Just because it's popular to hate on Flash everyone forgets about the good times it brought.
Back in school, flash games were all the rage and you could bet if we were on the computers for a lesson 90% of the time would be spent on the helicopter game or motorbike sport!
I never had any love for flash but it's demise brought down Silverlight which as a windows developer was a great way to build a LOB targeting mac and windows. It's to bad that Flashes association with ad networks doomed it rather then all the advancements it gave to the web so early on.
How it's even relevant? Just because some people enjoyed flash in the past doesn't changes the fact that now it is a menace and everyone would be much better without it.
So pack you misguided nostalgia and put it next to your Sonic the Hedgehog figurines(they are dolls and you know it).
There are quite a few times I have legitimately used flash where it has improved my web browsing experience.
HTML5 canvas? Not so much. Maybe some day. But it hasn't had very much impact so far.
It really is disappointing plugins are being removed from Chrome. I am seriously considering moving to a new browser. Those who didn't like it could just disable it.
'menace' is a bit too strong of a word. Alternatives for development are a good thing, just look at the native world and the constant innovation that goes on there (go, rust etc). This idea that everything on the web should be shoehorned into html + javascript is hugely flawed because the ideas behind those technologies are so antiquated. The web model is completely broken but everyone just keeps on ignoring the root problem and just patch over it with 'innovative' frameworks like angular or react...
Back in the day, a lot of my friends and me (mostly introvert and socially not very popular) used to spend a lot of time playing dating Flash games where the ultimate reward was sex. Good times!
I'm not 100% sure the death of Flash is a good thing. Maybe the death of "flash the buggy proprietary plugin" is good but there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of devs that are productive with flash and not likely to be as productive in HTML5. It would be nice if somehow Flash could export to HTML5 directly.
That said, Flash still has features that are missing from HTML5.
1. One file distribution.
AFAICT HTML5 has no real ability to do this
2. Easy streaming
I suppose you can break a HTML5 app into multiple files but with flash there's one file and it can start running the content of that file when only some small percentage of it has downloaded. And, it just magically happens or rather it's super easy to setup. Reproducing that in HTML5 is a huge chore.
3. Not running when not visible
HTML5 has no way to stop an animation when offscreen. If you have a requestAnimationFrame Canvas or WebGL or element based animation and your element is scrolled off the screen HTML5 will still execute your code. Flash will not. So, blogs aggregating flash content work. Blogs aggregating canvas/webgl content don't even exist or unlike flash each item needs to be on its own page. There are some workaround but they require you to modify all content where as Flash you can use 3rd party content and still get this.
4. Can copy to clipboard
Yes I know that's considered "unsafe" and yet nearly every website that needs that feature uses flash for it. Google Docs and GMail both use it even though Google's Chrome team claims they won't put the feature in HTML5 because it's unsafe. They need to make up their minds.
I'm sure people who are more familiar with flash can name more features they wish would make it to HTML5.
And on top of that I can easily block flash. I can't block HTML5 so much :P
I'm using RequestPolicy [0] for selectively disabling JavaScript based on domains. It's usually a bit of clicking to allow crucial sources when I visit a new site, but I think it pays back with the reduction in distracting UI elements and loading times.
> Web pages should be documents to be read, not programs to execute
Says who? Seriously.
Some things are better off as documents, sure, but having a secure and efficient way to run apps over the web has enabled a huge number of awesome things.
And exactly what is so non-open about it? HTML5, JS interpreters, and almost all of the major browser engines are all open-source.
> Web pages should be documents to be read, not programs to execute!
I really hope that you're not one one the people who are confused and upset that native mobile apps are replacing websites. If you want to know why web pages are becoming programs to execute, not documents to read, the answer is trivial: neither the content producers, nor the content consumers, are looking for web pages that are merely documents. They're looking for web pages that are programs. You want web sites to remain documents, but that doesn't meet (almost) anyone's needs.
I've always felt that Flash's influence on paving the way for the modern web gets overlooked. Against the backdrop of a web that was painfully fractured and deficient of features, Flash basically innovated the hell out of all the worst parts, and then slowly but surely browsers and web standards adopted the best innovations (and ignored a few missteps). People talk about Flash dying or being killed, but I think of it more as having served its purpose, in a good way - if the open standards are no longer deficient, then there's no need for proprietary solutions that work around them.
