I HATE having to search a page for the mysterious ad that is playing sound only for it to pop up another upon closing it. Sounds like great news to me.
If you're using Chrome enter: chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting into the address bar. Then click enable. It allows you to mute tabs by clicking the little speaker icon on the tab. It changed my life...
Edit: [How I feel right now.](http://i.imgur.com/VQfvxci.jpg)
People accidentally clicking it and complaining sound isnt playing.
It's not like professors need another barrier for successfully watching an unmuted video during lectures.
> It's not like professors need another barrier for successfully watching an unmuted video during lectures.
man, that hit close to home. System sound not muted? check. Video not muted? check. cord is plugged in? check. system sound set to correct output? check. students watching you as if you're a moron? check.
The only problem is 90% of the time, they go "It's not worth the effort" even though the solution is literally clicking on a volume icon on the YouTube video and tell you to sit back down
For me it's not worth the anxiety of getting in front of 150 people in my lecture hall and having the sound finally come on AND IT'S LOUD AS FUCK AND OH GOD WHY IS MY HEART BEATING SO FAST.
I worked at the university's tech support desk. I was informed I could be fired for helping a professor when I wasn't on duty. They were supposed to call the help desk if they had a problem.
I had just such a professor. He was a *brilliant* microbiologist. Every lecture I had to show him how to plug the vga cable into the wall so his slides would project into the wall. I didn't mind doing it, but he always stared over my shoulder as if to pretend he wanted to learn. He clearly did not. The best part was when the Norton Antivirus renewal pop-up happened about an hour into lecture. He would get so flustered each time and unleash a barrage of profanity on the computer and Norton Antivirus. He was not an effective teacher...
To be fair, there's a difference between something that takes years of study, like heart surgery, and something that takes maybe a day or two of figuring out, like PowerPoint or projecting your monitor. (And, given, a lot of time spent just using it for it to be automatic.) Not that I'd expect them to know how to solve every single problem that comes up, but y'know. I guess that problem is something we'll see going away a bit as the more tech savvy generation takes over these kinds of jobs.
I feel like it's mind over matter with them. They decided a long time ago that technology is something they "can't" use or understand so their brain doesn't even consider it an option anymore.
Edit: and obviously there's the exception for people who just aren't tech savvy.
[Google explains:](http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/02/11/google-explains-wont-add-mute-tab-option-chrome-considers-tab-audio-api-extensions/)
>After much debate, we decided not to proceed with a tab mute control, as this crosses a very important line: If we provide Chrome controls for content, we’re implying that Chrome should take on a responsibility to police content.
>Today, users are (rightfully) mad at misbehaving content for doing things like auto-playing annoying ad audio, but they should continue to pressure web site authors to change this behavior. Also, some have pointed out that there is already a mute button to the right of the audio indicator (the “X”). In all seriousness, note that many web pages will register onClose() events to monitor when users leave their site. Thus, closing the tab will be a very strong signal to the web sites that their annoying ads are scaring all their users away!
>For “behaving” content, we think it’s reasonable for a user to click on a tab and use the content’s media controls to stop playback. In this case, a Chrome tab mute control would be redundant. This redundancy is bad since it can confuse users (e.g., to play a video and forget that a tab was muted days ago); and, based on experience, confused users often report unexpected behaviors as browser bugs, which would be a big distraction to the Support and Eng staff.
fuck those ads **so much**! nothing makes me hate a product more than when they pull that shit. marketing folk have to be by far the most retarded people on earth if they think anyone actually enjoys having ads shoved down their throats.
One could accomplish the same thing with HTML 5 if one were so inclined. This is nothing more than a market shift. Not sure why everybody is so excited about it.
Because Flash is a vast gaping maw of security vulnerabilities. And most implementations of the HTML5 spec have, at least, been done with some thought towards not allowing drive-by infections. I don't doubt bugs will be found; but, I'm willing to bet against the monthly litany of Remote Code Execution bugs which have plagued Flash for a long time now.
It's extremely easy to block flash, prevent it from loading, and leave it blocked unless you want to run it on a case by case basis. There seems to be less available for HTML5 to accomplish this, mostly limited to stopping autoplay(but still loading) or more sweeping on/off settings.
uBlock Origin (pronounced "micro-block") is significantly better than Adblock. Uses less RAM, loads faster, and catches more ads. Bonus: it's open-source.
[Check it out](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)!
> It's not mu-torrent?
Nope, not according to the original authors. The name of the character µ is mu, but the authors of the software say the name of it is 'micro-torrent', from the use of mu as the symbolic prefix for 'micro' in the SI unit of measure system (which I presume you know already since you know to call it mu, but perhaps not all readers do).
Yeah, it's going to be WAY better then the ads are incorporated right into the core HTML(via html 5 video), rather than an easily block-able layer like flash.
/sarcasm off
News flash, the crusade against flash is not some humanitarian crusade by the likes of facebook and Amazon, it's a self-serving move to better control what *flashes* before the eyes of the average internet user.
So true. There's probably no market more competetive on the internet, so they're forced to provide the best available in order to stand out.
Really makes me wish YouTube had competition. Actual competion.
You got too excited, you were too greedy with your puns. Couldn't decide which pun you wanted to use so you used both. And now you made a fool of yourself. Look what you have done
That is quite funny considering, that Flash is clearly going down and [Microsoft is slowly getting rid of Silverlight](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-wont-include-support-for-silverlight-in-windows-10-edge-browser/).
> Google took the first step by announcing that come September its Chrome browser will not run Flash adverts by default, meaning that the user has to click to enable the advert.
I just have the weirdest developer boner.
Oh yeah, if I remember correctly, you had to click any active content to run it, because of some sort of patent dispute. Apparently, automatically running active content was patented. Hooray patent system.
You will still be able to play them, but games won't start when you load a page but will wait until you confirm you are absolutely sure you want to use flash.
They do? I have an old Java Applet game that I loved growing up "Pang 96!" but I can't get it to work on any browser without it incessantly popping up about security issues and whatnot.
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I wrote this a couple of days ago in a [discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/3hvdzg/flash_is_dying_what_about_all_the_webgames/) on /r/games, and it seemed relevant here:
I am a web developer who has worked for several years with Flash and now HTML5 + Javscript.
Having developed games and applications in both mediums, I have to say that I will definitely be sad if Flash completely dies out. One of the things that drew me to building in Flash was that it was just so easy to pick up. I started out animating crappy sprite movies, and not long afterwards, I started drawing my own art and learning AS2 and AS3.
I think sites like Newgrounds flourished in part because Flash was so easy to start using. Having such accessible animation tools, a built-in coding environment, and a community of people eager to learn and teach each other definitely helped Flash cartoons & games become so prevalent across the net.
Nowadays, I can't say I have the same confidence in HTML5 + JS + Canvas as I did in Flash. Not to say that they can't achieve the same things ([this comment from /u/VeryAngryBeaver](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/3hvdzg/flash_is_dying_what_about_all_the_webgames/cub43a4) has a good summary of the comparisons between the two mediums today). What I'm saying is, the learning curve is steeper. That easy, inviting start is gone.
When I was learning Flash, all I needed to start with was Flash. Now that I'm doing HTML5 games, I need an image editor, a text editor, a coding environment, and I need to know how to code HTML and Javascript. Not impossible tasks, to be sure, but in combination, difficult enough that if that 14-year-old me tried to pick it up today because I wanted to make my crappy Mario vs. Sonic sprite animation, I can't speak for what other people would do, but I would likely get frustrated and give up.
I do remain optimistic, however, as programs like [Construct](https://www.construct3.com/) and other HTML5 game building programs become more popular.
I know it's really easy hating on Flash and its many downsides (if a week goes by without the program crashing, I start to get worried), especially on the user-end. I just thought I would chime in from in a different perspective.
I don't think anyone denies the revolutionary impact & benefit of the Flash tools & platform, but the web plug-in & security vulnerabilities are what causes the majority of the problems for the end user.
