FedEx is offering $5 off web orders to enable Flash

Seems like a misleading title to me. I read it as saying that you have a choice of ordering without Flash at a higher price. In fact, Flash is a straight requirement no matter what, and they&#x27;re offering a code for $5 off in an attempt to compensate people for the hassle of installing it.<p>So really, you&#x27;re getting $5 off <i>for starting the process without Flash</i>. If you already have Flash installed, you&#x27;ll never see this page and never get the discount code.<p>Obviously they should stop requiring Flash, but the title doesn&#x27;t seem to accurately describe things.

Wish I had a highlight reel of the meetings that led to this decision. The shouting, the red faces, the eye rolling, the gigantic exhalations lel.

<p><pre><code> If you are using Chrome on a desktop or laptop: Open a new tab in your Chrome browser. Type “chrome:plugins” in your URL address field. Under Adobe Flash Player click the checkbox next to Always allowed to run. </code></pre> If doing this gets your box hacked, are they providing PC repair services?

Takes the term &quot;flash sale&quot; to another level.

Ha. No thanks. If I go to use FedEx and flash is required I&#x27;m just going to use a different carrier.<p>They are just delaying the inevitable. I bet there&#x27;s some higher-ups at FedEx who still like flash and refuse to give it up.

Even if they offered me $100, I wouldn&#x27;t enable Flash. I&#x27;m guessing they&#x27;re hard at work writing their Flash component into HTML&#x2F;JS.

Cheaper than re-engineering their enterprise web facing app I guess. Sad.

FedEx is the only courier service I&#x27;ve ever had problems with (once they didn&#x27;t deliver for three days in a row saying there was nobody home: there were five of us in the house those days and we were looking out for the delivery, when they eventually told me on the phone that the delivery would arrive by X time, it arrived 4 hours after X... They also tried to charge me import duty for an item that cost less than threshold and more recently they tried to get me to pay VAT on a VAT-exempt item) and I don&#x27;t use them unless I have absolutely no other choice. This is just another in a long list of turnoffs for me for this shitty company.<p>No other courier has ever done any of these things.

I bet they&#x27;d save a bunch of money if they added a flash based cat video instead of a coupon.<p>Users would enable flash to watch the video, because that&#x27;s what users do, and then it&#x27;ll be enabled for the rest of checkout.

I encountered that last night when trying to get something printed. Nope. My money went to a different printer.<p>I&#x27;d be really curious to see some numbers on how successful this has been for them.

The instructions should at least limit the &quot;always allow&quot; to the fedex sites. Pretty bad advice to always allow globally.

My experience with FedEx&#x27;s technology stack is minimal, but I can tell you that all publicly exposed FedEx technology (ie. apis, etc) confirm without a shadow of a doubt that FedEx is not a technology company and they should leave the evolution of the web to others.

I was amazed that MSNBC wanted me to enable flash to watch a video yesterday.<p>I would think AWS and Azure would have cleaned up grabbing all those transcoding dollars by now. It&#x27;s not like the impending death of flash was a surprise to anyone.

This makes me think about a related issue I&#x27;ve encountered at work: remote check deposit software from banks (think a small scanner designed for businesses to deposit multiple checks, not a smartphone app) is typically a browser-based Java applet. Already the latest Chrome and Firefox straight up won&#x27;t let you use this. I haven&#x27;t seen any bank that uses something other than Java applets for remote deposit, and I don&#x27;t have a clue if any of them are working on replacing it.<p>If anyone by chance knows a bank with remote deposit software that <i>isn&#x27;t</i> Java in the browser, I would love to know about it.

Has a company ever gone this route before?

I believe that because of all of the vulnerabilities in the Adobe Flash products, people should think of their computer&#x27;s security first and give FedEx the preverbal virtual finger, and force them to recode their software to use html5 video instead. It is becoming the new standard and is (currently) safer than risking the vulnerabilities in Flash.

I&#x27;ve often said things like, &quot;Not even if you paid me,&quot; but the truth is that rarely are you offered money like this.<p>Not even for $5.

Is there a portable way to create something like FedEx label in browser without flash? If there is, how hard would it be to make something like that - on the order of writing a new 2d graphics library from scratch? Very creatively use an existing an one? Just use an existing library and any moderately competent developer could do it?

Wow, Flash is worth <i>that much</i> to them. I wonder what the functionality is that&#x27;s worth <i>that much</i> and what it would cost to change what ever existing workplace culture, upskilling &amp; what have you. It might be a great investment on their behalf.

Also bad, they only mention support for 2 browsers, Chrome and Safari.

I sincerely hope that FedEx fails. I once bought the book &quot;FreeBSD Kernel Internals&quot; from informit. They sent it through FedEx. I payed the shipping costs in the informit site, as standard procedure. The book passed through customs fine, then FedEx hold it and told me they would not deliver the book unless i paid them 50EUR.<p>This is their current and common practice here in Portugal. Fsck them.

The chrome:plugins page was removed in Chrome 57. Even their instructions are outdated.

&gt; ...please update your browser using the simple steps provided below.<p>Yeah, like enabling flash is an update. Good move, Fedex.

ROFL