So in that vein, I think the features you've listed are basically the last few good bits that haven't been adopted (or covered by frameworks) yet. But I suspect 1-3 are kind of the same problem - that HTML's never had a good container format.
All of these can be done with HTML and JS, and (bar maybe clipboard) have worked for years:
> 1. One file distribution.
> AFAICT HTML5 has no real ability to do this
We've had this since the 90s, in the form of MIME HTML (.mhtml) files. We also have data: URIs, another approach, which has better browser support.
Nobody ever bothers with this stuff, but it is there and very easy to do. You can literally just open an HTML file in IE, press Ctrl+S and save an MHTML one with all the assets bundled into one.
This can actually be done in HTML as well, if you execute your JS when the DOM's ready, rather than when the page has loaded. jQuery users have done a very weak form of this for years. Again, though, nobody seems to bother.
MHTML was _awesome_ when I was still using IE.
It worked almost flawlessly (probably also cause sites were simpler) and I never understood why other browsers didn't support it.
It's been an RFC since at least 18 years ago ([0], preceded by [1]), which makes it all the more odd that some browsers (Firefox particularly) don't support it.
There's been an open bug for 16 years :( [2] (and a counterpart for saving for 15: [3])
I agree that it's the Adobe implementation which is the main problem here, and that dying is a good thing, but not the goals of Flash nor the SWF format itself. HTML5 and its related standards (CSS, JS, SVG) are a great example of "design by committee" leading to large amounts of gratuitous complexity and inefficiency. It's basically a document markup language which got coerced into a crude approximation of a general-purpose applications language, whereas SWF was designed from the beginning for vector graphics, animations, and interactivity.
Yes, it'll be great when all Flash advertisements with loud music become HTML5 ones and you'll need a 3rd party tool to block them. Absolutely the best thing along with killing off one of the most powerful and yet relatively easy to develop with tools on the web.
Please help me understand this obsession about building a secure software.
I understand there are sensitive information like bank account, email address(maybe? if you are important). But most of stuff on your computer is crap for, I'd say, 99% of the users(me included). And for an average user the convenience trumps everything.
All of this is fine if there is a perfect replacement for flash. No, there isn't. I don't like Html5, for one thing it is not as smooth, if you use progress bar to drag and drop, you can feel the difference.
Hence.. I really don't appreciated some security fanatics in mozilla disable flash weeks ago. I appreciate that you assume we are all Hillary Clinton. Really dude, I don't care my computer got hacked, there is all crap on it. Take a look yourself. Now if you excuse me, I'd like to watch some dancing cat.
One of the principles of security is conservative defaults. Flash is disabled by default because of a series of high-severity security flaws, and a basic understanding that not enough resources are being put in to actively secure the thing.
Yes, most of the stuff on anybody's computer is unimportant.
Now, let me ask. How important is that small part that you didn't talk about? Because it's on the exact same computer, and will be compromised together with the "most" trash that you don't care about.
Really, I would do this un-safe stuff in Virtual Machines. Use secure setup for work and other.
Of course it is better to be secure, but that's not logically possible. Programmers make mistakes, it happens, you computer could be hacked, it happeneds.
Can I at least have a choice to be functional though unsafe? The only way right now is either you have a dedicated computer, or run virtual machines. Mozilla's move seemed more like an personal attack on Adobe than doing something good for the user. They could have make this a choice, have a setting to unlock.. etc. which they didn't do.
Then I could have run unsafed version in VM and block flash everywhere else. At least I'd be functional..
> Please help me understand this obsession about building a secure software.
You probably already know this, but it's so your things don't get stolen and your computer doesn't get exploited and possibly used against other people's computers. Wouldn't you agree that these are bad things?
> most of stuff on your computer is crap
And the 1% (such as your bank information) is the most important and would affect you the most if exploited, wouldn't you say?
> for an average user the convenience trumps everything.
You're completely right, which is why Flash wasn't disabled until things got really bad.
> All of this is fine if there is a perfect replacement for flash. No, there isn't.
This is also a valid point that could be argued for.
> You probably already know this, but it's so your things don't get stolen and your computer doesn't get exploited and > possibly used against other people's computers. Wouldn't you agree that these are bad things?
In general, yes, these are bad things. But it is all about trade off, would you expose your bank account to watch some cat video.. maybe not. Would you expose your browser history to view some hot girl, to me, at least, yes I will do it in VM.
