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Comment by shocks | Hacker News Reader

I've had pretty much zero consequences from disabling Flash globally in all my browsers.

Where is Flash still essential?

I've been disabling by default for a few weeks, though many sites still use it, for example:

  - Facebook (videos)
  - Twitter (bizarrely uses it for gifs in Firefox)
  - YouTube
  - BBC news
  - The Independent and most of UK press
  - Basically any site with embedded video
  - even github prompts because of that copy+paste feature

I have no interest in Flash games or adverts, so it's annoying that these big sites all still use Flash.

Flash-less Youtube works well for me for at least a year now. Vimeo required more effort but also used to work.

Many embedded videos often don't, though.

Twitch as well. That's a big one for me.

There are millions of flash games that my kids would not appreciate losing access to; YouTube still uses flash by default I think; iPlayer (BBC program player) and news websites still mainly [or exclusively] use flash.

YouTube uses flash if it thinks you have flash. Otherwise if no flash installed or plugin disabled it defaults to HTML5 (Firefox on GNU/Linux and Mac)

I use flash blocker specifically for youtube, so that it doesn't start playing when I queue up a tab. When I get to the tab I enable flash for that player. Gonna be annoying when that doesn't work. Not that I don't want flash to disappear.

Firefox provides the "media.autoplay.enabled" setting to turn off autoplaying HTML5 media. Beware, it is slightly "buggy" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10135004

For Firefox users, YouTube is supposed to prefer HTML5 video if an H.264 platform decoder is available and then fall back to Flash. YouTube should be serving HTML5 video to OS X, Windows Vista+ (except for some variants without codecs like Windows Server 2008), and Linux (if ffmpeg is available).

I think when this came up a few months ago someone checked and found it was a bug -- it may have been fixed by now but I haven't checked recently since I don't have flash in ff anymore.

Flash is essential for harmony of your twosome life if you share your computer with your girlfriend who plays facebook games.

Just have her use Chrome for that. I don't have Flash installed, and I just copy and paste a URL into Chrome if some website's video player requires Flash with no HTML5 fallback.

you might also be able to get around it by using separate firefox profiles for each of you.

Videos in UK newspapers.

bbc iplayer on Mac and GNU/Linux

BBC iPlayer I don't mind (got a TV box thing), but BBC News is annoying. Videos don't work.

Several livestream sites (like twitch.tv) depend on flash.

Only if you're not using a superior playback option, like livestreamer.

Soundcloud :(

Works for me without Flash since at least a year (Fx on Mac). What are you using?

Chrome beta, Windows 8.1. But I tried it again now and it seems to be working without Flash. No idea what was wrong then a month ago. Ah well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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