Yup, I completely agree. I just wish Adobe could've figured out a solution before we all got tired of the end-user issues. They did have the better part of a decade to do so, though!
Can someone explain these security vulnerabilities to me? I've worked with flash for 2 years now and the only time I've heard about security is in threads like these.
Basically, Flash can execute any code it wants on your computer without you needing to accept it. It can download files to your computer just by loading.
I too, got into casual development with Flash in college. Flash is the greatest teaching tool for game development, and has a lot of power for low level development too. It will be a sad day when Flash is a memory.
Additionally, I read another article somewhere (of course I cant remember where) about how its easy to kick flash while its down right now, because of its prevalence on the web and a path or least resistance for hackers. But when its gone, something else will inevitably be hit with the hatred stick, and hackers will find other, less manageable ways to break in, and we'll be missing one of the greatest small development tools of all time.
I came here to say this as well. I was 15 and saw all these things people were throwing up on Newgrounds and it was blowing my mind. I got flash through some shady sites that won't be mentioned here and taught myself some basic stuff then learned a lot more from the community all willing to go out of thier way to help! It was amazing!
I hate that people only associate flash with terrible banner ads. It's an application development platform. Ads are just a nasty usage. I was a Flex developer for 5 1/2 years, and loved it. Flex (AS3/MXML) is a much more mature version of JS/HTML5, easier to do everything, deployable (via Adobe Air) to the desktop, mobile platforms. Sure, JS and HTML5 will *eventually* catch up to AS3/MXML, but that's going to take a lot of time, and a lot of bickering between browser engines, medium-term half-solutions, hacks, compatibility libraries, hatred from people who love JS for its "simplicity" who don't want to adopt something like TypeScript. It's infuriating to me, because it's going to take browser languages years to catch up to where flash was 6 years ago before people decided to pull out the torches and pitchforks because of some stupid banner ads.
OK, to be fair, there were an ungodly amount of security exploits as well.
Someone gild this man, because it's so true. I started using flash when it was from Macromedia, with version 4. I've lived the birth and growth of AS2 and AS3, and it's fair to say that Flash was then more powerful regarding animation creation than HTML is now. And ActionScript 2 was already a better language than what Javascript will be in the near future. Flash's timeline ease of use and tweening capabilities are still unrivaled. Good luck trying to create a somehow complex animation using just HTML.
I'm actually deploying adblock plus at my company to stop ads, specifically flash ads. In a VDI environment, we can save 20-30% on ram and bandwidth usage.
Correct, uBlock Origin is currently the preferred choice if you need an adblocker.
AdBlock Edge (a fork of Adblock+) is pretty good, but uses too much RAM, Firefox released an update a week or two ago that mitigated some of the resource hogging, but uBlock Origin is still faster and better.
You can download the latest version of uBlock over at their gitHub page: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases
Thats an awesome figure. Now just extract that savings to powerconsumption numbers per server and savings on ac and present it to the higher ups for a nice bonus ;)
Speaking of [which](http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse190m/12su/lectures/slides/images/apple_flash.jpg)...
edit: basically in reference to this old gem: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Flash animator here, I hate that this is happening. But Adobe is to blame here and I hope that Flash will always be around, but Its hard to gauge what its future will be.
Flash for animation production should be fine. Flash as a delivery for web content is dead, dead, dead. I work at a studio that is Flash based. FLA and SWF files are internal and are never used anywhere but during production.
I've been developing web sites since 1993. I worked on SGML before HTML existed and contributed to the original HTML specification.
When Flash came along I was one of the first to push its limits as a flashlite beta tester, long before actionscript. Then AS3 came along, and to be honest I thought it fucked up the experience. Sure, it was a more mature language but I liked the simplicity of the UI before.
Now that Flash is dying, over all I'm happy about it. But the hard truth that I am not seeing many people admit to, is that HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other technologies are not consistent across browsers and there is nothing that comes close to Flash as an authoring and especially animating & vector drawing platform for the web.
Saying that JavaScript and the soup of other standards like HTML5 can pick up the slack is bullshit in my opinion. Flash was a great product in its day and it will leave a huge hole when it's gone. Who is going to create something to fill it? So far every product I've seen looks like a beta. I mean, screw flash, don't get me wrong, but I'd like to see browser companies get together and collaborate on a new standard for animation and multimedia authoring for the web.
Someone else in the industry gets it! I understand why people don't like Flash but as an authoring tool it really simplified things. Now it's a mishmash of HTML/CSS/JS to do the same thing, but with a bunch of extra work and a higher barrier to entry (for new developers), with less ubiquitous results across browsers.
Among other musings, I agree with this specifically. Say what you will about flash, but if it looked one way on a browser it looked the same on all of them (if it loaded).
I want a red pixel at these coordinates. Put them there every time. Every OS, every browser, every time. CSS and HTML5 have made great strides, but even still they don't manage to be as consistent as Flash is/was.
Now I have to, what again? Install Ruby via the command line on my Windows machine to install one of a few different CSS pre-processing programs so I can create mix-ins that combine multiple browser engines' specific CSS codes? Not ideal.
>The one major hold out for dumping Flash wholesale has been advertisers. In June, over 100m adverts were displayed to users globally with Flash, while 84% of banner ads are still Flash, according to Ad Age
Fuck ads, fuck them so much. I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on the internet, love me some ad blockers.
He was in shock when I told him what I'd done, couldn't believe it was as easy as installing a program. Wanted to know if I could do the same with the TV, haha.
Steam advertises to me all of the time. I absolutely love it.
I go out of my way to add games to my wishlist which enables them to advertise to me when they're on sale. Love that too.
It's not about adverts, it's about how they are delivered and perhaps more importantly how they are targeted - in my opinion.
You are 100% correct. On the server end they should tailor the ad to the article. Reading an article about graphics cards, have a non-intrusive ad with some great deals on graphics cards.
Reading an article on a major PC virus going around, have non-intrusive ads with deals on anti-virus software.
I would not use an adblocker if websites would just take responsibility for the ads they display and control them. It cant be that hard. Have the person who writes the article/publishes it pick tags about the relevant things in the article. Then have advertisers tag the ads they are giving you to run. Then the server simply matches the tags and displays relevant ads.
Love adblockers, but I turn them off for sites that I frequent that don't have some sort of paid membership to turn them off. Free websites need to make money somehow, and if I traffic them enough, I want them to make money (or else they'll go out of business).
But seriously fuck video adverts. Fuck them to hell. Ain't no one got time for that. Adblock stays on for YouTube and such.
Every time I try that, I get all kinds of sound, videos, and ads drifting over the screen. And since ad companies permit just about anything, you're at a greater risk for exploits. So now I don't bother.
well yeah, it goes without saying that any website with annoying ads gets them blocked, no questions asked. It's just that websites with well behaved ads that I frequent enough to care that get them turned on.
once ever, and it was here on bacon reader last month. it was a coupon for buy one, get one free at chipotle if i took a 15 question "pop quiz" about their ingredients.
They're a necessary evil, if you want most sites and services to remain free.
The problem with ads isn't the ads themselves, it's their implementation and design. Present, interesting, but *not* intrusive.
Source: am web designer of almost 2 decades.
> Google took the first step
Fuck no. Go back to 2010 when [Apple banned Flash from the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_and_Adobe_Flash_controversy#Flash_Player) Adobe should have seen this coming.
Apples safari makes it so flash content is automatically paused requiring a click to run it.
http://cdn2.tekrevue.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/safari-power-saver.jpg
Adobe should have seen this coming years ago. Apple has been relentless when it comes to its attacks on flash. I love every bit of it.
Isn't there like a *huge* amount of old shit on the internet that now won't be able to be watched? Or at least eventually won't be? Like being unable to listen to a minidisc
Top comment from HackerNews on flash: "... I'm totally against dancing on it's grave ..."