The current software world basically just kills off that possibility of me saying "yes, I'd like the trade some personal info for convenience. "
While I agree that it might be time for Flash (the proprietary plugin) to be retired, I'm totally against dancing on it's grave, as is the tone of this article.
We have to respect it for what it brought to the world.
Flash has enabled many technologies and companies, like online video (youtube?), music playback (....) , games, cartoons and so on.
I remember how amazed I was by the perfection of the first flash website that I've seen. You could interact with spheres, it made high quality sounds and had cool animations and transitions. That was in Netscape Navigator 4.
This was absolutely impossible with HTML back then.
It's still pretty difficult to achieve the same results with HTML5 today.
Flash enabled artists. Nearly all my artist friends have started or played around with flash. Some became animators, some game designers, some UX designers, etc.
I know programmers who were artists playing around with flash and then they got interested in ActionScript and are now full time programmers.
It was their digital classroom.
So let's not forget all this good stuff when talking about the old man. Let him live his final years of retirement in peace.
And who knows, maybe if Adobe open sources it, it might even rejuvenate and have a spectacular come back ?
> Flash has enabled many technologies and companies, like online video (youtube?), music playback (....) , games, cartoons and so on.
We had online video and online music before Flash. The <embed> tag.
> I remember how amazed I was by the perfection of the first flash website that I've seen. You could interact with spheres, it made high quality sounds and had cool animations and transitions. That was in Netscape Navigator 4.
> This was absolutely impossible with HTML back then. It's still pretty difficult to achieve the same results with HTML5 today.
It wasn't impossible with HTML back then. Both Microsoft and Netscape had (incompatible) DHTML implementations you could use to do this stuff. Heck, Windows 98's desktop linked to a showcase of this stuff. It was amazing.
No Flash required.
Now, this isn't to say Flash wasn't useful for doing these things more easily, but it never was the only way to do these things, just the most convenient.
When it worked, which was rarely. ;) Flash's contribution was to solve the codec problem, which realistically is what made content services like youtube possible.
> DHTML
It existed, sure, but on top of IE and NS having completely unrelated solutions, even within each browser the behavior varied randomly by OS and version, and defied graceful degradation. In those days if displaying correctly for a meaningful subset of both mac and PC users was important, you used Flash.
DHTML was a horrible buggy inaccessible mess for anything more than extremely basic stuff. No design tools, and they didn't perform nearly as well as Flash. And sound? I highly doubt that in 1998 there was any capability for syncing sound files to animations outside of browser plugins like Flash, or shockwave or other lesser known plugins.
Yeah. Say what you will about the the bad old times of Dreamweaver and Flash, but back then, visual artists could actually contribute to the Web without going through "web programmer" gatekeepers. Unfortunately programmers have recaptured the power since then, declared the old technologies broken in ways that only programmers can understand, and brought nothing in return.
IMO that's not an accident. Many programmers would also love to kill off Excel, because it's messy and not a "proper database" or something. And if the rumors are true, HyperCard was killed because "you could do everything in Cocoa and ProjectBuilder instead". User-empowering tech always feels messy and unprincipled to programmers.
Dreamweaver was a different kettle of fish.. not the same, it was worse because it messed with HTML code, injecting its own horrible mess of stuff including nasty javascript. Early Dreamweaver at least.
Flash doesn't mess with HTML, it actually forms a fairly good connection with javascript on the page with pretty seamless data exchange between the page and the SWF, back and forth.
I don't think developers have problems with user-enabling technologies (at least I don't). What we do have problems with, however, are technologies that suck away our battery life and CPU time with little or no return, all while bringing a steady stream of exploitable security holes. If Adobe had actually made a serious effort to make Flash a lean, secure machine it'd still be around. Instead, they decided to just keep tacking on new features rather than spending several releases doing heavy optimization and only reactively dealt with security, so here we are.
The bottom line is that nobody but Adobe is to blame for the death of Flash.
If you want to blame anyone for stealing your battery life, blame it on the programmers. They were the using who took and easy to use (therefore easy to abuse) tech and misused it. Does Flash have more security holes then other techs? Maybe, but I do know that since it has a billion users, it is a prime target for every hacker.
However I will agree that Adobe has drank the cool aid when it comes to the broken model which is HTML5, CSS, and WebGL
This reminds me of a recent article on Offworld: http://boingboing.net/2015/08/24/a-game-making-app-for-every... The author went through a list of simple game-making programs that she had written up a few years ago, and found that most of them had expanded towards creating more "professional" games, and so had lost the simplicity that made them good to recommend to people getting into game development.
