10 ms·

The Call to Kill Adobe’s Flash in Favor of HTML5 Is Rising

133 points by werencole 11y ago

werencole 11y ago
Really, isn't it time for Adobe to admit that Flash is a relic?
- sp332 11y ago
  They have. Back in 2011 they acquired PhoneGap, which makes an HTML5 app platform. And Adobe Flash Professional can make HTML5 apps now.
  - werencole 11y ago
    And yet Flash persists.
    - sp332 11y ago
      Flash usage has been plummeting. I know these charts are questionable, but it looks like it will hit 0 in 3 years. http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/client_side_language/all/y http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/client_side...
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      Because HTML still fails short of everything that Flash is capable of, specially in what concerns games. Also Flash nowadays also compiles to native code and is used by many mobile games, even on iOS. And DRM video of course.
    - zamalek 11y ago
      One of the main problems I see is that Flash is used as a first preference as opposed to falling back to it. Prime example that I ran into today: first time I visit the 8tracks I am prompted to enable Flash, after about 10 seconds of me refusing to enable vulnerabilities it concedes and gives me the option to use HTML5 instead which, surprise surprise, obviously hasn't even been tested and does absolutely nothing. That's a worst-case scenario, but I get the "enable Flash bar" all too often - even when the website automatically upgrades to HTML5 instead. Even YouTube tries Flash first. Flash should be a fallback plan, not the first preference. Stop it. Please. I'm growing weary of ignoring that bar, it's like it's actually part of the browser chrome.
    - talmand 11y ago
      Flash will be with us for quite some time still. You can't get everyone to agree to uninstall Flash in one fell swoop. You can't expect Adobe to completely abandon it over night; which would mean no more updates and more security vulnerabilities.
- macspoofing 11y ago
  They kinda have. They killed the next-gen compiler and Flex. It's essentially in maintenance mode now. Most of the effort is now expanded on Air which has some utility as a mobile dev platform.
inthewoods 11y ago
Yeah Microsoft has at least put a bullet in Silverlight (admittedly it was use a LOT less).
- werencole 11y ago
  Hey, that can be done: http://arc.applause.com/2015/07/06/flash-silverlight-html5-video/ http://arc.applause.com/2015/07/06/flash-silverlight-html5-v...
columbo 11y ago
I wish we would kill flash by providing a stronger solution. Does any application exist today that can replicate the functionality of even Flash MX (now 11 years old) in HTML5? An actual application that could be given to non-developers and not a series of javascript libraries. http://www.colorado.edu/geography/foote/geog4043/notes/flashdemo/simple%20animation/directions%20simple%20animation.html http://www.colorado.edu/geography/foote/geog4043/notes/flash... http://www.colorado.edu/geography/foote/geog4043/notes/flashdemo/growth%20of%20a%20nation/frame_by_frame%20directions.html http://www.colorado.edu/geography/foote/geog4043/notes/flash...
- atonse 11y ago
  First, you can only do so much with flash without writing code. And ActionScript 3 looked pretty similar to javascript anyway. But more importantly, we should decouple the idea of Flash the authoring tool and Flash the runtime. I believe Flash the authoring tool already allows you to output to HTML 5 rather than an SWF file. So you can have all the benefits of flash authoring, without the drawbacks (killing your customer's batteries). Then there's Shumway (Mozilla's JS based flash runtime). There are already lots of alternatives to the nasty Flash runtime.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    So you can have all the benefits of flash authoring, without the drawbacks (killing your customer's batteries). How true is the battery thing today, really? Objectively, on my relatively powerful workstation PC, watching Flash videos using Flash widgets on web sites doesn't tend to bump either CPU or GPU frequencies up noticeably. In contrast, watching HTML5 video can cause either or both to go way up, with consequent extra power consumption, temperature rises, fan noise, etc. And all these trendy modern animations and canvas/SVG effects in browsers that are replacing some of what Flash used to be used for apparently require more effort from that workstation-class hardware than literally doing full-screen real-time 3D rendering in a graphics application. Of course it's possible that this is just dodgy graphics drivers -- I do have an extremely low opinion of AMD's supposedly premium products since I've actually used some of them -- but those same dodgy drivers are there when using Flash too, and it can still play videos without raising the ambient room temperate by multiple degrees.
spotj 11y ago
Wait, is it 2011 again?
- werencole 11y ago
  Ha ... when this cropped back up, that is exactly what I was thinking.
velcro 11y ago
A colleague of mine was a very vocal anti-Flash proponent - he used to say that he's tired of his laptop overheating from those 5 stupid animated Flash banners (on his favourite news site). The irony of it is - I'm not sure 5 animated WebGL banners would keep his laptop any cooler...
- SG- 11y ago
  getting the GPU to offload stuff and letting the host OS deal with it instead of layers of browser plugins still sounds better (even when Flash tries to use hardware acceleration). for example, it's much more efficient to let the browser (Safari) play html5 video and hardware decode it than the same video through flash. it's also much easier to control things when it's not in a black box such as flash, browsers let you disable or whitelist things like JS, WebGL, etc.