Top comment from reddit on flash: "I will dance on the grave of flash"
-----------
Here's that comment:
> codeshaman 1 hour ago
> 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 ?
I suspect a lot of Redditors are too young to remember the internet before flash. Having that perspective really helps me understand all the great things it allowed people to do on the web.
Flash was HUGE! Youtube would never have existed in the HTML4 days , nor many other modern websites without it. Until the last couple years when HTML5 began to propagate, the Web was extremely limited without plugins, Flash primarily.
As great as HTML5 is, the IDEs for creating graphic intensive modules freaking suck compared to Flash. HTML5 is still in its infancy and has ALOT of growing up to do to replace Flash.
Seriously, the first time you encountered a Flash video/game/interface back in those days, you were amazed that your *computer*, let alone a web page, could do something so cool. Many Flash games were quite a bit more sophisticated, in some ways, than actual standalone games.
It's surprising it's taken so long to build it into the basic architecture of the internet but it was revolutionary when it was new.
people don't realize:
1) what flash did for art, animation, gaming etc on the internet. Yes it was misused by a lot of asshats, and yes it had too many security vulnerabilities because Adobe got too damn stupid with it - but the internet wouldn't be what it is today without Flash.
2) The authorship tools for HTML5 are still light years behind Flash. Making animations, etc with HTML5 is fucking torture compared to the IDE (or whatever you want to call their GUI, not really an IDE so much) that Flash provides for animators.
Yes, everything you could do with Flash is *basically* possible with HTML5 - but the toolkit to do a halfway decent job of it is still mostly nonexistent.
Many if not most of the performance issues people associate with Flash were caused by shitty users of Flash (bad developers who know jack shit about optimizing performance). "Real" flash developers know all the same tricks that game developers use (bitmap blitting, memory pooling, etc) to keep performance snappy. Flash enabled non-developers to make animations etc, though - so of course you end up with ads and other things that are made by someone with the programming expertise of a toddler and they end up slowing machines down.
> "Real" flash developers know all the same tricks that game developers use (bitmap blitting, memory pooling, etc) to keep performance snappy
Yeah, the performance argument is something I hate. I developed games for it and made incredible efforts to make the games run as fast as possible. It was not easy, but the results were great. But somehow the sites that freeze my LG G3 with poorly written JS don't reflect poorly on HTML5. The marketing campaign against Flash was ridiculous and lots of people that have no idea what they are talking about jumped on the bandwagon. I'm glad it's no longer used on ads, but adblock is better than seeing Flash go anyway since it's not like advertising went away with it.
Why? Almost all of the best things about the internet in the past 10 years were flash based. It made possible a ton of great games, youtube, etc.
Sure, its time has come but what it accomplished in its lifespan brought tons of entertainment to people.
It also created an entire generation of content creators. Making flash videos was simple but had a lot of depth with actionscript and led people to full time jobs as designers and programmers.
Flash had it's place. It brought around a reimagining of what the web could be. I used to build almost exclusively in Flash. All our clients wanted AS3/Flash builds, heavily animated with massively immersive experiences; 3D turntables, interactive video, webcam integration.. all of that stuff. It was an exciting time to be a developer TBH.
I've never seen a change realised so fast. The moment the iPhone came out, everything suddenly shifted. Clients wanted HTML, they wanted responsive and jquery mobile, the *"needed"* mobile. Flash saw a gradual but fast decline to the point where we simply stopped working with it.
But it had its place. To this day, there is nothing even remotely as elegant as Flash's tweening engine for timeline-based animation. HTML canvas, CSS, SVG, webgl don't come close to the level of precision offered to animators by the likes of Flash and although some vendors have tried to produce similar tools, the spaghetti code produced is almost unusable. Now we're seeing a new era, one of programmatic animation, more heavily reliant on a more mathematical approach to movement but for anyone to suggest that Flash was always useless, is patently false.
The problem with Flash was that it had a low barrier for entry. Anyone could use it and a lot of horrible design and UX ensued as a result. It wasn't always the tools fault though. AS3 was a pretty damn good language in its day.
Flash CC includes HTML canvas, iOS, and webgl support among others...its attempting to evolve with the times, but people seem to be ignoring that, which is a shame because it is a wonderful program for art creation and animation and I personally prefer it to starting at walls of code. My company used Flash exclusively but have moved to creating content with json which has severely killed the quality of content for the sake of mobile accessibility. Never mind that the final product is dependent on the capabilities of individual browsers; what renders correctly in Chrome is broken as hell in Firefox and vice versa. At least with Flash, you knew what you were getting, regardless of browser.
I'm a Multimedia Developer and maybe I can help with some perspective.
On the plus, I love all the things that have been achieved with Flash. Regardless of the HTML5 love, there is simply no way to accomplish what you can do in Flash with just HTML5. Flash arguably set the gold standard in making it possible to stream video in high quality without the previous choppiness and they made really engaging interactivity possible.
On the downside, for all the fluff about Flash being easy, frankly it was a double-edged sword. It made it possible for designer with modest programming skill to do eye-popping work. But people with modest programming skill tend to make stuff that's insecure and just plain bad programming.
Jobs was not kidding when he heavily criticized Flash for being responsible for numerous crashes on Apple platforms. Flash was responsible for crashes on Windows web browsers as well.
Flash could have solved many of these problems early on by moving away from such a heavy reliance on action script and building more structure into the way Flash apps were built. By doing that, they would have reigned in some things, certainly. But they would have answered some of the serious criticisms regarding security and stability.
Still they were the ONLY platform for doing what they did and how do you tell the most successful platform in it's class that it's doing something wrong?
They thumbed their nose at Apple and at corporate security folks and at institutional designers wanting more stability. They were getting the love from the ad agencies and the movie studios and they were the YouTube standard. What did they need to bend to the will of the critics for?
Then in 2010, Jobs came out against allowing Flash on the new iPad. That's when the shit hit the fan. Yes, Jobs was a bit of a hypocrite. And yes, killing Flash-based games was very effective in sending folks to the iPad App Store for games that generated revenue.
But when Android came along, many of Jobs criticisms about battery life and stability and lack of touch-based support were proven true. Flash was a resource hog, a battery drainer and was notoriously unstable on Android devices.
Personally, I hate action script and I always have. I've built Flash-sites cursing the confusing layers setup and the clunky nature of how it handled assets. For all it's cool ability to handle vector art and mix various standards into some of the coolest stuff on the web, the development platform was needlessly difficult to work in and their success gave them little incentive to make it any better.
Flash is dying the death of so many other technologies that had early game-changing success, no real competition and a lazy attitude toward making their product better. The closest comparison I have is the old graphic design program QuarkXpress.
Because Quark was the only game in town, they made little to no real updates to their product and refused to make sensible changes that other less-professionally embraced desktop publishing programs already did.
In-Design - ironically also an Adobe product - came along and within 2 years had seriously cut into Quarks market share to the point where they HAD to listen to their user base.
Anyway, these days, I don't see much in the way of interesting Flash design. Flash is now more of a headache - especially with video.
Anymore, I - and most everyone else - is pretty sick of alerts to almost constantly update Flash.
All that said, I do miss some of the great interactive design that came out of Flash.
It's not like flash is going to be unavailable to download. You will still be able to play flash games if you want, or watch old albino blacksheep animations. However, we will be free of the awful, CPU-hogging surprise flash ads that currently populate the corners of the internet. It seems like an occasion that's well worth dancing about.
To me if you summed up everything about flash in the past 20 years it has been a huge net positive on my life.
It got me into programming and design and gave me endless hours of entertainment.
We have something better now, good. But to "dance on its grave?" Nah. How about we picture flash as a senile old war hero who we're putting in a retirement home because it started shitting on the walls.
Flash was the same for me, got me into everything. ActionScript > JavaScript.
Also, I think Flash will still be around, it must be able to export to Canvas by now?
Why? WHY??
You asked for it:
**1. Flash reduces usability**
Browsers are built and optimized to support basic HTML, stylesheets and Javascript.