Perhaps... but they did stuff that the tools of the "open web" could not... those technologies "got stuff done". And if they stole 10 years, then the competition (open web) was not yet up to par for about 7-8 years.
This is insanely far off base. When Flash was ascendant there was no open web, not on the horizon, not even as a glimmer in the milkman's eye. HTML/web development was a nasty brutish mess with each browser extending each "standard" however they wanted, while the w3c specified stuff none of the vendors were even considering implementing.
Then Flash came along with a single API, a single consistent model for interactivity, actual graceful degradation, video and audio that worked, etc. And content worked the same way across browsers and platforms. And it was much, much better than HTML/JS, so web development justifiably got its ass kicked for a few years. THEN, gradually, the standards committees and the browser started standardizing and implementing everything Flash had validated. That lead to the open web.
Hear, hear. Flash was the most wonderful laboratory.
Also: The Flash Virtual Machine is the real problem. It's bloody awful and buggy and slow. The tooling was fabulous, though. ActionScript (3) was (IMHO) excellent, well-documented and easy to use for developer-hackers. MTASC and then the Flex incremental compiler were great too, and I'm sorry they're out of use.
Realistically, sadly, it was never going to be a sudden thing. When it does happen, I don't think many people even notice until someone prominent makes noise about it.
This isn't the worst possible outcome by any means.
These articles are getting boring and repetitive. "Someone think of the children" is the only line I haven't seen yet in these copy and paste yawn-fests. This one actually squeezes "dying" and "death" into the one headline.
Flash is a tool that provides more power and performance in games targeting laptop/desktop browsers who have the Flash player - and there's millions out there.
Adobe have stated the new focus and direction of Flash is console-quality games and "premium video". The latter can be argued all day as to whether HTML is completely up to the task. But it sounds like Adobe don't give a damn about web page ads. They moved on ages ago judging by the roadmap which was written ages ago.
There's Adobe Air for those who want to use the Adobe Flash tools to make games, and target native mobile platforms. It's completely reasonable.
We all [should] know that HTML5 is not up to achieving console-quality games. Nor should it be. The current HTML game scene is dominated by 1980s looking games in the browser. That's fine, but the thing is they're not even as good as 1980s games, and they don't perform consistently cross-browser, often not loading depending on the browser. Or, they load but "no sound" or terrible frame-rate, or other glitches. Maybe a conflict with your ad-blocker. At least Flash is sandboxed from your browsing environment, with all assets nicely folded into the one binary for highly compact, efficient delivery.
Makes you laptop fan spin up? Yeah.. like playing just about any modern game does.
I actually hope Adobe keeps innovating and improving Flash. I'm a fan of open source, but I also make exceptions for things that are up to version 18 and been with us since the 90s. That's just me. If you don't want the flash player on your computer, then simply uninstall it.
I don't know enough to write it myself, but it would be neat to see someone who did write a really good history of the evolution of the dynamic web. We've had so many technologies rise and fall, Java, ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, and now HTML5/JS, plus however many dozens of minor players that never really caught on. It'd be nice to have a comprehensive record of who pushed what, how they all evolved and caught on, or didn't, why the technologies that lost out did so, and what the pros and cons were.
I want Flash to die. What I need is a service that will transcode video to HLS and MPEG-DASH for live stream and VOD. Surprisingly, it's hard to find one that's really excellent.
It's a shame that most of the people espousing Javascript were watching Power Rangers when Flash's real contribution to the web was being recognized.
There are a few archetypes of flash haters and they almost all fall into one of these categories:
* Tech Bloggers looking for a salacious story, considering Flash is Dead articles always get a lot of debate (and clicks)
* Young kids who lack the historical perspective to understand Flash's contributions to the web and just want to bully something unpopular.
* Mac Users who for years suffered a lot of stability and performance problems from the poorly supported Mac Flash plugin and have never let it go.
* Ex-Flash developers who feel that Adobe abandoned and betrayed them by their silence on the "Flash is Dead" issue and turned on the technology that predicated their careers.
* Security experts who were sick of the constant patching of their network's machines due to the continual trickle of discovered flaws.
* Impressional engineers who never researched anything objective about Flash but heard something from one of the above archetypes and blindly follow it.
* Brendan Eich, who in his quest to globally dominate the world with Javascript, threw Flash under the bus publicly many times.
