Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

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'm not 100% sure the death of Flash is a good thing. Maybe the death of "flash the buggy proprietary plugin" is good but there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of devs that are productive with flash and not likely to be as productive in HTML5. It would be nice if somehow Flash could export to HTML5 directly.

That said, Flash still has features that are missing from HTML5.

1. One file distribution.

AFAICT HTML5 has no real ability to do this

2. Easy streaming

I suppose you can break a HTML5 app into multiple files but with flash there's one file and it can start running the content of that file when only some small percentage of it has downloaded. And, it just magically happens or rather it's super easy to setup. Reproducing that in HTML5 is a huge chore.

3. Not running when not visible

HTML5 has no way to stop an animation when offscreen. If you have a requestAnimationFrame Canvas or WebGL or element based animation and your element is scrolled off the screen HTML5 will still execute your code. Flash will not. So, blogs aggregating flash content work. Blogs aggregating canvas/webgl content don't even exist or unlike flash each item needs to be on its own page. There are some workaround but they require you to modify all content where as Flash you can use 3rd party content and still get this.

4. Can copy to clipboard

Yes I know that's considered "unsafe" and yet nearly every website that needs that feature uses flash for it. Google Docs and GMail both use it even though Google's Chrome team claims they won't put the feature in HTML5 because it's unsafe. They need to make up their minds.

I'm sure people who are more familiar with flash can name more features they wish would make it to HTML5.

And on top of that I can easily block flash. I can't block HTML5 so much :P

Just because it's popular to hate on Flash everyone forgets about the good times it brought.

Back in school, flash games were all the rage and you could bet if we were on the computers for a lesson 90% of the time would be spent on the helicopter game or motorbike sport!

Yes, it'll be great when all Flash advertisements with loud music become HTML5 ones and you'll need a 3rd party tool to block them. Absolutely the best thing along with killing off one of the most powerful and yet relatively easy to develop with tools on the web.

But hey, at least I was reminded of this site http://flashvhtml.com/

These articles are getting boring and repetitive. "Someone think of the children" is the only line I haven't seen yet in these copy and paste yawn-fests. This one actually squeezes "dying" and "death" into the one headline.

Flash is a tool that provides more power and performance in games targeting laptop/desktop browsers who have the Flash player - and there's millions out there.

Adobe have stated the new focus and direction of Flash is console-quality games and "premium video". The latter can be argued all day as to whether HTML is completely up to the task. But it sounds like Adobe don't give a damn about web page ads. They moved on ages ago judging by the roadmap which was written ages ago.

There's Adobe Air for those who want to use the Adobe Flash tools to make games, and target native mobile platforms. It's completely reasonable.

We all [should] know that HTML5 is not up to achieving console-quality games. Nor should it be. The current HTML game scene is dominated by 1980s looking games in the browser. That's fine, but the thing is they're not even as good as 1980s games, and they don't perform consistently cross-browser, often not loading depending on the browser. Or, they load but "no sound" or terrible frame-rate, or other glitches. Maybe a conflict with your ad-blocker. At least Flash is sandboxed from your browsing environment, with all assets nicely folded into the one binary for highly compact, efficient delivery.

Makes you laptop fan spin up? Yeah.. like playing just about any modern game does.

I actually hope Adobe keeps innovating and improving Flash. I'm a fan of open source, but I also make exceptions for things that are up to version 18 and been with us since the 90s. That's just me. If you don't want the flash player on your computer, then simply uninstall it.

  Flash is dying! - 2015
  Flash is dying! - 2014
  Flash is dying! - 2013
  Flash is dying! - 2012
  Flash is dying! - 2011
  Flash is dying! - 2010

Although I am hopeful for this year

I really don't know what benefits open sourcing flash would have, do you? JavaScript is in many ways more dangerous as it does not operate in the same security sandbox as flash. I can not specify a customized Java Script interpreter that visitors must use when they visit my website, they will always be relegated to what has been implemented by their browser. There is a big difference between open-source and free. Open-sourcing flash would most likely lead to a few dozen clones, just look at linux or android. Instead of a unified platform now there would be multiple variations. You would have to make sure your project ran on every single version in order for anyone to even see what you where trying to do. I think firefox's impetus has more to do with them justifying Shumway ( and continuing their funding) then anything.

Ok, kill Flash. Then you will get HTML5 banners :) without simplest redraw region optimization inside, so you will get much more hot from your computer.

it's funny but Flash IDE is the best tool nowadays to create HTML5 animations.