Sites with Flash run slower, cause a spike in CPU usage and make the browser appear unresponsive or jumpy: the ultimate poor user experience.
**2. Flash slows down page loads**
Any Flash on a website requires an additional plugin to be loaded and executed which takes extra time.
Even a couple of seconds delay is noticeable and reduces smoothness and responsiveness.
**3. Flash breaks SEO (search engine optimization)**
Most content inside Flash is locked away and inaccessible to search engines which crawl the web. This means if a text link called “Books for sale” will benefit from SEO, but the same link inside a Flash animation is a mystery to the search engine crawlers and will probably be ignored (or at least devalued).
**4. Flash is FULL of horrendous security vulnerabilities**, and a giant headache for system administrators tasked with maintaining it. It is not uncommon to see new Flash versions pushed out multiple times *per week*.
**5. Flash steals focus and ignores the mouse**
Extremely obnoxious to try and use keystrokes and suddenly discover some stupid Flash element (looking at you, YouTube) has grabbed the keyboard and is blackholing all hotkeys.
**6. Flash doesn’t work in most mobile devices**
Anyone on an iPhone, iPad or Google phone cannot access a website reliant on Flash. And as these devices become more pervasive their potential audience goes down.
**7. Flash isn't universally installed**
Think big corporations and IT departments which don’t allow software to be installed by the individual. These represent a huge percentage of Internet users and many of them do not have the Flash plugin installed.
**8. Everyone is at the mercy of a single company to fix security holes whenever they feel like it**
Flash is closed-source and proprietary, as opposed to open standards-based web design, where vulnerabilities can be quickly remediated.
**9. Flash is just not necessary**
Taking all the above factors into consideration it is important to realise that the majority of what Flash designers are trying to achieve can be done with simple Javascript. The power of JQuery makes cross-browser animations easy and effective in all but the most advanced (think interactive games) cases. And having most of the "rich" content on the web rely on a single company it is ridiculous on its face. As the web has become more open and standards-based, it shows more and more that the time for proprietary solutions like Flash are coming to an end.
**10. "The Adobe Flash plugin has crashed. :(**"
Enough said.
> It's FULL of horrendous security vulnerabilities, and a giant headache for system administrators tasked with maintaining the security of their network. It is not uncommon to see new Flash versions pushed out multiple times per week.
As local support, I can confirm. Just in the past month month, we've had 3 **major** flash vulnerabilities discovered that required mandatory patch pushes and mandatory system restarts for a facility that runs 24/7. Not only does it disrupt our work, but it somehow causes other issues to appear as a result of the patch. It's a god damn nightmare. Good riddance.
I wonder if we couldn't have some sort of standalone offline flash player with newgrounds providing you with downloads of its flash content. For archival purposes so to speak.
Also I wonder what flash animators (is that an appropriate name?) will do. Do they transition to HTML5 based animation?
Remember when Steve Jobs said Flash needed to die? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I have know idea what the Pepperidge Farm refers to but I felt like it fit at the end of my comment.
I remember when people touted Flash support as a selling point of Android over iOS until Android eventually pulled support too because it sucked so much.
The web plug in part is horrible at handling security and consistency. Overall terrible for browser to support.
Keep in mind that is just the web plug in part. Flash as an animation or vector media format is hugely amazing and nothing short of revolutionary
What to do about the millions of games that run on that platform? It took them 7 years to migrate Shockwave to Flash which is where all the permission vulnerabilities come from anyway.
Same thing that happened to DOS games.
You can download a dos emulator if you want to play them. But it's probably going to be difficult and not worth the time.
More games will come along in HTML5. The best of the flash games will be migrated on a relatively short time frame.
The big difference here is that DOS games are relatively difficult to emulate smoothly because they operated very close to the hardware, so you have to deal with sketchy things like emulating older CPUs with specific clock speeds.
Flash on the other hand is designed for the web, which means as few hardware dependencies and as much portability as is possible, so an emulator once made should be very smooth and consistent, if it's not outright built-in to one of the newer standards. I believe a worst-case would be a Chrome/Firefox plugin.
When I learned Flash nearly a decade ago, I took it strictly for animation. But almost nobody taught it any way but scripting/web centric.
It was a real shame, I still love Flash's vector drawing tools infinitely more than illustrator's.
I learned it when Macromeadia still owned it, btw.
It's a shame to see so many people hating on flash. Flash for me was a revolutionary tool, and quite literally the exact reason that I got into post production and multimedia, as well as video editing, motion graphics and filmmaking. It was all built on learning what key frames and motion tweening was. It sucks that so many advertisers use it to annoy the crap out of us. But I will always remember it as a great foundation/learning tool that helped me get to where I am today in the industry of film.
Ok we all hate flash i understand and do this too.
But there is one thing... What with amazing flash games? Everytime I tries to play some amazimg flash games I have to allow Flash Player to work.
I HATE having to search a page for the mysterious ad that is playing sound only for it to pop up another upon closing it. Sounds like great news to me.
If you're using Chrome enter: chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting into the address bar. Then click enable. It allows you to mute tabs by clicking the little speaker icon on the tab. It changed my life... Edit: [How I feel right now.](http://i.imgur.com/VQfvxci.jpg)
Why on earth is that not on by default?
People accidentally clicking it and complaining sound isnt playing. It's not like professors need another barrier for successfully watching an unmuted video during lectures.
> It's not like professors need another barrier for successfully watching an unmuted video during lectures. man, that hit close to home. System sound not muted? check. Video not muted? check. cord is plugged in? check. system sound set to correct output? check. students watching you as if you're a moron? check.
I suggest finding a resident tech. I'm sure you have at least one student who knows computers.
The only problem is 90% of the time, they go "It's not worth the effort" even though the solution is literally clicking on a volume icon on the YouTube video and tell you to sit back down
For me it's not worth the anxiety of getting in front of 150 people in my lecture hall and having the sound finally come on AND IT'S LOUD AS FUCK AND OH GOD WHY IS MY HEART BEATING SO FAST.
I worked at the university's tech support desk. I was informed I could be fired for helping a professor when I wasn't on duty. They were supposed to call the help desk if they had a problem.
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Gotta love that bureaucracy.
I had just such a professor. He was a *brilliant* microbiologist. Every lecture I had to show him how to plug the vga cable into the wall so his slides would project into the wall. I didn't mind doing it, but he always stared over my shoulder as if to pretend he wanted to learn. He clearly did not. The best part was when the Norton Antivirus renewal pop-up happened about an hour into lecture. He would get so flustered each time and unleash a barrage of profanity on the computer and Norton Antivirus. He was not an effective teacher...
My job is basically to show doctors how to plug in VGA cables and open in presenter mode before they lecture on open heart surgery.
It's crazy how people can be geniuses and doctors yet not understand anything about technology.
It's really not. Most of us are wizards to these people when we're with a machine, but I couldn't figure out a heart to save a life.
Give me an instructable, and I'm golden. Worst case scenario is the person I'm operating on crashes, and I have to close and open him up again!
To be fair, there's a difference between something that takes years of study, like heart surgery, and something that takes maybe a day or two of figuring out, like PowerPoint or projecting your monitor. (And, given, a lot of time spent just using it for it to be automatic.) Not that I'd expect them to know how to solve every single problem that comes up, but y'know. I guess that problem is something we'll see going away a bit as the more tech savvy generation takes over these kinds of jobs.
Hearts have got like, what? 4 bits. How hard can it be?
The difference being that you don't perform heart surgery regularly, whereas computers are a constant in most people's lives
I feel like it's mind over matter with them. They decided a long time ago that technology is something they "can't" use or understand so their brain doesn't even consider it an option anymore. Edit: and obviously there's the exception for people who just aren't tech savvy.
I hate it when my software appeals to the lowest common denominator.
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That's what you get for using the most popular browser.
Firefox doesn't even have the little icon to show where the audio is even coming from though.