  - velcro 11y ago
    If you're implying that Flash is using only software-based rendering while WebGL is hardware accelerated - thats not really true. Look it up - Flash has been doing HW acc. for years now across platforms. Its 2015 now and it took WebGL 5 years to get to decent (but not perfect) desktop support - forget about mobile. Same with video - as far as I know Flash does HW acc. video too. To a developer Flash is not a black box - to a user, again - it seems that that technology gets a lot of blame for what developers are doing with it. If you have 5 animated banners hogging your CPU/GPU, whether in WebGL or Flash - who is to blame?
    - SG- 11y ago
      I specifically mention that even when it tries to do hardware acceleration it isn't as efficient. I know it does h264 hardware acceleration along with 3D stuff. It does it, it just does it really poorly compared to native alternatives. The blackbox comment is referring to it not being part of the DOM.
      - velcro 11y ago
DannoHung 11y ago
You know what's actually kinda interesting? There's going to have to be an independent flash file player in order to view a lot of content that was produced when Flash was king. Like, I mean a lot of games and videos are going to be strictly inaccessible without downloading a tailored piece of software to specifically view them. Think about all the other common file formats that your computer will just open for you now. All those flash files are going to be basically in the dustbin.
- sosuke 11y ago
  There has been for a very long time a desktop player packaged with Flash Professional, I'm not sure if it comes with the free player download but I expect it would. The real problem will be the Flash games and applications that try and call home to domains that no longer exist.
  - userbinator 11y ago
    You can get them for free from Adobe's site, search for "standalone flash player": https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-playe... In the later versions it was renamed to "projector" but you can still tell them apart from the "_sa" in the filename.
zhte415 11y ago
IE (even 11) still has bad support for robust rendering of HTML5. Until that changes, not a lot will happen.
sosuke 11y ago
Ask Google Music developers why they still require Flash for the best experience? You can call for its death but the call is hollow without a replacement. Isn't there also a possibility for the browsers to sandbox the plugins enough to keep them safe?
- robmcm 11y ago
  This is what chrome does with Flash now.
- wldcordeiro 11y ago
  On Chrome Google Play Music uses HTML5 Audio but for Firefox and other browsers they use the Flash plugin.
jstuxx 11y ago
What's the big deal about Flash, I've been hearin kill flash for years The kill flash rhetoric is getting old now.
cwyers 11y ago
Let's say that we can get every major site to stop using Flash going forward, and that we can paper over it with HTML5 and polyfills. Great. What do we do about the historic content that will never, ever be ported to anything other than Flash? Every thing on Kongregate? Newgrounds? Homestarrunner.com? Desktop Tower Defense? We're talking about taking a decade's worth of interactive web content and declaring it no longer relevant. Without a plan for preserving that material and continuing to make it accessible, I think that killing off Flash rather than deprecating it is a terrible idea.
- ende 11y ago
  We don't go to those sites anymore.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  As an aside, we shouldn't even accept your first assumption there, because it's demonstrably not true. There are all kinds of thing that tools like Flash (and Java, and Silverlight, and even ActiveX controls) have previously been useful for that HTML5 and JS can't yet replace. But your main point is a very good one. There are way too many people in the industry right now complaining about those older technologies who think that the world somehow magically owes them updates to 10-20 years of past work, just because their bleeding edge browser-native tools have finally reached the point in the very recent past when they can do some of the same work to a useful degree. There are also way too many people moaning about how these plug-ins are such horrendous security problems while ignoring the facts that (a) every major browser also has a less than stellar track record on security issues, with Firefox and Chrome patching numerous vulnerabilities in updates every few weeks, and (b) moving the more advanced, and often hardware-accelerated, functionality from plug-ins to native browser capabilities isn't really reducing the area of the attack surface, it's just reshaping it. Given these facts, there is little reason to assume that browsers will inherently be more secure just because plug-ins were forced out in favour of native technologies. As others have been pointing out today, the reverse might actually be true, because at least the plug-ins have a degree of isolation and click-to-play safeguards are now widespread, while the trend with browsers (again, particularly Firefox and Chrome) is to remove obvious settings that would allow users to turn off certain functions.
userbinator 11y ago
IMHO Flash was pretty good when it was still Macromedia Flash; after Adobe bought it, things started going downhill. I think the file format itself is quite nice (it's much more compact than SVG, for example) - the real problem is with the interpreter's implementation...
Thiz 11y ago
I killed it five years ago and haven't missed it a bit.
super_mario 11y ago
Unfortunately, Flash still plays Youtube videos more efficiently than HTML5. On weak hardware this can make a difference between smooth playback or choppy video or watching videos in much lower resolution that you normally would with Flash.