Adobe has done several things to fundamentally address their concerns:
- They released auto-updating plugins (albeit too late in my opinion) so they could patch players on their own.
- They doubled down to make the Mac client more secure and performant (albeit too late in my opinion)
- They increased the frequency of updates, including biweekly beta releases, and quarterly major updates. Nobody knows this though.
What Adobe has not done is market Flash (or its little brother AIR) in any way. They have made some public announcements that they are not abandoning the runtimes but it's hard to know when that will change, so it's almost as if they never said it at all.
I have a very unique take on the situation. I think plugins are a superior way to distribute content technology. It is faster to innovate than open standards development, and provides a more consistent quality than fragmented browser-based development.
My analogy is 3D printers. One day 3D printers will be able to make super complex things such as watches or maybe even cars. Do you really think Rolex or Tesla would adopt such a technology? Hell no. And the reason is simple: your product is reduced to the quality of the crappiest 3D printer out there. The quality is no longer in the content maker's hands, but in the 3D printer manufacturer's hands. Your only option is to reduce the quality of your own content to the lowest common denominator of all the 3D printers out there.
And that's exactly what we now face in an HTML5 future. Flash provided a very consistent presentation of content across all browsers and even mobile during its brief life on Android. Flash would auto update major features every 3 months, giving access to very advanced GPU based rendering features. Now we have to wait around for every browser out there to adopt WebGL standards. Some have done it well, others half-assed it, and on Mobile, forget about it. And even WebGL is now an outdated standard now that glNext is coming. So we have to start all over again.
HTML5 enthusiasts sure are patient people. If they knew how fast Adobe can get updates/security fixes out to a very high % of people, they'd be green with envy.
Well said snja! Much as I dislike the loss of control from using propietary software, I do agree that Flash is greatly superior to HTML5 and javascript with one major exception. Lack of interest from the community at large.
Adobe needs to present a 5 year plan, so that developers can know that Flash wont be going away anytime soon.
I really don't know what benefits open sourcing flash would have, do you? JavaScript is in many ways more dangerous as it does not operate in the same security sandbox as flash. I can not specify a customized Java Script interpreter that visitors must use when they visit my website, they will always be relegated to what has been implemented by their browser. There is a big difference between open-source and free. Open-sourcing flash would most likely lead to a few dozen clones, just look at linux or android. Instead of a unified platform now there would be multiple variations. You would have to make sure your project ran on every single version in order for anyone to even see what you where trying to do. I think firefox's impetus has more to do with them justifying Shumway ( and continuing their funding) then anything.
Ok, kill Flash. Then you will get HTML5 banners :) without simplest redraw region optimization inside, so you will get much more hot from your computer.
it's funny but Flash IDE is the best tool nowadays to create HTML5 animations.
Also Flash is used for crossplatform apps and game development for social networks, mobile and desktop platforms. I really doubt that million players of Candy Crush will remove Flash Player :) Top 25 Facebook games are made with Flash :) Market is still huge. There are no any alternative to Flash nowadays, Unity3D doesn't work in Chrome, WebGL export is a shit(we are all waiting for a new standard), HTML5 game development is really expensive and sometimes impossible.
62 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadBack in school, flash games were all the rage and you could bet if we were on the computers for a lesson 90% of the time would be spent on the helicopter game or motorbike sport!
So pack you misguided nostalgia and put it next to your Sonic the Hedgehog figurines(they are dolls and you know it).
HTML5 canvas? Not so much. Maybe some day. But it hasn't had very much impact so far.
It really is disappointing plugins are being removed from Chrome. I am seriously considering moving to a new browser. Those who didn't like it could just disable it.
That said, Flash still has features that are missing from HTML5.
1. One file distribution.
AFAICT HTML5 has no real ability to do this
2. Easy streaming
I suppose you can break a HTML5 app into multiple files but with flash there's one file and it can start running the content of that file when only some small percentage of it has downloaded. And, it just magically happens or rather it's super easy to setup. Reproducing that in HTML5 is a huge chore.
3. Not running when not visible
HTML5 has no way to stop an animation when offscreen. If you have a requestAnimationFrame Canvas or WebGL or element based animation and your element is scrolled off the screen HTML5 will still execute your code. Flash will not. So, blogs aggregating flash content work. Blogs aggregating canvas/webgl content don't even exist or unlike flash each item needs to be on its own page. There are some workaround but they require you to modify all content where as Flash you can use 3rd party content and still get this.