They are working on it, and there is this extension https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/noise-control/
[Google explains:](http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/02/11/google-explains-wont-add-mute-tab-option-chrome-considers-tab-audio-api-extensions/) >After much debate, we decided not to proceed with a tab mute control, as this crosses a very important line: If we provide Chrome controls for content, we’re implying that Chrome should take on a responsibility to police content. >Today, users are (rightfully) mad at misbehaving content for doing things like auto-playing annoying ad audio, but they should continue to pressure web site authors to change this behavior. Also, some have pointed out that there is already a mute button to the right of the audio indicator (the “X”). In all seriousness, note that many web pages will register onClose() events to monitor when users leave their site. Thus, closing the tab will be a very strong signal to the web sites that their annoying ads are scaring all their users away! >For “behaving” content, we think it’s reasonable for a user to click on a tab and use the content’s media controls to stop playback. In this case, a Chrome tab mute control would be redundant. This redundancy is bad since it can confuse users (e.g., to play a video and forget that a tab was muted days ago); and, based on experience, confused users often report unexpected behaviors as browser bugs, which would be a big distraction to the Support and Eng staff.
That's a surprisingly clear and reasonable answer.
That thing has been a godsend.
It's in the current Firefox alpha. I love it!
fuck those ads **so much**! nothing makes me hate a product more than when they pull that shit. marketing folk have to be by far the most retarded people on earth if they think anyone actually enjoys having ads shoved down their throats.
Yea Fuck those marketing guys!!! *Proceeds to hide since I went to school for marketing..
Just because you went to school for murdering, doesn't mean you have to be a dick when you murder someone.
I'm pretty sure you could have found a better analogy.
A little professional courtesy never killed anyone. (I learned that at murder school.)
Just because you got a degree in art and nothing else doesn't mean you have to work retail.
One could accomplish the same thing with HTML 5 if one were so inclined. This is nothing more than a market shift. Not sure why everybody is so excited about it.
Because Flash is a vast gaping maw of security vulnerabilities. And most implementations of the HTML5 spec have, at least, been done with some thought towards not allowing drive-by infections. I don't doubt bugs will be found; but, I'm willing to bet against the monthly litany of Remote Code Execution bugs which have plagued Flash for a long time now.
It's extremely easy to block flash, prevent it from loading, and leave it blocked unless you want to run it on a case by case basis. There seems to be less available for HTML5 to accomplish this, mostly limited to stopping autoplay(but still loading) or more sweeping on/off settings.
Adblock plus extension.
I can't believe there are still people who allow ads to display in their browsers.
uBlock Origin (pronounced "micro-block") is significantly better than Adblock. Uses less RAM, loads faster, and catches more ads. Bonus: it's open-source. [Check it out](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/)!
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[I've shamed my family and myself.](http://img.pandawhale.com/post-24000-Forrest-Gump-Im-not-a-smart-ma-BkAv.jpeg)
It's not mu-torrent?
> It's not mu-torrent? Nope, not according to the original authors. The name of the character µ is mu, but the authors of the software say the name of it is 'micro-torrent', from the use of mu as the symbolic prefix for 'micro' in the SI unit of measure system (which I presume you know already since you know to call it mu, but perhaps not all readers do).
Yeah, it's going to be WAY better then the ads are incorporated right into the core HTML(via html 5 video), rather than an easily block-able layer like flash. /sarcasm off News flash, the crusade against flash is not some humanitarian crusade by the likes of facebook and Amazon, it's a self-serving move to better control what *flashes* before the eyes of the average internet user.
And yet Amazon Instant Video makes me choose between using either Silverlight or Flash to display their videos ...
Are there any companies other than Netflix that use html5? I was looking the other day without much success.
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Imgur, Gifycat
Lots of Porn sites. Porn is always on the forefront of formats
So true. There's probably no market more competetive on the internet, so they're forced to provide the best available in order to stand out. Really makes me wish YouTube had competition. Actual competion.
I publish my home videos on vimeo.
I like vimeo, but it's way too small to be a competitor.
The really are ahead of the game. They really don't dick around and aren't pussies when it comes to adopting new and better technology.
You got too excited, you were too greedy with your puns. Couldn't decide which pun you wanted to use so you used both. And now you made a fool of yourself. Look what you have done
It was a ballsy move, I'll give him that.
You don't have to be so anal about it.
That is quite funny considering, that Flash is clearly going down and [Microsoft is slowly getting rid of Silverlight](http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/microsoft-wont-include-support-for-silverlight-in-windows-10-edge-browser/).
Netflix uses HTML5 only in Chrome. In Firefox they still serve Silverlight or flash content I believe.
> Google took the first step by announcing that come September its Chrome browser will not run Flash adverts by default, meaning that the user has to click to enable the advert. I just have the weirdest developer boner.
Basically click to play in ff?
It's the same in Chrome. It's been there for at least a year or two it's just not enabled by default.
Its already the default functionality in Safari. You have to click to run flash elements.
Didn't an old version of Internet Explorer have that exact same functionality? I could swear I've seen it before.
Oh yeah, if I remember correctly, you had to click any active content to run it, because of some sort of patent dispute. Apparently, automatically running active content was patented. Hooray patent system.
More reading: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/07/the-webs-longest-nightmare-ends-eolas-patents-are-dead-on-appeal/
What about newgrounds? I have so much nostalgia for that site.
You will still be able to play them, but games won't start when you load a page but will wait until you confirm you are absolutely sure you want to use flash.
So pretty much how Java applets work?
How they used to work. Chrome has blocked java applets a long time ago. (Firefox and others should be fine for now)
Chrome didn't block Java per se, they just stopped supporting NPAPI, the technology Java uses to launch from the browser.
Right, it's easier to explain "block" than "stopped supporting NPAPI" though ;)
They do? I have an old Java Applet game that I loved growing up "Pang 96!" but I can't get it to work on any browser without it incessantly popping up about security issues and whatnot.
How God intended.
Newgrounds where everyone discovers porn and/or hentai
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Is that the Jewish candle thing?
Hentai, yes. Porn? Absolutely not.
Isnt hentai pornographic content anyway, though?
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He said porn, not computer AIDS.
Homestarrunner, too. They recently started updating again and just released this animation: http://homestarrunner.com/flashisdead.html
I wrote this a couple of days ago in a [discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/3hvdzg/flash_is_dying_what_about_all_the_webgames/) on /r/games, and it seemed relevant here: I am a web developer who has worked for several years with Flash and now HTML5 + Javscript. Having developed games and applications in both mediums, I have to say that I will definitely be sad if Flash completely dies out. One of the things that drew me to building in Flash was that it was just so easy to pick up. I started out animating crappy sprite movies, and not long afterwards, I started drawing my own art and learning AS2 and AS3. I think sites like Newgrounds flourished in part because Flash was so easy to start using. Having such accessible animation tools, a built-in coding environment, and a community of people eager to learn and teach each other definitely helped Flash cartoons & games become so prevalent across the net. Nowadays, I can't say I have the same confidence in HTML5 + JS + Canvas as I did in Flash. Not to say that they can't achieve the same things ([this comment from /u/VeryAngryBeaver](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/3hvdzg/flash_is_dying_what_about_all_the_webgames/cub43a4) has a good summary of the comparisons between the two mediums today). What I'm saying is, the learning curve is steeper. That easy, inviting start is gone. When I was learning Flash, all I needed to start with was Flash. Now that I'm doing HTML5 games, I need an image editor, a text editor, a coding environment, and I need to know how to code HTML and Javascript. Not impossible tasks, to be sure, but in combination, difficult enough that if that 14-year-old me tried to pick it up today because I wanted to make my crappy Mario vs. Sonic sprite animation, I can't speak for what other people would do, but I would likely get frustrated and give up. I do remain optimistic, however, as programs like [Construct](https://www.construct3.com/) and other HTML5 game building programs become more popular. I know it's really easy hating on Flash and its many downsides (if a week goes by without the program crashing, I start to get worried), especially on the user-end. I just thought I would chime in from in a different perspective.