- erikb 11y ago
  Maybe that's true on Windows? On Linux the HTML5 version of youtube is way more reactive, feels(!) to download faster, and the GUI itself is broken less often (flash player often had some broken lines, or some elements that seemingly haven't been in the right place)
  - super_mario 11y ago
    My experience is for Mac OS X only. I don't use Windows much and don't watch Youtube on Linux.
- danbee 11y ago
  In what browser? I find Safari with HTML5 video much better than Flash.
  - super_mario 11y ago
    I use Firefox latest version and Safari 7.1.x (most recent version available on Mavericks).
EarthLaunch 11y ago
The "kill flash" screeching has been at full volume in ignorant tech communities for at least five years already.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  I don't think it's ignorant to not want multiple zero-day vulnerabilities every week.
  - zwetan 11y ago
    you could tell that to all the browser vendors too
    - asadotzler 11y ago
      The browser vendors are fixing bugs faster. Also, Flash is not required for surfing most of the Web where as a Web browser is. Flash is additional and unnecessary risk.
      - zwetan 11y ago
        faster ? O RLY ? please point to me a remote code execution exploit from any browsers that have been fixed in 48h or less, I dare you.
        indiv0 11y ago
        CVE-2015-2733 in Firefox 38 [1]. > Publish Date : 2015-07-05 > Last Update Date : 2015-07-07 Admittedly, most CVEs tend to take longer, but there's your counterexample. [1]: http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2015-2733/ http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2015-2733/
  - EarthLaunch 11y ago
    Indeed that is not relevant to the ignorance.
erikb 11y ago
Why does Facebook call for a Flash kill? It's nearly the only site in my always open tabs that is still using Flash.
edko 11y ago
WebAssembly will have all the good parts of the Flash VM, with the important advantage of being an open standard, right from the beginning, with multiple competing implementations. It will really be the final nail in the coffin for Flash.
dangerboysteve 11y ago
I uninstalled flash a long time ago and no issues. Don't miss it.
programminggeek 11y ago
One area where Flash was incredible - Adobe Air for desktop apps. Seriously, there was no better/easier way to visit a site, download an app, and have it push out updates. It was beautiful. No other cross platform solution comes close to AIR in that regard.
- reiichiroh 11y ago
  Doesn't this mean Adobe Air is a huge risk as well because it's based on Flash?
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    Flash runs in the browser, so any random web page can run malicious Flash content. Adobe Air is a standalone application runtime, so Air users know what content they're running.
mildweed 11y ago
Ad networks are going to have to finally get their act together.
amelius 11y ago
Can we please also kill Android and iOS in favor of HTML5?
zwetan 11y ago
it's been 5 years or so that I constantly hear ppl saying "flash is dead", OK maybe, maybe not. Apparently it's not dead enough, HTML5 didn't grow enough in those last 5 years to kill it, so what ppl are asking now ? "oh please Adobe kill it yourself" and why ? oh because this remote code execution flaw is unacceptable, humm OK, so following this logic we should kill any technology that get the same flaw right ? How about killing Firefox ? Chrome ? Windows ? etc. I mean that's what we are talking about here right, preserve ppl from security flaw by killing bad technology that constantly have flaw, well ... why stop at Flash only ? ouh it took Adobe 48h to fix a security flaw, if your platform take more than 48h to fix the same kind of security risk it should be killed too, and there we look into the details and oh surprise, how long does it take Mozilla to fix a remote code execution ? at least few weeks, well that's it we should all ask Mozilla to kill Firefox too. Let's review the others now, Google with Chrome, Microsoft with Windows, etc. I mean really we have the great opportunity here to ask every single big software vendors who ever had some security flaw in their software to just kill them because duh it's just keep happening and it is unacceptable. No, no worries, don't even bother to fix them, just kill them. Because everyone knows that only good secure software never have bugs or security flaws right, so let's do this logic thing let's kill all software that have flaws and only keep using those with no flaws. Hahaha it is ridiculous, every single software out there have bugs, flaws, etc. and among all that yeah sure you have big security exploits waiting to be discovered, but the important thing to understand is that it does concern everyone. If you say or think it is only Adobe with Flash you are lying to yourself big time. But fair is fair, if you want to lash out on Flash, yeah be my guest but then do the same for every other tech out there because they are all guilty of the same problems. Software can not be bug free, it's like that, accept it and live with it. You will always have a bunch of people trying to find those bugs and exploit them, and as well you always have another bunch of people trying to fix those bugs. But if your logic is just about "oh this piece of crap of software is ridden with bugs we should just kill it", then be ready to kill the next one, and the next one, and the next one, till there is no software anymore out there. go here http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-vendors.php http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-vendors.php and starts to ask all those companies to kill their products
kungfooman 11y ago
HTML5 is plain slow.