4. Can copy to clipboard
Yes I know that's considered "unsafe" and yet nearly every website that needs that feature uses flash for it. Google Docs and GMail both use it even though Google's Chrome team claims they won't put the feature in HTML5 because it's unsafe. They need to make up their minds.
I'm sure people who are more familiar with flash can name more features they wish would make it to HTML5.
And on top of that I can easily block flash. I can't block HTML5 so much :P
[0] https://requestpolicycontinued.github.io
Not any web page, and not completely unusable, but it's getting worse every single day.
It makes me sick to see the open web perverted so badly. Web pages should be documents to be read, not programs to execute!
Says who? Seriously.
Some things are better off as documents, sure, but having a secure and efficient way to run apps over the web has enabled a huge number of awesome things.
And exactly what is so non-open about it? HTML5, JS interpreters, and almost all of the major browser engines are all open-source.
I really hope that you're not one one the people who are confused and upset that native mobile apps are replacing websites. If you want to know why web pages are becoming programs to execute, not documents to read, the answer is trivial: neither the content producers, nor the content consumers, are looking for web pages that are merely documents. They're looking for web pages that are programs. You want web sites to remain documents, but that doesn't meet (almost) anyone's needs.
So in that vein, I think the features you've listed are basically the last few good bits that haven't been adopted (or covered by frameworks) yet. But I suspect 1-3 are kind of the same problem - that HTML's never had a good container format.
More gear towards games though.
Existing browser devs have been quite resistant to these suggestions.
Another approach: blocking advertising and annoyances hosts via /etc/hosts or dnsmasq. Latter will block entire domains. It also reads /etc/hosts.
> 1. One file distribution.
> AFAICT HTML5 has no real ability to do this
We've had this since the 90s, in the form of MIME HTML (.mhtml) files. We also have data: URIs, another approach, which has better browser support.
Nobody ever bothers with this stuff, but it is there and very easy to do. You can literally just open an HTML file in IE, press Ctrl+S and save an MHTML one with all the assets bundled into one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_URI_scheme
> 2. Easy streaming
This can actually be done in HTML as well, if you execute your JS when the DOM's ready, rather than when the page has loaded. jQuery users have done a very weak form of this for years. Again, though, nobody seems to bother.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/DOMConte...
> 3. Not running when not visible
> HTML5 has no way to stop an animation when offscreen.
HTML5's had the ability to detect if the window is visible or active for a long time now, but nobody uses it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/User_expe...
> 4. Can copy to clipboard
Internet Explorer had this years ago, and you can do this with HTML5 too, it's now standard. Strangely, nobody uses it.
http://stackoverflow.com/a/30810322/736162
> And on top of that I can easily block flash. I can't block HTML5 so much :P
NoScript!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noscript/?src...
There's been an open bug for 16 years :( [2] (and a counterpart for saving for 15: [3])
[0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2557
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2110
[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18764
[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=40873
What's wrong with using data URIs?
But hey, at least I was reminded of this site http://flashvhtml.com/
Flash version runs a lot smoother (as expected)... Firefox, desktop. Sound didn't work in the HTML version at all, and frame-rate was slower.
I understand there are sensitive information like bank account, email address(maybe? if you are important). But most of stuff on your computer is crap for, I'd say, 99% of the users(me included). And for an average user the convenience trumps everything.
All of this is fine if there is a perfect replacement for flash. No, there isn't. I don't like Html5, for one thing it is not as smooth, if you use progress bar to drag and drop, you can feel the difference.
Hence.. I really don't appreciated some security fanatics in mozilla disable flash weeks ago. I appreciate that you assume we are all Hillary Clinton. Really dude, I don't care my computer got hacked, there is all crap on it. Take a look yourself. Now if you excuse me, I'd like to watch some dancing cat.
You need to make the decision. That's the point.
Now, let me ask. How important is that small part that you didn't talk about? Because it's on the exact same computer, and will be compromised together with the "most" trash that you don't care about.
Of course it is better to be secure, but that's not logically possible. Programmers make mistakes, it happens, you computer could be hacked, it happeneds.
Can I at least have a choice to be functional though unsafe? The only way right now is either you have a dedicated computer, or run virtual machines. Mozilla's move seemed more like an personal attack on Adobe than doing something good for the user. They could have make this a choice, have a setting to unlock.. etc. which they didn't do.
