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Comment by ash_gti | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what the major use cases are for Flash Player these days?

I assume some of the 'Farm Ville' style web games are probably in Flash still these days.

VMware vCenter's Web UI by default runs in Flash, even on the newest vCenter 6.5. There's an option for an HTML5 interface, but it's not feature-complete and is far buggier and laggier than the already buggy Flash client. ESXi 6.5's web interface is HTML5, and it appears to have a lot of common codebase with vCenter's HTML5 interface, but is far more mature and accessible. I hope that this gives VMware the kick in the pants to finally lose the Flash vCenter client and finish up the HTML5 version.

Just a couple of years ago, someone from EMC came to our data storage team and proudly announced their brand new interface, written in Flash. I laughed in his face when he said that.

I guess it's a step up from java?

That's amazing, I haven't used EMC much and didn't realize they used Flash for their interface also.

I (with protest) use Java UIs so much for configuring various networking gear (old Cisco MDS switches still in use, etc) that I have to have three Win7 VMs with different Java versions and settings to make sure I can access them all. At least using Flash for the UI makes it so I can access it on just about any machine with Flash enabled so I don't have to have crazy configs to get things working.

Ah yes, good old Java. Write once, run everywhere, but only on the exact same version of Java.

Be nice if they just went back to desktop client; it was better in every way.

I totally agree. In the past week I deployed a new VMware cluster with vCenter, and found myself constantly wishing for the desktop client. A lot of the issues I had were related to bugs in the web interface itself, I had to SSH in to fix random things. Apparently, certain 'invalid' VM configurations can cause the web interface to error out completely until the VM is disassociated or edited, even on a brand new cluster. For VM stuff I can use Workstation to administrate them so I was able to change the VM settings from there, but for anything above individual VM control you pretty much need the web UI.

Vmware, ADP, and Several Other very large Enterprise Vendors use Flash, Infact some of them just made a transitions from Java to Flash after Java announced the EOL of Web Browser Applets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...

Tons of animators still use Flash, the tools are by far the best and easiest for making animated and interactive content. It used to also have an awesome publishing path, but Apple killed that off. All the animators I know still work with it, but record the flash animations as videos and post 'em on youtube.

HBO Now is still using a (terrible) Flash-based player.

Surely they're not alone. Aren't many media/news/entertainment companies in the same boat? e.g. go.cnn.com

Probably but since CNN isn't the only legal source of new Game of Thrones episodes, I don't think nearly as many people care.

A lot of advertisement on porn sites is still Flash. Will anybody think of the children?

An awfull lot of UI component in desktop and mobile application seems to be using flash under the hood, and yes that is including games as well, but not just the "farm ville" type (world of tanks is a prime example).

Low-latency live streaming and video conferencing on the web.

Lots of games, but that's about it.

It was a path to programming for a lot of artistic minded kids who enjoy learning things on their own. They could start by slowly adding programming to animations until it became a game they could share with their friends. A lot of these people grew up into development jobs. I think if the barrier to learning was picking up ES6 and React or Unity before being able to make a functional game, a lot of them would not have gotten started.

This is not a small thing.

This is why they should open source it if they aren't planning to do anything with it.

They are doing something with it, they renamed it to Animate and made it export to HTML5. They're just killing the format.

Wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Flash_animated_televis...

Flash is one of the best workflows for animators ever. This is equivalent to Photoshop being EOL'd because Apple doesn't like the pictures you can make with it.

A metric TON of them are.

Filmstruck uses it

legacy games & apps

spotify web uses flash

No, it has been using EME[1] (eg. Google Widevine in Chrome) for a few months now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions

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