133 points by werencole 11y ago

werencole 11y ago

Really, isn't it time for Adobe to admit that Flash is a relic?

sp332 11y ago
They have. Back in 2011 they acquired PhoneGap, which makes an HTML5 app platform. And Adobe Flash Professional can make HTML5 apps now.
- werencole 11y ago
  And yet Flash persists.
  - sp332 11y ago
    Flash usage has been plummeting. I know these charts are questionable, but it looks like it will hit 0 in 3 years. http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/client_side_language/all/y http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_overview/client_side...
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    Because HTML still fails short of everything that Flash is capable of, specially in what concerns games. Also Flash nowadays also compiles to native code and is used by many mobile games, even on iOS. And DRM video of course.
  - zamalek 11y ago
    One of the main problems I see is that Flash is used as a first preference as opposed to falling back to it. Prime example that I ran into today: first time I visit the 8tracks I am prompted to enable Flash, after about 10 seconds of me refusing to enable vulnerabilities it concedes and gives me the option to use HTML5 instead which, surprise surprise, obviously hasn't even been tested and does absolutely nothing. That's a worst-case scenario, but I get the "enable Flash bar" all too often - even when the website automatically upgrades to HTML5 instead. Even YouTube tries Flash first. Flash should be a fallback plan, not the first preference. Stop it. Please. I'm growing weary of ignoring that bar, it's like it's actually part of the browser chrome.
  - talmand 11y ago
    Flash will be with us for quite some time still. You can't get everyone to agree to uninstall Flash in one fell swoop. You can't expect Adobe to completely abandon it over night; which would mean no more updates and more security vulnerabilities.
macspoofing 11y ago
They kinda have. They killed the next-gen compiler and Flex. It's essentially in maintenance mode now. Most of the effort is now expanded on Air which has some utility as a mobile dev platform.

inthewoods 11y ago

Yeah Microsoft has at least put a bullet in Silverlight (admittedly it was use a LOT less).

