4 ms·

Flash was the major source of online rich-media games up until a couple of years ago, not "the 90's". It's still used in that arena because HTML/CSS/JS is not a

Flash was the major source of online rich-media games up until a couple of years ago, not "the 90's". It's still used in that arena because HTML/CSS/JS is not as good of a platform for interactive gaming.

potatolicious 11y ago
I'd argue that Flash as a gaming platform has been fairly marginal for quite some time, and that most of what people would want to preserve existed somewhere between the late 90s to the mid-00s - but that's purely a subjective argument and we can argue about that till the cows come home and never agree. Ultimately it comes down to this: keeping a notoriously insecure runtime around in active use, by hundreds of millions of people, is a non-starter. Unlike, say, Java applets, the frequency and severity of security holes found in Flash is just ridiculous. After years of allegedly focusing on cleaning up Flash, serious exploits are still being discovered regularly. The strongest argument in favor of keeping Flash around is IMO the fact that there is important functionality provided by Flash that has not been effectively (or at all) replicated by HTML. The weakest argument is IMO any centered around historical preservation. Personally, even considering the strongest argument, keeping an insecure runtime running on hundreds of millions of machines vs. better in-browser games... The choice seems pretty clear.
- cwyers 11y ago
  Why is deprecation insufficient for the security concerns? Say that Firefox/Chrome/Edge will no longer execute Flash code without explicit user permission on a per-SWF file basis. No more background execution of Flash as a default. But the Flash runtime is still there to display Flash content if the user trusts the source. Doesn't that address the security concern AND allow people to continue to access the entire web?
  - potatolicious 11y ago
    Oh don't get me wrong - deprecation is the right move. We are after all unable to simply remove Flash from every website and every user machine overnight. But right now we're not moving towards deprecation, Flash is not officially stated by Adobe (nor anyone else of any authority) to be a deprecated technology, and new work is being created for it still (with the encouragement of Adobe, even). Deprecation at the community level will also require us to define replacements and expand the current limitations of HTML5 so that functionality lost with Flash can at least in some way be recovered. That being said, my ideal solution here is a bit harsher than yours. Like you, I hope all browsers immediately stop executing Flash code without explicit user permission on a per-SWF basis, and I want them to unbundle Flash. The only people who should be running Flash are the ones who have chosen explicitly to put it on their machine. In any case, my original post was in response to the notion that Flash should be kept alive because of all the old games/animations that have already been created for it - that is IMO a pretty bogus argument for keeping around something so infamously insecure. Flash needs to be deprecated. Not to mention from a preservation of history perspective deprecation of Flash is not harmful. You can run an old copy of Windows in a VM with an old copy of a browser with an old copy of Flash (and not have any back compat issues, sweet). I do not believe it should be a priority to preserve everyone's ability to view old Flash content without any prior setup at the drop of a hat. If you want to rewind to the mid-00s it's easy enough to get something like this set up - certainly easier than buying your own 35mm projector or microfilm machine like other archival formats.

potatolicious 11y ago

I'd argue that Flash as a gaming platform has been fairly marginal for quite some time, and that most of what people would want to preserve existed somewhere between the late 90s to the mid-00s - but that's purely a subjective argument and we can argue about that till the cows come home and never agree. Ultimately it comes down to this: keeping a notoriously insecure runtime around in active use, by hundreds of millions of people, is a non-starter. Unlike, say, Java applets, the frequency and severity of security holes found in Flash is just ridiculous. After years of allegedly focusing on cleaning up Flash, serious exploits are still being discovered regularly. The strongest argument in favor of keeping Flash around is IMO the fact that there is important functionality provided by Flash that has not been effectively (or at all) replicated by HTML. The weakest argument is IMO any centered around historical preservation. Personally, even considering the strongest argument, keeping an insecure runtime running on hundreds of millions of machines vs. better in-browser games... The choice seems pretty clear.

cwyers 11y ago
Why is deprecation insufficient for the security concerns? Say that Firefox/Chrome/Edge will no longer execute Flash code without explicit user permission on a per-SWF file basis. No more background execution of Flash as a default. But the Flash runtime is still there to display Flash content if the user trusts the source. Doesn't that address the security concern AND allow people to continue to access the entire web?
- potatolicious 11y ago
  Oh don't get me wrong - deprecation is the right move. We are after all unable to simply remove Flash from every website and every user machine overnight. But right now we're not moving towards deprecation, Flash is not officially stated by Adobe (nor anyone else of any authority) to be a deprecated technology, and new work is being created for it still (with the encouragement of Adobe, even). Deprecation at the community level will also require us to define replacements and expand the current limitations of HTML5 so that functionality lost with Flash can at least in some way be recovered. That being said, my ideal solution here is a bit harsher than yours. Like you, I hope all browsers immediately stop executing Flash code without explicit user permission on a per-SWF basis, and I want them to unbundle Flash. The only people who should be running Flash are the ones who have chosen explicitly to put it on their machine. In any case, my original post was in response to the notion that Flash should be kept alive because of all the old games/animations that have already been created for it - that is IMO a pretty bogus argument for keeping around something so infamously insecure. Flash needs to be deprecated. Not to mention from a preservation of history perspective deprecation of Flash is not harmful. You can run an old copy of Windows in a VM with an old copy of a browser with an old copy of Flash (and not have any back compat issues, sweet). I do not believe it should be a priority to preserve everyone's ability to view old Flash content without any prior setup at the drop of a hat. If you want to rewind to the mid-00s it's easy enough to get something like this set up - certainly easier than buying your own 35mm projector or microfilm machine like other archival formats.