ends (not only Maps and Street View but also Search, Mail, Groups, Gplus, etc.) is mostly a product of incompetent management process internal to Google, rather than an indictment of web technology generally.
  - batou 11y ago
    I genuinely agree with you here. I've gone back to a desktop mail client (Thunderbird) and moved away from the web for this sort of thing myself. As far as the web goes, I am very impressed at openstreetmap. That is fast, accurate and has more useful mapping data than anything else rather than fancy overlays and imaging.
    - Crito 11y ago
      While on vacation recently, I had to switch from Google Maps to OSMAnd. OSM map data was just as good for my purposes at least (arguably better), but the real motivating factor was just how fucking pathetic Google Maps on Android has become. Just having it find my location became a chore. I'd be walking down the street looking at my phone the whole block, waiting for it to get my location. Many times it would show my location (with several miles of uncertainty) as being somewhere that I had not been for more than several hours. Other times it would just never find the location at all, not even having any idea what country, let alone city, I was in. I downloaded OSMAnd and the province map data, and it was able to find my location within mere seconds every time. It was able to do it fast enough that if I clicked the power button as I was pulling my phone out of my pocket, it would have my position before my phone was in front of my face. Unfortunately OSMAnd does not do transit routing, so I was attempting to use both at the same time. This gave me a direct comparison between how fast both were able to find my position, and how accurately. OSMAnd blows Google Maps away. I often resorted to typing in my "from" location in Google Maps, just so that I could use it to find routes for me while it was stalling on finding my location itself. My location permissions were all correct. I tried wiping the application settings, with no luck. On the last day of my vacation I uninstalled all the google maps updates on my phone, and tried the version that shipped with it. It worked just fine. If anybody else ever gets annoyed at Google Maps being unable to find their location in a timely manner, I highly recommend they try OSMAnd. It saved my vacation. As a bonus, it even behaves sensibly when on a boat.
  - przemoc 11y ago
    FWIW, Google Maps are generally noticeably slower and laggier in Firefox when compared to Chrome.
    - ild 11y ago
      Still, old one was faster.
    - josteink 11y ago
      The old Google Maps were orders of magnitudes faster than the current one in all browsers. Despite Google's claim to the contrary, they obviously no longer care about performance for some of their web-products.
    - Pxtl 11y ago
      Maps straight-up crashes ff for me when zooming.
      - robin_reala 11y ago
        Have you filed a bug with Mozilla about that? Speed issues are one thing, but crashing is another.
        Pxtl 11y ago
        Could never reproduce it consistently, and I'm always hesitent to file a bug without decent repro steps. Also, it seems to have been fixed in latest... maybe. Again, if I can't reproduce it consistently, I can't say if it's fixed or not. I did go through the crash reporter.
        robin_reala 11y ago
        So what I do in these situations is go to about:crashes, click on the appropriate crash id and look under the Related Bugs section. If there’s been a bug filed with the same signature then it’ll appear there. Alternatively, if it’s not been filed already you could click on ‘More Reports’ and look at the number of crashes. If it looks like a few you might want to file it with just the signature and no steps to reproduce; sometimes a signature and backtrace alone is enough to diagnose and fix (e.g. this one I filed recently: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163945 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163945 ).
  - snarfy 11y ago
    The first version they bought and re-branded. The second version was developed in house using the purchased technologies. It's sad the stuff developed in house seems to be worse.
- vbezhenar 11y ago
  Here's flashless street view from Yandex: https://maps.yandex.ru/-/CVcbFJYs https://maps.yandex.ru/-/CVcbFJYs I don't have much problems with Firefox, it seems to work smooth. May be it's Google's fault?
- baumgarn 11y ago
  Flash should still have its legitimation as an authoring tool. I think the direct approach in which you can throw together a scene or an animation has its value. The tools you use influence design decisions. Of course, technology wise, we should be happy without it. But if you always start a project with coding first, it limits your thinking. I fancy all the nice webgl demos and data visualizations, but they mostly lack a meaningful human perspective. Authoring tools like Flash and Director did provide a different feedback loop, not a data point of view but a narrative one.
  - spiralganglion 11y ago
    Strongly agree. The company I work for makes interactive/animated training media. While I work as a coder doing mostly server-side stuff, I can vouch for the power that the Flash authoring environment provided. It was rather similar to something like Unity, with a tightly integrated scenegraph and coding environment. For our team of animators who (by necessity, not by choice) picked up some coding chops on the job, it was a huge blessing. Moving everything over to web technology has been extremely painful for exactly one reason: lack of a decent authoring workflow for interactive animations. There's nothing that can even touch Flash in this regard.
programmernews3 11y ago
The problem is the long tail of sites or site features that don't work without flash and users who rely on those sites or site features. I've heard Facebook video and last.fm streaming don't work without Flash for eg.
- Gys 11y ago
  Maybe you missed this ? But this whole discussion on the death of Flash was started by Facebook: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2015/07/13/flash-aah-aah-its-not-the-savior-of-any-of-us/ http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2015/07/13/flash-aah-aah-its-...
  - giancarlostoro 11y ago
    Every video on Facebook still relies on Flash though. So I'm not sure why they haven't put their money where their mouth is about it yet? Would make Facebook a lot more accessible in most cases for me not having to rely on Flash whatsoever just to view a video. I usually end up not watching a number of videos after I realize it wont let me watch them without Flash.
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      I wonder if they're trying to wait out Firefox on the MP4 vs. WebM/Ogg issue. They've already gone HTML5 on the mobile versions.
      - cpeterso 11y ago
        Facebook is migrating from Flash to HTML5 video. As of last week, they are serving HTML5 video to users running Windows 7+, including Firefox users. Firefox supports H.264 video on Windows Vista+ and OS X because those platforms ship H.264 decoders.
        giancarlostoro 11y ago
        Guess Linux gets excluded once again? Cause they keep pushing Flash to me, even though I have H.264?
kevin_thibedeau 11y ago
> On a side note Firefox without Flash is so much smoother. IMHO it is the fastest and most stable browser when it doesn't have Flash bogging it down. That is primarily because of the flash ads being dumped. An ad/flash/js blocker achieves much the same and then some by further reducing the latency to collect everything needed to render.
Quarrelsome 11y ago
Will someone actually go ahead and implement the required features in the browsers? Last I checked there is still no cross-platform way to do video publishing without flash. The option we now all have is multiple platform specific implementations.
sethd 11y ago
Unfortunately Flash still fills a couple gaps in browser support: live video streaming and adaptive bit rate streaming (live or recorded). I posted a similar comment about it the other day: [0] Personally I would like to see HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) [1] implemented in the all the browsers, it's a nice lightweight protocol and would be the path of least resistance since it's already used heavily in the mobile space. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874338 [1] - https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-16 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming...
- nacs 11y ago
  Agreed. I was looking into this streaming/live video issue as well and there really is no cross platform method of doing this without having a Flash fallback. For everything else however (like pre-recorded video, games via WebGL), Flash should be phased out.
  - sethd 11y ago
    Even for pre-recorded video you still need Flash if you want to implement adaptive bitrate streaming in order to provide multiple quality levels and have the client automatically switch between them rather than buffer.
dblohm7 11y ago
Mozilla performance dev here: Our data backs this up. 4 out of 10 of our top most frequent janks are due to Flash initialization. I'm working to make that all work asynchronously until the time comes when we can kill NPAPI altogether.