werencole 11y ago
Hey, that can be done: http://arc.applause.com/2015/07/06/flash-silverlight-html5-video/ http://arc.applause.com/2015/07/06/flash-silverlight-html5-v...

columbo 11y ago

I wish we would kill flash by providing a stronger solution. Does any application exist today that can replicate the functionality of even Flash MX (now 11 years old) in HTML5? An actual application that could be given to non-developers and not a series of javascript libraries. http://www.colorado.edu/geography/foote/geog4043/notes/flashdemo/simple%20animation/directions%20simple%20animation.html http://www.colorado.edu/geography/foote/geog4043/notes/flash... http://www.colorado.edu/geography/foote/geog4043/notes/flashdemo/growth%20of%20a%20nation/frame_by_frame%20directions.html http://www.colorado.edu/geography/foote/geog4043/notes/flash...

atonse 11y ago
First, you can only do so much with flash without writing code. And ActionScript 3 looked pretty similar to javascript anyway. But more importantly, we should decouple the idea of Flash the authoring tool and Flash the runtime. I believe Flash the authoring tool already allows you to output to HTML 5 rather than an SWF file. So you can have all the benefits of flash authoring, without the drawbacks (killing your customer's batteries). Then there's Shumway (Mozilla's JS based flash runtime). There are already lots of alternatives to the nasty Flash runtime.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  So you can have all the benefits of flash authoring, without the drawbacks (killing your customer's batteries). How true is the battery thing today, really? Objectively, on my relatively powerful workstation PC, watching Flash videos using Flash widgets on web sites doesn't tend to bump either CPU or GPU frequencies up noticeably. In contrast, watching HTML5 video can cause either or both to go way up, with consequent extra power consumption, temperature rises, fan noise, etc. And all these trendy modern animations and canvas/SVG effects in browsers that are replacing some of what Flash used to be used for apparently require more effort from that workstation-class hardware than literally doing full-screen real-time 3D rendering in a graphics application. Of course it's possible that this is just dodgy graphics drivers -- I do have an extremely low opinion of AMD's supposedly premium products since I've actually used some of them -- but those same dodgy drivers are there when using Flash too, and it can still play videos without raising the ambient room temperate by multiple degrees.

spotj 11y ago

Wait, is it 2011 again?

werencole 11y ago
Ha ... when this cropped back up, that is exactly what I was thinking.

velcro 11y ago

A colleague of mine was a very vocal anti-Flash proponent - he used to say that he's tired of his laptop overheating from those 5 stupid animated Flash banners (on his favourite news site). The irony of it is - I'm not sure 5 animated WebGL banners would keep his laptop any cooler...

SG- 11y ago
getting the GPU to offload stuff and letting the host OS deal with it instead of layers of browser plugins still sounds better (even when Flash tries to use hardware acceleration). for example, it's much more efficient to let the browser (Safari) play html5 video and hardware decode it than the same video through flash. it's also much easier to control things when it's not in a black box such as flash, browsers let you disable or whitelist things like JS, WebGL, etc.
- velcro 11y ago
  If you're implying that Flash is using only software-based rendering while WebGL is hardware accelerated - thats not really true. Look it up - Flash has been doing HW acc. for years now across platforms. Its 2015 now and it took WebGL 5 years to get to decent (but not perfect) desktop support - forget about mobile. Same with video - as far as I know Flash does HW acc. video too. To a developer Flash is not a black box - to a user, again - it seems that that technology gets a lot of blame for what developers are doing with it. If you have 5 animated banners hogging your CPU/GPU, whether in WebGL or Flash - who is to blame?
  - SG- 11y ago
    I specifically mention that even when it tries to do hardware acceleration it isn't as efficient. I know it does h264 hardware acceleration along with 3D stuff. It does it, it just does it really poorly compared to native alternatives. The blackbox comment is referring to it not being part of the DOM.
    - velcro 11y ago

DannoHung 11y ago

You know what's actually kinda interesting? There's going to have to be an independent flash file player in order to view a lot of content that was produced when Flash was king. Like, I mean a lot of games and videos are going to be strictly inaccessible without downloading a tailored piece of software to specifically view them. Think about all the other common file formats that your computer will just open for you now. All those flash files are going to be basically in the dustbin.