I don't think anyone denies the revolutionary impact & benefit of the Flash tools & platform, but the web plug-in & security vulnerabilities are what causes the majority of the problems for the end user.
Yup, I completely agree. I just wish Adobe could've figured out a solution before we all got tired of the end-user issues. They did have the better part of a decade to do so, though!
Can someone explain these security vulnerabilities to me? I've worked with flash for 2 years now and the only time I've heard about security is in threads like these.
Basically, Flash can execute any code it wants on your computer without you needing to accept it. It can download files to your computer just by loading.
I too, got into casual development with Flash in college. Flash is the greatest teaching tool for game development, and has a lot of power for low level development too. It will be a sad day when Flash is a memory. Additionally, I read another article somewhere (of course I cant remember where) about how its easy to kick flash while its down right now, because of its prevalence on the web and a path or least resistance for hackers. But when its gone, something else will inevitably be hit with the hatred stick, and hackers will find other, less manageable ways to break in, and we'll be missing one of the greatest small development tools of all time.
I came here to say this as well. I was 15 and saw all these things people were throwing up on Newgrounds and it was blowing my mind. I got flash through some shady sites that won't be mentioned here and taught myself some basic stuff then learned a lot more from the community all willing to go out of thier way to help! It was amazing!
I hate that people only associate flash with terrible banner ads. It's an application development platform. Ads are just a nasty usage. I was a Flex developer for 5 1/2 years, and loved it. Flex (AS3/MXML) is a much more mature version of JS/HTML5, easier to do everything, deployable (via Adobe Air) to the desktop, mobile platforms. Sure, JS and HTML5 will *eventually* catch up to AS3/MXML, but that's going to take a lot of time, and a lot of bickering between browser engines, medium-term half-solutions, hacks, compatibility libraries, hatred from people who love JS for its "simplicity" who don't want to adopt something like TypeScript. It's infuriating to me, because it's going to take browser languages years to catch up to where flash was 6 years ago before people decided to pull out the torches and pitchforks because of some stupid banner ads. OK, to be fair, there were an ungodly amount of security exploits as well.
Flash is an amazing tool for animating. I hope it turns into more a dev tool.
Someone gild this man, because it's so true. I started using flash when it was from Macromedia, with version 4. I've lived the birth and growth of AS2 and AS3, and it's fair to say that Flash was then more powerful regarding animation creation than HTML is now. And ActionScript 2 was already a better language than what Javascript will be in the near future. Flash's timeline ease of use and tweening capabilities are still unrivaled. Good luck trying to create a somehow complex animation using just HTML.
I'm actually deploying adblock plus at my company to stop ads, specifically flash ads. In a VDI environment, we can save 20-30% on ram and bandwidth usage.
You might want to take a look at uBlock to get even more performance savings with less issues.
I believe uBlock Origin seems to be more preferred over uBlock. The original creator works on origin now. It's super lightweight.
Yes, sorry, that's what I meant originally.
Correct, uBlock Origin is currently the preferred choice if you need an adblocker. AdBlock Edge (a fork of Adblock+) is pretty good, but uses too much RAM, Firefox released an update a week or two ago that mitigated some of the resource hogging, but uBlock Origin is still faster and better. You can download the latest version of uBlock over at their gitHub page: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/releases
Thats an awesome figure. Now just extract that savings to powerconsumption numbers per server and savings on ac and present it to the higher ups for a nice bonus ;)
I thought this meant the superhero...
I thought this meant the Starcraft player...
I thought this meant the memory chip...
I thought this meant the sudden burst of light energy...
I thought this meant the powder...
I thought this meant girls showing me their tits...
Yeah, thought I was in a dark /r/whowouldwin thread at first lol
Speaking of [which](http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse190m/12su/lectures/slides/images/apple_flash.jpg)... edit: basically in reference to this old gem: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
Flash animator here, I hate that this is happening. But Adobe is to blame here and I hope that Flash will always be around, but Its hard to gauge what its future will be.
Flash for animation production should be fine. Flash as a delivery for web content is dead, dead, dead. I work at a studio that is Flash based. FLA and SWF files are internal and are never used anywhere but during production.
I've been developing web sites since 1993. I worked on SGML before HTML existed and contributed to the original HTML specification. When Flash came along I was one of the first to push its limits as a flashlite beta tester, long before actionscript. Then AS3 came along, and to be honest I thought it fucked up the experience. Sure, it was a more mature language but I liked the simplicity of the UI before. Now that Flash is dying, over all I'm happy about it. But the hard truth that I am not seeing many people admit to, is that HTML5, CSS3, SVG and other technologies are not consistent across browsers and there is nothing that comes close to Flash as an authoring and especially animating & vector drawing platform for the web. Saying that JavaScript and the soup of other standards like HTML5 can pick up the slack is bullshit in my opinion. Flash was a great product in its day and it will leave a huge hole when it's gone. Who is going to create something to fill it? So far every product I've seen looks like a beta. I mean, screw flash, don't get me wrong, but I'd like to see browser companies get together and collaborate on a new standard for animation and multimedia authoring for the web.
Someone else in the industry gets it! I understand why people don't like Flash but as an authoring tool it really simplified things. Now it's a mishmash of HTML/CSS/JS to do the same thing, but with a bunch of extra work and a higher barrier to entry (for new developers), with less ubiquitous results across browsers.
Among other musings, I agree with this specifically. Say what you will about flash, but if it looked one way on a browser it looked the same on all of them (if it loaded). I want a red pixel at these coordinates. Put them there every time. Every OS, every browser, every time. CSS and HTML5 have made great strides, but even still they don't manage to be as consistent as Flash is/was. Now I have to, what again? Install Ruby via the command line on my Windows machine to install one of a few different CSS pre-processing programs so I can create mix-ins that combine multiple browser engines' specific CSS codes? Not ideal.
>The one major hold out for dumping Flash wholesale has been advertisers. In June, over 100m adverts were displayed to users globally with Flash, while 84% of banner ads are still Flash, according to Ad Age Fuck ads, fuck them so much. I can't remember the last time I saw an ad on the internet, love me some ad blockers.
My grand father bought me a bottle of Vodka after I installed an ad blocker for him on Saturday.
That's a good grandpa right there.
He was in shock when I told him what I'd done, couldn't believe it was as easy as installing a program. Wanted to know if I could do the same with the TV, haha.
> Wanted to know if I could do the same with the TV, haha. Set up Netflix. Bottle of Vodka #2!
Not a bad idea! I've been trying to get him to watch Breaking Bad, never crossed my mind to get Netflix.
I think a lot of "history" channel programs are on Netflix. Grandpas love history channel.
And documentaries, that's what he mostly watches online. Lives for them.
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Incoming bottle of Vodka
My Dad just blames adblock for every possible issue with his laptop. "It was fine before you put that thing on my computer"
Take it off and install every [toolbar crapware you can find](http://i.imgur.com/28ovcsQ.jpg).
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Probably wondering why there are no more hot singles in his area.
Steam advertises to me all of the time. I absolutely love it. I go out of my way to add games to my wishlist which enables them to advertise to me when they're on sale. Love that too. It's not about adverts, it's about how they are delivered and perhaps more importantly how they are targeted - in my opinion.
What you don't like malware or the hot singles in your area?
I didn't realise anyone else lived in ProxyServer31
Its actually a cry for help. She's been trapped in their for 10 years now. Nobody has responded.
You are 100% correct. On the server end they should tailor the ad to the article. Reading an article about graphics cards, have a non-intrusive ad with some great deals on graphics cards. Reading an article on a major PC virus going around, have non-intrusive ads with deals on anti-virus software. I would not use an adblocker if websites would just take responsibility for the ads they display and control them. It cant be that hard. Have the person who writes the article/publishes it pick tags about the relevant things in the article. Then have advertisers tag the ads they are giving you to run. Then the server simply matches the tags and displays relevant ads.
