Although Flash's heyday is long gone, let's not forget how much Flash brought to the table back in the late 90's and early 2000's: animation, sound, games, and scaleable vector graphics and more. Macromedia's purchase of FutureSplash and subsequent release of the ubiquitous Flash player was a game changer for the web. Being able to download and play real games and experience interactive websites over slow dial-up connections was amazing and changed people's perspectives of the web.<p>The FLV format also finally made streaming video a seamless experience for the end user; leading to the creation of Youtube and other streaming video services.<p>Like all technologies, Flash was overused in places (pre-loaders, rotating 3d logos, banner ads) and Adobe's push towards Flex and RIA's took Flash away from of it's roots in animation for quite a few years. However, it will be interesting to see if the equivalent HTML5 stack follows a similar timeline-- minus the website pre-loaders...of course.
I'm happy to see Flash on its way out – I haven't even tried to install it the last few years. Native browser support tends to work and integrate much better on Linux than having to depend on a third party to deliver up-to-date software. The only site I visit that still seems to require Flash is the BBC, for video fragments.<p>There's some irony with Google blaming Flash for being spammy; I recently inspected what's probably the biggest shopping website in the EU because it slowed my computer to a crawl and noticed at least 30 to 40 outgoing connections, a lot of them to Google and its diverse ad, tracker and analytics properties.
> Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it.<p>Slightly off topic: I always found the term "block" to be a bit odd in the web browser context. The browser is the ultimate authority on what gets rendered and shown to the user; there's no need to block anything, because it can just not attempt to show it in the first place.<p>The term goes back at least as far as popup blockers. I wonder if it's because early popup blockers were browser plugins, rather than built in features, so they did have to actively intervene in the user experience.
The end of an era, to which all I can say is good riddance. Flash Player has been responsible for 892 published CVEs [1]. The world is safer without it.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/product_id-6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...</a>
As a former Flash animator and ActionScript programmer I appreciate the tone of the post. Flash sucks by today's standards but it played its crucial role in the history of the internet. Farewell.
I hope as the web moves on we find an easy way of preserving a lot of the creative work that's been done in Flash.<p>Some sort of WebGL/asm.js/WebAssembly player for SWFs on the internet archive would be the pipe dream, I think. That way we could watch Strong Bad long after Flash is available in the future.
I was a Flash developer. It blows my mind how far and wide this plugin went. We're still dealing with a transition out years after it fell out of favour. It's kind of neat and a good reminder that if people start using a technology it's not so easy to simply move away from it. Very similar to the days of IE 5,6,7,8 (and yes I know that's not "over" either... but a lot less of a concern than it was).<p>Still, faults aside, Flash was awesome. It was an advanced "Hypercard" (which I learned to build things in as a kid). I hope we don't completely lose some of the good aspects of these technologies.
They need a more technical description of "default experience". How is Chrome supposed to know if a site only supports Flash? I've tried several sites that require Flash, but only until I change the user agent to a mobile browser. Will Chrome try messing with the user agent in this case?
Flash has also been used to circumvent some of the browser protections, especially for older browsers. For example it has been the way to achieve cross-origin http requests (CORS) for browsers that don't support it, like IExplorer < 9 (or 8?) and even IExplorer 9 because the CORS support is shit for that one. On one hand it's been cool for developers to be able to do such things, but on the other hand it makes your browser less secure.<p>Anyway, I'm a Firefox user and I don't have Flash installed. The web works just fine without it. One less plugin to worry about.
There seems to be a lot of people saying "ohh people thing flash is bad now, but once upon a time it was really a useful thing."<p>That time was the 90s and early 2000s. And in that time, I avoided pages with Flash because they were painful. They are still a little painful now.<p>If Flash was transformative, I think it was that it introduced the kind of bloat and intrusiveness that we now take for granted on the web.
As happy as I am overall about the death of Flash I will say that at least Flash being a plugin meant it was trivial to control.<p>The amount of auto-play videos (both ads and non-ads) is extremely obnoxious and I haven't found a good way to prevent that them yet.
> In December, Chrome 55 will make HTML5 the default experience, except for sites which only support Flash. For those, you’ll be prompted to enable Flash when you first visit the site.<p>Are they still planning to grant a one-year exemption to the top ten flash-only sites? The article doesn't mention it, but I haven't heard anything about it being cancelled.
Looks like <a href="https://google.com/finance" rel="nofollow">https://google.com/finance</a> didn't get the memo.<p><i>"Adobe Flash Player is required for interactive charts."</i>
<a href="http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/</a>
Steve Jobs, April 2010
When I clicked on the link, I expected to see something like "Flash is an abomination and shouldn't exist, that's why we are killing it". I was wrong and happy to be. Today "Flash" means "problems", but I remember the time where it meant "modernity" and "Improved user experience": I'm glad to witness that Google discards Flash while honoring its legacy!
