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Ask HN: Has Flash Been Replaced?

14 points by buboard ↗ HN
Adobe plans to end support for flash in 2020 . Chromium plans to remove it by then. Yet, i am noticing many websites still use flash, because surprisingly it works better than alternatives that were supposed to work better. I have seen it being mixed with webrtc for video and some other uses in various places. It is also odd that 10 years after people declared the end of it there are uses for it where there are no decent alternatives. E.g. I was also looking for a replacement to standard Flash-based website chat room, and there aren't any. So, is flash really ready to be removed from the web?

17 comments

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samfisher83
At least flash was somewhat consistent between platforms. Due to chrome's market share it has kind of become the defacto standard.
godzillabrennus
Somehow an entirely proprietary Adobe platform was preferable to a mostly open source Google platform?

I’d rather an open source standard exist than a proprietary one.

samfisher83
I am not saying one is preferable to another. I am just saying its google now defining the standard instead of adobe.
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Was it? I remember trying to watch flash stuff on Linux at the turn of the century and it wasn't so consistent at all.
[dead] mantawolf
Websites are still using Flash, not because better alteratives dont exist, but because of cost of redevelopment. HTML5 will do anything Flash will and isnt a giant security hole like Flash is.

Flash should be taken out behind the shed and shot, I removed it from my personal browsers years ago rather than deal with security issues.

barberousse
A lot of companies whose business was highly interactive Flash media there's still no replacement that is one-to-one to what Flash was giving them.
lacker
For the specific case of a chat room, real-time communication with web sockets is good enough now in JavaScript that you can just do JavaScript.
kevinherron
I can't even remember the last time I saw a website using Flash...
neilsimp1
I know of two websites that still use Flash Player for their videos.

One is an, um, adult site. The other is HBO Go, which I only know because I had issues getting this running on Linux. I haven't tried it in several months though so that may have changed.

theandrewbailey
I only recall running into about 3 kinds of uses for Flash:

1. Video and animation. We have native browser video tags.

2. Brochureware (static pages, like restaurant websites). Looking back, I think this was done to work around the fact that browsers didn't render things the same. We have much better CSS standards and implementations today.

3. Games. Javascript is much faster today, and there's WebGL.

I never was a big chat user, but WebRTC and sockets seem to cover those uses, too.

Unless I'm missing a whole bunch of things, there's not much reason to keep Flash around on the open web. The security issues alone make it quite a headache.

taurath
There's not yet a good JS framework for games that does nearly what flash did 15 years ago, that I know of. WYSIWYG animations and interactive games used to be one of the most fun parts of the internet, and they're still either all flash or programmer projects.
[dead] terrycody
I think you should take a look at webassembly.
danbolt
It's a lot less centralized than it used to be (eg: Flash Portals), and you're right that there isn't the same iconic replacement as Flash's WYSIWYG editor, but I think there are a lot more browser-playable tools and options than there used to be. [1]

[1] https://itch.io/games/platform-web

grepgeek
Which websites do you still find using Flash? I ask because I am genuinely interested to know. I think it has been years since I came across a website that used Flash. I uninstalled Flash the day I found that YouTube does not require Flash anymore.
mattfrommars
If were Chinese and use their website to watch game streams or TV/movies, you will need it.
mattfrommars
I have noticed that flash is very popular with Chinese community - as per my observation of how widespread it is in Chinese top streaming companies. The industry which they operate is in streaming Chinese TVs shows and game streams.
opliko
Flash based website chat room? What? Never ran into something like that - the closest thing i've seen was a chat with flash based sound notifications using flash, so if you didn't want it to give out any sounds it worked fine without flash.

There are a lot of technologies that can be used for chat. Literally by looking for a flash chat room (searched "flash chat room for a website") the third result I got in google was a html5 based one. Just to name a few random examples of open source html/css/js based chats: https://github.com/credija/opa https://conversejs.org/ https://rocket.chat/ https://firechat.firebaseapp.com/ https://deadsimplechat.com/ and since I mentioned css, I have to add this: https://github.com/kkuchta/css-only-chat :)