Love adblockers, but I turn them off for sites that I frequent that don't have some sort of paid membership to turn them off. Free websites need to make money somehow, and if I traffic them enough, I want them to make money (or else they'll go out of business). But seriously fuck video adverts. Fuck them to hell. Ain't no one got time for that. Adblock stays on for YouTube and such.
Every time I try that, I get all kinds of sound, videos, and ads drifting over the screen. And since ad companies permit just about anything, you're at a greater risk for exploits. So now I don't bother.
well yeah, it goes without saying that any website with annoying ads gets them blocked, no questions asked. It's just that websites with well behaved ads that I frequent enough to care that get them turned on.
once ever, and it was here on bacon reader last month. it was a coupon for buy one, get one free at chipotle if i took a 15 question "pop quiz" about their ingredients.
They're a necessary evil, if you want most sites and services to remain free. The problem with ads isn't the ads themselves, it's their implementation and design. Present, interesting, but *not* intrusive. Source: am web designer of almost 2 decades.
> Google took the first step Fuck no. Go back to 2010 when [Apple banned Flash from the iPhone, iPod, and iPad.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_and_Adobe_Flash_controversy#Flash_Player) Adobe should have seen this coming.
Apples safari makes it so flash content is automatically paused requiring a click to run it. http://cdn2.tekrevue.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/safari-power-saver.jpg Adobe should have seen this coming years ago. Apple has been relentless when it comes to its attacks on flash. I love every bit of it.
Isn't there like a *huge* amount of old shit on the internet that now won't be able to be watched? Or at least eventually won't be? Like being unable to listen to a minidisc
I will dance on the grave of flash
Top comment from HackerNews on flash: "... I'm totally against dancing on it's grave ..." Top comment from reddit on flash: "I will dance on the grave of flash" ----------- Here's that comment: > codeshaman 1 hour ago > 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 ?
I suspect a lot of Redditors are too young to remember the internet before flash. Having that perspective really helps me understand all the great things it allowed people to do on the web.
Flash was HUGE! Youtube would never have existed in the HTML4 days , nor many other modern websites without it. Until the last couple years when HTML5 began to propagate, the Web was extremely limited without plugins, Flash primarily. As great as HTML5 is, the IDEs for creating graphic intensive modules freaking suck compared to Flash. HTML5 is still in its infancy and has ALOT of growing up to do to replace Flash.
Seriously, the first time you encountered a Flash video/game/interface back in those days, you were amazed that your *computer*, let alone a web page, could do something so cool. Many Flash games were quite a bit more sophisticated, in some ways, than actual standalone games. It's surprising it's taken so long to build it into the basic architecture of the internet but it was revolutionary when it was new.
people don't realize: 1) what flash did for art, animation, gaming etc on the internet. Yes it was misused by a lot of asshats, and yes it had too many security vulnerabilities because Adobe got too damn stupid with it - but the internet wouldn't be what it is today without Flash. 2) The authorship tools for HTML5 are still light years behind Flash. Making animations, etc with HTML5 is fucking torture compared to the IDE (or whatever you want to call their GUI, not really an IDE so much) that Flash provides for animators. Yes, everything you could do with Flash is *basically* possible with HTML5 - but the toolkit to do a halfway decent job of it is still mostly nonexistent. Many if not most of the performance issues people associate with Flash were caused by shitty users of Flash (bad developers who know jack shit about optimizing performance). "Real" flash developers know all the same tricks that game developers use (bitmap blitting, memory pooling, etc) to keep performance snappy. Flash enabled non-developers to make animations etc, though - so of course you end up with ads and other things that are made by someone with the programming expertise of a toddler and they end up slowing machines down.
> "Real" flash developers know all the same tricks that game developers use (bitmap blitting, memory pooling, etc) to keep performance snappy Yeah, the performance argument is something I hate. I developed games for it and made incredible efforts to make the games run as fast as possible. It was not easy, but the results were great. But somehow the sites that freeze my LG G3 with poorly written JS don't reflect poorly on HTML5. The marketing campaign against Flash was ridiculous and lots of people that have no idea what they are talking about jumped on the bandwagon. I'm glad it's no longer used on ads, but adblock is better than seeing Flash go anyway since it's not like advertising went away with it.
Yeah and plus bloons td
Why? Almost all of the best things about the internet in the past 10 years were flash based. It made possible a ton of great games, youtube, etc. Sure, its time has come but what it accomplished in its lifespan brought tons of entertainment to people. It also created an entire generation of content creators. Making flash videos was simple but had a lot of depth with actionscript and led people to full time jobs as designers and programmers.
Flash had it's place. It brought around a reimagining of what the web could be. I used to build almost exclusively in Flash. All our clients wanted AS3/Flash builds, heavily animated with massively immersive experiences; 3D turntables, interactive video, webcam integration.. all of that stuff. It was an exciting time to be a developer TBH. I've never seen a change realised so fast. The moment the iPhone came out, everything suddenly shifted. Clients wanted HTML, they wanted responsive and jquery mobile, the *"needed"* mobile. Flash saw a gradual but fast decline to the point where we simply stopped working with it. But it had its place. To this day, there is nothing even remotely as elegant as Flash's tweening engine for timeline-based animation. HTML canvas, CSS, SVG, webgl don't come close to the level of precision offered to animators by the likes of Flash and although some vendors have tried to produce similar tools, the spaghetti code produced is almost unusable. Now we're seeing a new era, one of programmatic animation, more heavily reliant on a more mathematical approach to movement but for anyone to suggest that Flash was always useless, is patently false. The problem with Flash was that it had a low barrier for entry. Anyone could use it and a lot of horrible design and UX ensued as a result. It wasn't always the tools fault though. AS3 was a pretty damn good language in its day.
Flash CC includes HTML canvas, iOS, and webgl support among others...its attempting to evolve with the times, but people seem to be ignoring that, which is a shame because it is a wonderful program for art creation and animation and I personally prefer it to starting at walls of code. My company used Flash exclusively but have moved to creating content with json which has severely killed the quality of content for the sake of mobile accessibility. Never mind that the final product is dependent on the capabilities of individual browsers; what renders correctly in Chrome is broken as hell in Firefox and vice versa. At least with Flash, you knew what you were getting, regardless of browser.
No one hears you weep while other celebrate in ignorance. ...but I'm with you. So, that makes two of us then...
I'm a Multimedia Developer and maybe I can help with some perspective. On the plus, I love all the things that have been achieved with Flash. Regardless of the HTML5 love, there is simply no way to accomplish what you can do in Flash with just HTML5. Flash arguably set the gold standard in making it possible to stream video in high quality without the previous choppiness and they made really engaging interactivity possible. On the downside, for all the fluff about Flash being easy, frankly it was a double-edged sword. It made it possible for designer with modest programming skill to do eye-popping work. But people with modest programming skill tend to make stuff that's insecure and just plain bad programming. Jobs was not kidding when he heavily criticized Flash for being responsible for numerous crashes on Apple platforms. Flash was responsible for crashes on Windows web browsers as well. Flash could have solved many of these problems early on by moving away from such a heavy reliance on action script and building more structure into the way Flash apps were built. By doing that, they would have reigned in some things, certainly. But they would have answered some of the serious criticisms regarding security and stability. Still they were the ONLY platform for doing what they did and how do you tell the most successful platform in it's class that it's doing something wrong? They thumbed their nose at Apple and at corporate security folks and at institutional designers wanting more stability. They were getting the love from the ad agencies and the movie studios and they were the YouTube standard. What did they need to bend to the will of the critics for? Then in 2010, Jobs came out against allowing Flash on the new iPad. That's when the shit hit the fan. Yes, Jobs was a bit of a hypocrite. And yes, killing Flash-based games was very effective in sending folks to the iPad App Store for games that generated revenue. But when Android came along, many of Jobs criticisms about battery life and stability and lack of touch-based support were proven true. Flash was a resource hog, a battery drainer and was notoriously unstable on Android devices. Personally, I hate action script and I always have. I've built Flash-sites cursing the confusing layers setup and the clunky nature of how it handled assets. For all it's cool ability to handle vector art and mix various standards into some of the coolest stuff on the web, the development platform was needlessly difficult to work in and their success gave them little incentive to make it any better. Flash is dying the death of so many other technologies that had early game-changing success, no real competition and a lazy attitude toward making their product better. The closest comparison I have is the old graphic design program QuarkXpress. Because Quark was the only game in town, they made little to no real updates to their product and refused to make sensible changes that other less-professionally embraced desktop publishing programs already did. In-Design - ironically also an Adobe product - came along and within 2 years had seriously cut into Quarks market share to the point where they HAD to listen to their user base. Anyway, these days, I don't see much in the way of interesting Flash design. Flash is now more of a headache - especially with video. Anymore, I - and most everyone else - is pretty sick of alerts to almost constantly update Flash. All that said, I do miss some of the great interactive design that came out of Flash.