sosuke 11y ago
There has been for a very long time a desktop player packaged with Flash Professional, I'm not sure if it comes with the free player download but I expect it would. The real problem will be the Flash games and applications that try and call home to domains that no longer exist.
- userbinator 11y ago
  You can get them for free from Adobe's site, search for "standalone flash player": https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions.html https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-playe... In the later versions it was renamed to "projector" but you can still tell them apart from the "_sa" in the filename.

zhte415 11y ago

IE (even 11) still has bad support for robust rendering of HTML5. Until that changes, not a lot will happen.

sosuke 11y ago

Ask Google Music developers why they still require Flash for the best experience? You can call for its death but the call is hollow without a replacement. Isn't there also a possibility for the browsers to sandbox the plugins enough to keep them safe?

robmcm 11y ago
This is what chrome does with Flash now.
wldcordeiro 11y ago
On Chrome Google Play Music uses HTML5 Audio but for Firefox and other browsers they use the Flash plugin.

jstuxx 11y ago

What's the big deal about Flash, I've been hearin kill flash for years The kill flash rhetoric is getting old now.

cwyers 11y ago

Let's say that we can get every major site to stop using Flash going forward, and that we can paper over it with HTML5 and polyfills. Great. What do we do about the historic content that will never, ever be ported to anything other than Flash? Every thing on Kongregate? Newgrounds? Homestarrunner.com? Desktop Tower Defense? We're talking about taking a decade's worth of interactive web content and declaring it no longer relevant. Without a plan for preserving that material and continuing to make it accessible, I think that killing off Flash rather than deprecating it is a terrible idea.

ende 11y ago
We don't go to those sites anymore.
Silhouette 11y ago
As an aside, we shouldn't even accept your first assumption there, because it's demonstrably not true. There are all kinds of thing that tools like Flash (and Java, and Silverlight, and even ActiveX controls) have previously been useful for that HTML5 and JS can't yet replace. But your main point is a very good one. There are way too many people in the industry right now complaining about those older technologies who think that the world somehow magically owes them updates to 10-20 years of past work, just because their bleeding edge browser-native tools have finally reached the point in the very recent past when they can do some of the same work to a useful degree. There are also way too many people moaning about how these plug-ins are such horrendous security problems while ignoring the facts that (a) every major browser also has a less than stellar track record on security issues, with Firefox and Chrome patching numerous vulnerabilities in updates every few weeks, and (b) moving the more advanced, and often hardware-accelerated, functionality from plug-ins to native browser capabilities isn't really reducing the area of the attack surface, it's just reshaping it. Given these facts, there is little reason to assume that browsers will inherently be more secure just because plug-ins were forced out in favour of native technologies. As others have been pointing out today, the reverse might actually be true, because at least the plug-ins have a degree of isolation and click-to-play safeguards are now widespread, while the trend with browsers (again, particularly Firefox and Chrome) is to remove obvious settings that would allow users to turn off certain functions.

userbinator 11y ago

IMHO Flash was pretty good when it was still Macromedia Flash; after Adobe bought it, things started going downhill. I think the file format itself is quite nice (it's much more compact than SVG, for example) - the real problem is with the interpreter's implementation...

Thiz 11y ago

I killed it five years ago and haven't missed it a bit.

super_mario 11y ago

Unfortunately, Flash still plays Youtube videos more efficiently than HTML5. On weak hardware this can make a difference between smooth playback or choppy video or watching videos in much lower resolution that you normally would with Flash.

erikb 11y ago
Maybe that's true on Windows? On Linux the HTML5 version of youtube is way more reactive, feels(!) to download faster, and the GUI itself is broken less often (flash player often had some broken lines, or some elements that seemingly haven't been in the right place)
- super_mario 11y ago
  My experience is for Mac OS X only. I don't use Windows much and don't watch Youtube on Linux.
danbee 11y ago
In what browser? I find Safari with HTML5 video much better than Flash.
- super_mario 11y ago
  I use Firefox latest version and Safari 7.1.x (most recent version available on Mavericks).