I find it a bit funny and ironic that the only app I regularly use which prompts me to install Flash [0] is Google Music. On both Safari and Safari Technology Preview!<p>I'm all for killing Flash, but if even Google is unable to completely do away with it, doesn't that mean that it might be a premature move?<p>I don't have any interest in seeing Flash kept around. In fact, I'm quite happy to see it die. But do we actually have working alternatives for the problems it currently solves? I don't ask this rhetorically, I'm very curious if there's still problems which HTML5 is unable to reasonably solve.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/f52ew4wpwcmt1dr/Screenshot%202016-08-10%2005.25.48.png?dl=0" rel="nofollow">https://www.dropbox.com/s/f52ew4wpwcmt1dr/Screenshot%202016-...</a>
Flash is definitively the perfect scapegoat<p>whatever your problem: slow machine, battery, security, etc. it's all its fault<p>seriously, if everyone have already moved to HTML5, how come we are still blaming Flash for those daily petty problems ?<p>It's not used so let's block it but it is still responsible for the majority of problems ...<p>nobody notice the ambiguity of the argument ?<p>It's quite painful to see such arguments from Google, I thought they would be smart enough to understand that any popular technology get hacked, the problem is not really Flash, its the browser itself (and the advertising networks that are perfect to distribute dodgy payloads to tons of users).<p>The other sad point is the amalgam of everything, for some ppl Flash equals advertising, and that's bad so Flash is bad, and they don't want to think further than that.<p>The choice of the users ? The tons of SWF content (that will probably not be ported to HTML5) ? nobody care apparently<p>And about throwing everything in the same bag, so apparently if Flash is dead then ActionScript is dead too right ?<p>nope<p>Flash is just 1 runtime running in the browser, there are other runtimes: Adobe AIR for desktop and mobile, and also Redtamarin [1] for the command-line / server-side.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin</a>
I used to make and release flash games and still have them on my website. Is there a good low-to-moderate effort way to convert them to HTML5?<p>A couple of the games used a ton of frame by frame animation with large sprites, so they probably wouldn't convert to spritesheets very well and should stay vector graphics.<p>Example: <a href="https://youtu.be/Qk9HlXbqRTQ?t=43s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Qk9HlXbqRTQ?t=43s</a>
So what specifically is going to happen? Instead of a click-to-play box, you'll get an HTML5 version of the content if the site is serving one, and if the site isn't serving one, you get a button to click to enable Flash content on that domain? Seems a little unclear to me and not much different from click-to-play. It sounds like Flash will continue to work with a clickthrough, which is the status quo.
I can't be happier that Flash is bein removed except that I a heavily use Google's own MotionChart[1] which is built using Flash and there seems to be no HTML5 alternative yet available [2] (although google internally seems to be uing a HTML5 version of it [3]):-(<p>[1] <a href="https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery/motionchart" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/gallery...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/google/google-visualization-issues/issues/1046" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/google/google-visualization-issues/issues...</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ltjib1m1uf3pf_#!ctype=m&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=s&met_s=incinequal_t1g&scale_s=lin&ind_s=false&idim=country:KOR:JPN:ISL:IRL:GBR:FRA&ifdim=country:country_group:oecd&hl=de&dl=de&ind=false" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=ltjib1m1uf3pf_#...</a>
This seems to me to be an obvious power play by google. Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from. When the analytics are in flash, google has no insight, but when forced into js they have full visibility into everything a developer does.
To all those saying Flash is dead or dying, this is simply not so. Mainstream use of Flash may be on it's way out, but browsers will continue to support it in one way or another for the foreseeable future.<p>Why? As I've said before, and will say again: A lot of enterprisey applications have tools developed in Flash/Flex. Mostly internal and B2B tools, but tools nonetheless. It's not likely that they will be replaced anytime soon, because no one is going to authorize the budget for replacing something that still works, so Flash will be around in one form or another for a long while.
Am I the only one who feels like this has been talked about for a long, long time? I actually already thought that Flash had been just about eradicated from the major browsers.
I still use Flash for youtube (with an add-on that enforces it) because Firefox doesn't seem to be able to handle my 4-monitor Xmonad setup properly with HTML5 fullscreen video. And the process also locks up my soundcard until I kill the process. Flash behaves much better. After youtube ditches its Flash player altogether, I guess it's chromium for YT then. No biggie.
> Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it.<p>I'm all against Flash. But this argument sounds silly. Why not handle this like any decent OS, and "nice" the Flash portion of the page, so that it takes only cycles (or bandwidth) which are otherwise left unused?
> <i>This kind of Flash slows you down</i><p>I wonder if Flash is still slower than the current JS bloat of the "modern web". My intuition says, probably not.
Good. Maybe that'd force Facebook to update their OpenGraph video embedding. Right now it essentially requires an URL that's either application/x-shockwave-flash or video/mp4 (with undocumented <iframe> embedding for chosen parties), which doesn't really cover all the cases for online videos (e.g. live streaming with DASH or HLS).
The article mentions Flash content slows web page loading and is power inefficient. Flash also has an abysmal security record. Chrome 53 will start blocking certain kinds of Flash usage, and Chrome 55, in December 2016, will go further.<p>Great news!
Even then Chrome's battery usage is pathetic. I sincerely hope you guys get it right in battery consumption from within chrome rather than blaming on flash! Please! It hurts.
It's great that Google is highlighting the importance of power efficiency as a major part of their justification for killing flash. Now they need to fix Chrome itself: <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/20/11975514/microsoft-chrome-edge-browser-battery-life-tests" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/20/11975514/microsoft-chrome-...</a>
I updated my Chrome today (Mac OSX) and the graphics took a huuuuge step backward. Almost like someone accidentally published the Linux build to the Mac link. A couple of my friends have reported the same experience, but I don't see anything official about this. Am I going to have to attempt to downgrade to get the better UI back?
Flash has one key advantage over HTML5 video.<p>Flash can be blocked, through browser extensions, CSS, or simply by removing the !@#$%^&*() Flash plugin, disabling all autoplay video.<p>HTML5 has no such similar functionality.<p>This feature of Flash is very sorely missed.<p>(/etc/hosts or similar blocklists of all known video service providers is an effective and reasonably concise, if not entirely perfect, alternative. I recommend it.)