Then I could have run unsafed version in VM and block flash everywhere else. At least I'd be functional..
Maybe your PC is currently DDOS'ing github as well. If so then you are really doing a wonderful service to a lot of other people too!
Computers will get hacked. Any dominating pc OS, once found a security hole, will add thousands to the bonet.
This is really a fact. Also means, if you are targeted by some hacker, you will get DDOSed. Requiring all user to be security aware is not practical.
You probably already know this, but it's so your things don't get stolen and your computer doesn't get exploited and possibly used against other people's computers. Wouldn't you agree that these are bad things?
> most of stuff on your computer is crap
And the 1% (such as your bank information) is the most important and would affect you the most if exploited, wouldn't you say?
> for an average user the convenience trumps everything.
You're completely right, which is why Flash wasn't disabled until things got really bad.
> All of this is fine if there is a perfect replacement for flash. No, there isn't.
This is also a valid point that could be argued for.
In general, yes, these are bad things. But it is all about trade off, would you expose your bank account to watch some cat video.. maybe not. Would you expose your browser history to view some hot girl, to me, at least, yes I will do it in VM.
The current software world basically just kills off that possibility of me saying "yes, I'd like the trade some personal info for convenience. "
We have to respect it for what it brought to the world.
Flash has enabled many technologies and companies, like online video (youtube?), music playback (....) , games, cartoons and so on.
I remember how amazed I was by the perfection of the first flash website that I've seen. You could interact with spheres, it made high quality sounds and had cool animations and transitions. That was in Netscape Navigator 4.
This was absolutely impossible with HTML back then. It's still pretty difficult to achieve the same results with HTML5 today.
Flash enabled artists. Nearly all my artist friends have started or played around with flash. Some became animators, some game designers, some UX designers, etc.
I know programmers who were artists playing around with flash and then they got interested in ActionScript and are now full time programmers.
It was their digital classroom.
So let's not forget all this good stuff when talking about the old man. Let him live his final years of retirement in peace.
And who knows, maybe if Adobe open sources it, it might even rejuvenate and have a spectacular come back ?
We had online video and online music before Flash. The <embed> tag.
> I remember how amazed I was by the perfection of the first flash website that I've seen. You could interact with spheres, it made high quality sounds and had cool animations and transitions. That was in Netscape Navigator 4.
> This was absolutely impossible with HTML back then. It's still pretty difficult to achieve the same results with HTML5 today.
It wasn't impossible with HTML back then. Both Microsoft and Netscape had (incompatible) DHTML implementations you could use to do this stuff. Heck, Windows 98's desktop linked to a showcase of this stuff. It was amazing.
No Flash required.
Now, this isn't to say Flash wasn't useful for doing these things more easily, but it never was the only way to do these things, just the most convenient.
When it worked, which was rarely. ;) Flash's contribution was to solve the codec problem, which realistically is what made content services like youtube possible.
> DHTML
It existed, sure, but on top of IE and NS having completely unrelated solutions, even within each browser the behavior varied randomly by OS and version, and defied graceful degradation. In those days if displaying correctly for a meaningful subset of both mac and PC users was important, you used Flash.
IMO that's not an accident. Many programmers would also love to kill off Excel, because it's messy and not a "proper database" or something. And if the rumors are true, HyperCard was killed because "you could do everything in Cocoa and ProjectBuilder instead". User-empowering tech always feels messy and unprincipled to programmers.
Flash doesn't mess with HTML, it actually forms a fairly good connection with javascript on the page with pretty seamless data exchange between the page and the SWF, back and forth.
The bottom line is that nobody but Adobe is to blame for the death of Flash.
The state of the open web slowed down because of them.
And I see this happening again with native mobile apps.
Then Flash came along with a single API, a single consistent model for interactivity, actual graceful degradation, video and audio that worked, etc. And content worked the same way across browsers and platforms. And it was much, much better than HTML/JS, so web development justifiably got its ass kicked for a few years. THEN, gradually, the standards committees and the browser started standardizing and implementing everything Flash had validated. That lead to the open web.
Also: The Flash Virtual Machine is the real problem. It's bloody awful and buggy and slow. The tooling was fabulous, though. ActionScript (3) was (IMHO) excellent, well-documented and easy to use for developer-hackers. MTASC and then the Flex incremental compiler were great too, and I'm sorry they're out of use.