Also Flash is used for crossplatform apps and game development for social networks, mobile and desktop platforms. I really doubt that million players of Candy Crush will remove Flash Player :) Top 25 Facebook games are made with Flash :) Market is still huge. There are no any alternative to Flash nowadays, Unity3D doesn't work in Chrome, WebGL export is a shit(we are all waiting for a new standard), HTML5 game development is really expensive and sometimes impossible.

Time will show.

I don't know enough to write it myself, but it would be neat to see someone who did write a really good history of the evolution of the dynamic web. We've had so many technologies rise and fall, Java, ActiveX, Flash, Silverlight, and now HTML5/JS, plus however many dozens of minor players that never really caught on. It'd be nice to have a comprehensive record of who pushed what, how they all evolved and caught on, or didn't, why the technologies that lost out did so, and what the pros and cons were.

I want Flash to die. What I need is a service that will transcode video to HLS and MPEG-DASH for live stream and VOD. Surprisingly, it's hard to find one that's really excellent.

It's a shame that most of the people espousing Javascript were watching Power Rangers when Flash's real contribution to the web was being recognized.

There are a few archetypes of flash haters and they almost all fall into one of these categories:

* Tech Bloggers looking for a salacious story, considering Flash is Dead articles always get a lot of debate (and clicks)

* Young kids who lack the historical perspective to understand Flash's contributions to the web and just want to bully something unpopular.

* Mac Users who for years suffered a lot of stability and performance problems from the poorly supported Mac Flash plugin and have never let it go.

* Ex-Flash developers who feel that Adobe abandoned and betrayed them by their silence on the "Flash is Dead" issue and turned on the technology that predicated their careers.

* Security experts who were sick of the constant patching of their network's machines due to the continual trickle of discovered flaws.

* Impressional engineers who never researched anything objective about Flash but heard something from one of the above archetypes and blindly follow it.

* Brendan Eich, who in his quest to globally dominate the world with Javascript, threw Flash under the bus publicly many times.

Adobe has done several things to fundamentally address their concerns:

- They released auto-updating plugins (albeit too late in my opinion) so they could patch players on their own.

- They doubled down to make the Mac client more secure and performant (albeit too late in my opinion)

- They increased the frequency of updates, including biweekly beta releases, and quarterly major updates. Nobody knows this though.

What Adobe has not done is market Flash (or its little brother AIR) in any way. They have made some public announcements that they are not abandoning the runtimes but it's hard to know when that will change, so it's almost as if they never said it at all.

I have a very unique take on the situation. I think plugins are a superior way to distribute content technology. It is faster to innovate than open standards development, and provides a more consistent quality than fragmented browser-based development.

My analogy is 3D printers. One day 3D printers will be able to make super complex things such as watches or maybe even cars. Do you really think Rolex or Tesla would adopt such a technology? Hell no. And the reason is simple: your product is reduced to the quality of the crappiest 3D printer out there. The quality is no longer in the content maker's hands, but in the 3D printer manufacturer's hands. Your only option is to reduce the quality of your own content to the lowest common denominator of all the 3D printers out there.

And that's exactly what we now face in an HTML5 future. Flash provided a very consistent presentation of content across all browsers and even mobile during its brief life on Android. Flash would auto update major features every 3 months, giving access to very advanced GPU based rendering features. Now we have to wait around for every browser out there to adopt WebGL standards. Some have done it well, others half-assed it, and on Mobile, forget about it. And even WebGL is now an outdated standard now that glNext is coming. So we have to start all over again.

HTML5 enthusiasts sure are patient people. If they knew how fast Adobe can get updates/security fixes out to a very high % of people, they'd be green with envy.

Please help me understand this obsession about building a secure software.

I understand there are sensitive information like bank account, email address(maybe? if you are important). But most of stuff on your computer is crap for, I'd say, 99% of the users(me included). And for an average user the convenience trumps everything.

All of this is fine if there is a perfect replacement for flash. No, there isn't. I don't like Html5, for one thing it is not as smooth, if you use progress bar to drag and drop, you can feel the difference.

Hence.. I really don't appreciated some security fanatics in mozilla disable flash weeks ago. I appreciate that you assume we are all Hillary Clinton. Really dude, I don't care my computer got hacked, there is all crap on it. Take a look yourself. Now if you excuse me, I'd like to watch some dancing cat.