EarthLaunch 11y ago

The "kill flash" screeching has been at full volume in ignorant tech communities for at least five years already.

cpncrunch 11y ago
I don't think it's ignorant to not want multiple zero-day vulnerabilities every week.
- zwetan 11y ago
  you could tell that to all the browser vendors too
  - asadotzler 11y ago
    The browser vendors are fixing bugs faster. Also, Flash is not required for surfing most of the Web where as a Web browser is. Flash is additional and unnecessary risk.
    - zwetan 11y ago
      faster ? O RLY ? please point to me a remote code execution exploit from any browsers that have been fixed in 48h or less, I dare you.
      - indiv0 11y ago
        CVE-2015-2733 in Firefox 38 [1]. > Publish Date : 2015-07-05 > Last Update Date : 2015-07-07 Admittedly, most CVEs tend to take longer, but there's your counterexample. [1]: http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2015-2733/ http://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2015-2733/
- EarthLaunch 11y ago
  Indeed that is not relevant to the ignorance.

erikb 11y ago

Why does Facebook call for a Flash kill? It's nearly the only site in my always open tabs that is still using Flash.

edko 11y ago

WebAssembly will have all the good parts of the Flash VM, with the important advantage of being an open standard, right from the beginning, with multiple competing implementations. It will really be the final nail in the coffin for Flash.

dangerboysteve 11y ago

I uninstalled flash a long time ago and no issues. Don't miss it.

programminggeek 11y ago

One area where Flash was incredible - Adobe Air for desktop apps. Seriously, there was no better/easier way to visit a site, download an app, and have it push out updates. It was beautiful. No other cross platform solution comes close to AIR in that regard.

reiichiroh 11y ago
Doesn't this mean Adobe Air is a huge risk as well because it's based on Flash?
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Flash runs in the browser, so any random web page can run malicious Flash content. Adobe Air is a standalone application runtime, so Air users know what content they're running.

mildweed 11y ago

Ad networks are going to have to finally get their act together.

amelius 11y ago

Can we please also kill Android and iOS in favor of HTML5?

zwetan 11y ago

it's been 5 years or so that I constantly hear ppl saying "flash is dead", OK maybe, maybe not. Apparently it's not dead enough, HTML5 didn't grow enough in those last 5 years to kill it, so what ppl are asking now ? "oh please Adobe kill it yourself" and why ? oh because this remote code execution flaw is unacceptable, humm OK, so following this logic we should kill any technology that get the same flaw right ? How about killing Firefox ? Chrome ? Windows ? etc. I mean that's what we are talking about here right, preserve ppl from security flaw by killing bad technology that constantly have flaw, well ... why stop at Flash only ? ouh it took Adobe 48h to fix a security flaw, if your platform take more than 48h to fix the same kind of security risk it should be killed too, and there we look into the details and oh surprise, how long does it take Mozilla to fix a remote code execution ? at least few weeks, well that's it we should all ask Mozilla to kill Firefox too. Let's review the others now, Google with Chrome, Microsoft with Windows, etc. I mean really we have the great opportunity here to ask every single big software vendors who ever had some security flaw in their software to just kill them because duh it's just keep happening and it is unacceptable. No, no worries, don't even bother to fix them, just kill them. Because everyone knows that only good secure software never have bugs or security flaws right, so let's do this logic thing let's kill all software that have flaws and only keep using those with no flaws. Hahaha it is ridiculous, every single software out there have bugs, flaws, etc. and among all that yeah sure you have big security exploits waiting to be discovered, but the important thing to understand is that it does concern everyone. If you say or think it is only Adobe with Flash you are lying to yourself big time. But fair is fair, if you want to lash out on Flash, yeah be my guest but then do the same for every other tech out there because they are all guilty of the same problems. Software can not be bug free, it's like that, accept it and live with it. You will always have a bunch of people trying to find those bugs and exploit them, and as well you always have another bunch of people trying to fix those bugs. But if your logic is just about "oh this piece of crap of software is ridden with bugs we should just kill it", then be ready to kill the next one, and the next one, and the next one, till there is no software anymore out there. go here http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-vendors.php http://www.cvedetails.com/top-50-vendors.php and starts to ask all those companies to kill their products

kungfooman 11y ago

HTML5 is plain slow.