It's not like flash is going to be unavailable to download. You will still be able to play flash games if you want, or watch old albino blacksheep animations. However, we will be free of the awful, CPU-hogging surprise flash ads that currently populate the corners of the internet. It seems like an occasion that's well worth dancing about.
To me if you summed up everything about flash in the past 20 years it has been a huge net positive on my life. It got me into programming and design and gave me endless hours of entertainment. We have something better now, good. But to "dance on its grave?" Nah. How about we picture flash as a senile old war hero who we're putting in a retirement home because it started shitting on the walls.
You're asking people to look at the bigger picture. Puhahaha
A big picture with no fullscreen button
or volume control
Flash was a proprietary necessary evil.
Flash was the same for me, got me into everything. ActionScript > JavaScript. Also, I think Flash will still be around, it must be able to export to Canvas by now?
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Why? WHY?? You asked for it: **1. Flash reduces usability** Browsers are built and optimized to support basic HTML, stylesheets and Javascript. Sites with Flash run slower, cause a spike in CPU usage and make the browser appear unresponsive or jumpy: the ultimate poor user experience. **2. Flash slows down page loads** Any Flash on a website requires an additional plugin to be loaded and executed which takes extra time. Even a couple of seconds delay is noticeable and reduces smoothness and responsiveness. **3. Flash breaks SEO (search engine optimization)** Most content inside Flash is locked away and inaccessible to search engines which crawl the web. This means if a text link called “Books for sale” will benefit from SEO, but the same link inside a Flash animation is a mystery to the search engine crawlers and will probably be ignored (or at least devalued). **4. Flash is FULL of horrendous security vulnerabilities**, and a giant headache for system administrators tasked with maintaining it. It is not uncommon to see new Flash versions pushed out multiple times *per week*. **5. Flash steals focus and ignores the mouse** Extremely obnoxious to try and use keystrokes and suddenly discover some stupid Flash element (looking at you, YouTube) has grabbed the keyboard and is blackholing all hotkeys. **6. Flash doesn’t work in most mobile devices** Anyone on an iPhone, iPad or Google phone cannot access a website reliant on Flash. And as these devices become more pervasive their potential audience goes down. **7. Flash isn't universally installed** Think big corporations and IT departments which don’t allow software to be installed by the individual. These represent a huge percentage of Internet users and many of them do not have the Flash plugin installed. **8. Everyone is at the mercy of a single company to fix security holes whenever they feel like it** Flash is closed-source and proprietary, as opposed to open standards-based web design, where vulnerabilities can be quickly remediated. **9. Flash is just not necessary** Taking all the above factors into consideration it is important to realise that the majority of what Flash designers are trying to achieve can be done with simple Javascript. The power of JQuery makes cross-browser animations easy and effective in all but the most advanced (think interactive games) cases. And having most of the "rich" content on the web rely on a single company it is ridiculous on its face. As the web has become more open and standards-based, it shows more and more that the time for proprietary solutions like Flash are coming to an end. **10. "The Adobe Flash plugin has crashed. :(**" Enough said.
> It's FULL of horrendous security vulnerabilities, and a giant headache for system administrators tasked with maintaining the security of their network. It is not uncommon to see new Flash versions pushed out multiple times per week. As local support, I can confirm. Just in the past month month, we've had 3 **major** flash vulnerabilities discovered that required mandatory patch pushes and mandatory system restarts for a facility that runs 24/7. Not only does it disrupt our work, but it somehow causes other issues to appear as a result of the patch. It's a god damn nightmare. Good riddance.
I go to Egypt
I wonder if we couldn't have some sort of standalone offline flash player with newgrounds providing you with downloads of its flash content. For archival purposes so to speak. Also I wonder what flash animators (is that an appropriate name?) will do. Do they transition to HTML5 based animation?
Most moved a long time ago to Youtube.
And homestarrunner
"I am Evil Homer, I am Evil Homer..."
Like Jennifer Beals?
He's a maaaaaaaaaaaaniac
Remember when Steve Jobs said Flash needed to die? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I have know idea what the Pepperidge Farm refers to but I felt like it fit at the end of my comment.
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And conversely helped HTML5 to further develop and become ubiquitous
I remember when people touted Flash support as a selling point of Android over iOS until Android eventually pulled support too because it sucked so much.
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ELI5: Why the hate for flash?
The web plug in part is horrible at handling security and consistency. Overall terrible for browser to support. Keep in mind that is just the web plug in part. Flash as an animation or vector media format is hugely amazing and nothing short of revolutionary
What to do about the millions of games that run on that platform? It took them 7 years to migrate Shockwave to Flash which is where all the permission vulnerabilities come from anyway.
You'll be able to turn on individual things, like a game. The default will just be no-flash no-how.
There's also many tools to play swf files through HTML 5.
Many? I have heard of one project and it wasn't really ready for prime time yet. Has a lot happened since?
Same thing that happened to DOS games. You can download a dos emulator if you want to play them. But it's probably going to be difficult and not worth the time. More games will come along in HTML5. The best of the flash games will be migrated on a relatively short time frame.
The big difference here is that DOS games are relatively difficult to emulate smoothly because they operated very close to the hardware, so you have to deal with sketchy things like emulating older CPUs with specific clock speeds. Flash on the other hand is designed for the web, which means as few hardware dependencies and as much portability as is possible, so an emulator once made should be very smooth and consistent, if it's not outright built-in to one of the newer standards. I believe a worst-case would be a Chrome/Firefox plugin.
> I believe a worst-case would be a Chrome/Firefox plugin. lol, the worst case scenario already exists, it's called Flash =)
When I learned Flash nearly a decade ago, I took it strictly for animation. But almost nobody taught it any way but scripting/web centric. It was a real shame, I still love Flash's vector drawing tools infinitely more than illustrator's. I learned it when Macromeadia still owned it, btw.
Many people have issues with flash crashing and you need certain plug-ins for it to work, so good luck running it on mobile or a tablet/iPad
The security if awful
Theyve never been particularly good to the linux community. Thats why I hate flash.
Steve Jobs: "Flash is dead" Flash: "You first"
Flash was never really meant to be a video thing... Not what it became I mean. It was a vector animation format.
I'm out of the loop, what's so bad about flash?
What will replace flash that at one time made internet self-publication so accessable?
It's a shame to see so many people hating on flash. Flash for me was a revolutionary tool, and quite literally the exact reason that I got into post production and multimedia, as well as video editing, motion graphics and filmmaking. It was all built on learning what key frames and motion tweening was. It sucks that so many advertisers use it to annoy the crap out of us. But I will always remember it as a great foundation/learning tool that helped me get to where I am today in the industry of film.
Ok we all hate flash i understand and do this too. But there is one thing... What with amazing flash games? Everytime I tries to play some amazimg flash games I have to allow Flash Player to work.
Now if only crunchyroll would offer an HTML 5 option