paganel 11y ago

> God will Flash just die already. 5 to 7 years ago I would have said the same thing, I hated Flash with a passion. But now, when it's almost gone for good, I see that it had its reasons. For example the new Google Street View is many times slower and lags so much as to give me motion sickness (when it's not blocking my browser) compared to the previous version, which was Flash-based, and which used to work like a charm.

jacobolus 11y ago
The new Google Maps is also dramatically slower, laggier, and buggier than the old version which was a regular web app built to work on browsers from 2005. I think the terribleness of recent Google web front-ends (not only Maps and Street View but also Search, Mail, Groups, Gplus, etc.) is mostly a product of incompetent management process internal to Google, rather than an indictment of web technology generally.
- batou 11y ago
  I genuinely agree with you here. I've gone back to a desktop mail client (Thunderbird) and moved away from the web for this sort of thing myself. As far as the web goes, I am very impressed at openstreetmap. That is fast, accurate and has more useful mapping data than anything else rather than fancy overlays and imaging.
  - Crito 11y ago
    While on vacation recently, I had to switch from Google Maps to OSMAnd. OSM map data was just as good for my purposes at least (arguably better), but the real motivating factor was just how fucking pathetic Google Maps on Android has become. Just having it find my location became a chore. I'd be walking down the street looking at my phone the whole block, waiting for it to get my location. Many times it would show my location (with several miles of uncertainty) as being somewhere that I had not been for more than several hours. Other times it would just never find the location at all, not even having any idea what country, let alone city, I was in. I downloaded OSMAnd and the province map data, and it was able to find my location within mere seconds every time. It was able to do it fast enough that if I clicked the power button as I was pulling my phone out of my pocket, it would have my position before my phone was in front of my face. Unfortunately OSMAnd does not do transit routing, so I was attempting to use both at the same time. This gave me a direct comparison between how fast both were able to find my position, and how accurately. OSMAnd blows Google Maps away. I often resorted to typing in my "from" location in Google Maps, just so that I could use it to find routes for me while it was stalling on finding my location itself. My location permissions were all correct. I tried wiping the application settings, with no luck. On the last day of my vacation I uninstalled all the google maps updates on my phone, and tried the version that shipped with it. It worked just fine. If anybody else ever gets annoyed at Google Maps being unable to find their location in a timely manner, I highly recommend they try OSMAnd. It saved my vacation. As a bonus, it even behaves sensibly when on a boat.
- przemoc 11y ago
  FWIW, Google Maps are generally noticeably slower and laggier in Firefox when compared to Chrome.
  - ild 11y ago
    Still, old one was faster.
  - josteink 11y ago
    The old Google Maps were orders of magnitudes faster than the current one in all browsers. Despite Google's claim to the contrary, they obviously no longer care about performance for some of their web-products.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    Maps straight-up crashes ff for me when zooming.
    - robin_reala 11y ago
      Have you filed a bug with Mozilla about that? Speed issues are one thing, but crashing is another.
      - Pxtl 11y ago
        Could never reproduce it consistently, and I'm always hesitent to file a bug without decent repro steps. Also, it seems to have been fixed in latest... maybe. Again, if I can't reproduce it consistently, I can't say if it's fixed or not. I did go through the crash reporter.
        robin_reala 11y ago
        So what I do in these situations is go to about:crashes, click on the appropriate crash id and look under the Related Bugs section. If there’s been a bug filed with the same signature then it’ll appear there. Alternatively, if it’s not been filed already you could click on ‘More Reports’ and look at the number of crashes. If it looks like a few you might want to file it with just the signature and no steps to reproduce; sometimes a signature and backtrace alone is enough to diagnose and fix (e.g. this one I filed recently: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163945 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1163945 ).
- snarfy 11y ago
  The first version they bought and re-branded. The second version was developed in house using the purchased technologies. It's sad the stuff developed in house seems to be worse.
vbezhenar 11y ago
Here's flashless street view from Yandex: https://maps.yandex.ru/-/CVcbFJYs https://maps.yandex.ru/-/CVcbFJYs I don't have much problems with Firefox, it seems to work smooth. May be it's Google's fault?
baumgarn 11y ago
Flash should still have its legitimation as an authoring tool. I think the direct approach in which you can throw together a scene or an animation has its value. The tools you use influence design decisions. Of course, technology wise, we should be happy without it. But if you always start a project with coding first, it limits your thinking. I fancy all the nice webgl demos and data visualizations, but they mostly lack a meaningful human perspective. Authoring tools like Flash and Director did provide a different feedback loop, not a data point of view but a narrative one.
- spiralganglion 11y ago
  Strongly agree. The company I work for makes interactive/animated training media. While I work as a coder doing mostly server-side stuff, I can vouch for the power that the Flash authoring environment provided. It was rather similar to something like Unity, with a tightly integrated scenegraph and coding environment. For our team of animators who (by necessity, not by choice) picked up some coding chops on the job, it was a huge blessing. Moving everything over to web technology has been extremely painful for exactly one reason: lack of a decent authoring workflow for interactive animations. There's nothing that can even touch Flash in this regard.