This isn't the worst possible outcome by any means.
Flash is a tool that provides more power and performance in games targeting laptop/desktop browsers who have the Flash player - and there's millions out there.
Adobe have stated the new focus and direction of Flash is console-quality games and "premium video". The latter can be argued all day as to whether HTML is completely up to the task. But it sounds like Adobe don't give a damn about web page ads. They moved on ages ago judging by the roadmap which was written ages ago.
There's Adobe Air for those who want to use the Adobe Flash tools to make games, and target native mobile platforms. It's completely reasonable.
We all [should] know that HTML5 is not up to achieving console-quality games. Nor should it be. The current HTML game scene is dominated by 1980s looking games in the browser. That's fine, but the thing is they're not even as good as 1980s games, and they don't perform consistently cross-browser, often not loading depending on the browser. Or, they load but "no sound" or terrible frame-rate, or other glitches. Maybe a conflict with your ad-blocker. At least Flash is sandboxed from your browsing environment, with all assets nicely folded into the one binary for highly compact, efficient delivery.
Makes you laptop fan spin up? Yeah.. like playing just about any modern game does.
I actually hope Adobe keeps innovating and improving Flash. I'm a fan of open source, but I also make exceptions for things that are up to version 18 and been with us since the 90s. That's just me. If you don't want the flash player on your computer, then simply uninstall it.
There are a few archetypes of flash haters and they almost all fall into one of these categories:
* Tech Bloggers looking for a salacious story, considering Flash is Dead articles always get a lot of debate (and clicks)
* Young kids who lack the historical perspective to understand Flash's contributions to the web and just want to bully something unpopular.
* Mac Users who for years suffered a lot of stability and performance problems from the poorly supported Mac Flash plugin and have never let it go.
* Ex-Flash developers who feel that Adobe abandoned and betrayed them by their silence on the "Flash is Dead" issue and turned on the technology that predicated their careers.
* Security experts who were sick of the constant patching of their network's machines due to the continual trickle of discovered flaws.
* Impressional engineers who never researched anything objective about Flash but heard something from one of the above archetypes and blindly follow it.
* Brendan Eich, who in his quest to globally dominate the world with Javascript, threw Flash under the bus publicly many times.
Adobe has done several things to fundamentally address their concerns:
- They released auto-updating plugins (albeit too late in my opinion) so they could patch players on their own.
- They doubled down to make the Mac client more secure and performant (albeit too late in my opinion)
- They increased the frequency of updates, including biweekly beta releases, and quarterly major updates. Nobody knows this though.
What Adobe has not done is market Flash (or its little brother AIR) in any way. They have made some public announcements that they are not abandoning the runtimes but it's hard to know when that will change, so it's almost as if they never said it at all.
I have a very unique take on the situation. I think plugins are a superior way to distribute content technology. It is faster to innovate than open standards development, and provides a more consistent quality than fragmented browser-based development.
My analogy is 3D printers. One day 3D printers will be able to make super complex things such as watches or maybe even cars. Do you really think Rolex or Tesla would adopt such a technology? Hell no. And the reason is simple: your product is reduced to the quality of the crappiest 3D printer out there. The quality is no longer in the content maker's hands, but in the 3D printer manufacturer's hands. Your only option is to reduce the quality of your own content to the lowest common denominator of all the 3D printers out there.
And that's exactly what we now face in an HTML5 future. Flash provided a very consistent presentation of content across all browsers and even mobile during its brief life on Android. Flash would auto update major features every 3 months, giving access to very advanced GPU based rendering features. Now we have to wait around for every browser out there to adopt WebGL standards. Some have done it well, others half-assed it, and on Mobile, forget about it. And even WebGL is now an outdated standard now that glNext is coming. So we have to start all over again.
HTML5 enthusiasts sure are patient people. If they knew how fast Adobe can get updates/security fixes out to a very high % of people, they'd be green with envy.
it's funny but Flash IDE is the best tool nowadays to create HTML5 animations.
Also Flash is used for crossplatform apps and game development for social networks, mobile and desktop platforms. I really doubt that million players of Candy Crush will remove Flash Player :) Top 25 Facebook games are made with Flash :) Market is still huge. There are no any alternative to Flash nowadays, Unity3D doesn't work in Chrome, WebGL export is a shit(we are all waiting for a new standard), HTML5 game development is really expensive and sometimes impossible.
Time will show.