programmernews3 11y ago

The problem is the long tail of sites or site features that don't work without flash and users who rely on those sites or site features. I've heard Facebook video and last.fm streaming don't work without Flash for eg.

Gys 11y ago
Maybe you missed this ? But this whole discussion on the death of Flash was started by Facebook: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2015/07/13/flash-aah-aah-its-not-the-savior-of-any-of-us/ http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2015/07/13/flash-aah-aah-its-...
- giancarlostoro 11y ago
  Every video on Facebook still relies on Flash though. So I'm not sure why they haven't put their money where their mouth is about it yet? Would make Facebook a lot more accessible in most cases for me not having to rely on Flash whatsoever just to view a video. I usually end up not watching a number of videos after I realize it wont let me watch them without Flash.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    I wonder if they're trying to wait out Firefox on the MP4 vs. WebM/Ogg issue. They've already gone HTML5 on the mobile versions.
    - cpeterso 11y ago
      Facebook is migrating from Flash to HTML5 video. As of last week, they are serving HTML5 video to users running Windows 7+, including Firefox users. Firefox supports H.264 video on Windows Vista+ and OS X because those platforms ship H.264 decoders.
      - giancarlostoro 11y ago
        Guess Linux gets excluded once again? Cause they keep pushing Flash to me, even though I have H.264?

kevin_thibedeau 11y ago

> On a side note Firefox without Flash is so much smoother. IMHO it is the fastest and most stable browser when it doesn't have Flash bogging it down. That is primarily because of the flash ads being dumped. An ad/flash/js blocker achieves much the same and then some by further reducing the latency to collect everything needed to render.

Quarrelsome 11y ago

Will someone actually go ahead and implement the required features in the browsers? Last I checked there is still no cross-platform way to do video publishing without flash. The option we now all have is multiple platform specific implementations.

sethd 11y ago

Unfortunately Flash still fills a couple gaps in browser support: live video streaming and adaptive bit rate streaming (live or recorded). I posted a similar comment about it the other day: [0] Personally I would like to see HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) [1] implemented in the all the browsers, it's a nice lightweight protocol and would be the path of least resistance since it's already used heavily in the mobile space. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9874338 [1] - https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming-16 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-pantos-http-live-streaming...

nacs 11y ago
Agreed. I was looking into this streaming/live video issue as well and there really is no cross platform method of doing this without having a Flash fallback. For everything else however (like pre-recorded video, games via WebGL), Flash should be phased out.
- sethd 11y ago
  Even for pre-recorded video you still need Flash if you want to implement adaptive bitrate streaming in order to provide multiple quality levels and have the client automatically switch between them rather than buffer.

dblohm7 11y ago

Mozilla performance dev here: Our data backs this up. 4 out of 10 of our top most frequent janks are due to Flash initialization. I'm working to make that all work asynchronously until the time comes when we can kill NPAPI altogether.