Google Chrome: Flash Usage Declines from 80% in 2014 to Under 8% Today | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome: Flash Usage Declines from 80% in 2014 to Under 8% Today

bleepingcomputer.com

60 pointscoloneltcb44 comments

Testament to Google Finance's abandonment: still using Flash.

Yeah, a real shame too. I really liked the simplicity of `finance.google.com`. It appears new development has been done at `google.com/finance`... a different interface with less information.

And it surprisingly still uses flash. So.. who knows when it will die?

Chromes click-to-run model is broken for half the sites where I still need flash. I've almost switched to Firefox to deal with it

I don’t fully get the hate on Flash. We have shifted the CPU usage from the extension to the browser, with less capabilites than Flash. No sure if the web is a winner here.

> with less capabilites than Flash

In what way less?

Could write to the clipboard I guess.

Write-ish. I always had problems with how it worked.

Just going off the games and how much faster the video capabilities were in Flash, I'd have to assume that it was in fact more capable. It could have just been the tooling? (That is a genuine question.)

The alternatives are catching up, no doubt. But flash was way ahead in those areas and is easily the reason it took so long to deprecate it.

> Just going off the games

The games I've seen in WebGL match and exceed anything I ever saw in Flash. You can still use Adobe's software to publish to HTML5 if you want. Game engines like Unity and Unreal also support publishing to HTML5:

https://unity3d.com/

https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/what-is-unreal-engine-4

The modern games I've seen are. It took a long time to get there. And many of these won't work well on older phones that actually could handle the flash stuff decently.

> It took a long time to get there.

It didn't. Here are some examples.

HexGL has been around for 5 and a half years: http://bkcore.com/blog/3d/hexgl-webgl-racing-game-html5.html

Pirates Love Daisies has been around for 7 years: http://blog.gskinner.com/archives/2010/12/pirates-love-daisi...

You can go all the way back to DHTML Lemmings which has been around for 15 years: https://crisp.tweakblogs.net/blog/3881/dhtml-lemmings-primer...

I don't know what to say. Demos were working fine for a long time. However, I still haven't seen people actually playing HTML games like they did flash ones.

Some of that, I presume, is just where I look. That said, I feel like flash games were played. HTML has largely missed the boat to native phone apps.

Were people able to make the games? At an absolute level? I guess. Could have done it with Java applets, as well. By and large, that didn't happen. I'm curious why.

HTML5 games seem to be working fine at Disney which is about as mainstream as it gets:

http://lol.disney.com/games

I'd say your experience is not universal.

Disney is an interesting example for me, because I remember it wasn't that long ago that they were not HTML. At the least, they didn't work on my kid's raspberry pi computer. Thought it was that we didn't have flash installed at the time.

Regardless, glad to see that isn't the case, anymore. Huge thanks on correcting me here!

It generally boils down to one or more of:

- closed and proprietary

- has vulnerabilities

- could be resource intensive

Here's an article (from 2015) which discusses it more.

https://www.wired.com/2015/07/adobe-flash-player-die/

Now we have web assembly and EME for closed and proprietary blobs, and JS for hogging resource.

Flash was a mess, but the sunlit uplands after Flash aren't looking especially sunny!

That second one needs to be in all caps, bold, and repeated about a dozen times.

I'm curious that we couldn't harden flash runtimes.

because it was

> - closed and proprietary

Pretty sure the format was more open than this statement makes it sound. More, I doubt it would have been too expensive (compared to the alternative costs, it isn't like the other formats have been free), to make open.

And, there were certainly some features that were insecure by design. I cannot defend all of it. Nor am I intending to really defend any of it. However, there are more than a few warts in in HTML/JavaScript that were insecure-ish by design.

right because vulnerabilities don't exist anywhere else, only Flash.

funny how people jump up and down about how vulnerable Flash was, but when you try to find one single person you know whose computer was actually compromised via Flash, you get nothing.

I agree with the first two but for the third one (performance), I suppose that was quite a few years ago, when websites were reasonable.

Now that all the crap that was previously made in Flash has shifted to the modern web technologies, things are terrible again.

When it comes to size, Flash files are usually in the hundreds of kB, compare to today's web pages which routinely take several MB. And because Flash typically use vector graphics, it often looks better in modern very high resolution displays.

Of course, modern web technologies can be light and efficient too, but it shows that the problem isn't the technology itself but how it is used.

- poor integration with the web browsers

Flash would effectively steal keyboard focus and render all the browser keyboard shortcuts unusable until you clicked away with your mouse.

I dunno if this is still the case: I've not used Flash since YouTube made their HTML5 player available (about 8 years ago).

Flash was much more heavy than JavaScript, especially on Mac/Linux.

That’s a blanket statement that needs to be qualified. I’m sure it was possible for good flash devs to write applets much lighter than JS used in production today. And I’m sure a talented developer could minify that further in JS or any language of their choice similarly tightly integrated in the browser.

If the flash plugin was a huge pile of shit I can’t see how good flash dev could produce something lighter than anything running on the modern highly optimised JavaScript engines.

Was never really about the CPU. Flash wasn't designed to be for any device (mobile/tablet/desktop UI) and the pattern of plugins exposed the user to too many security flaws which could not be patched quickly enough.

Flash Lite worked on mobile phones before iPhone was a thing. I think it still runs in great many applications for mobile and stationary devices as embedded graphical toolkit. On the other side of the spectrum, some AAA games have in-game UIs made in Flash.

The only thing I remember about using Web technology in games is this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV7ei1Z40fQ

If they'd just done Java applets right, we could have avoided 20 years of wheelmaking in web development. Might have gotten out of dealing with JavaScript a long time ago too...

Essentially it meant that your OS / browser combination couldn't be a first-class citizen on the web unless Adobe felt it was important enough to port Flash to it. I definitely don't think Adobe wanted to use this to squash alternatives, but it still had that effect.

This post right here is a classic: https://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

Apple had their own agenda with the app store, so this is not really an objective source.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but not allowing flash was before the app store was even an idea.

I agree that we didn't know about the app store before we knew that flash wouldn't be supported by the iphone, but surely that was a part of Apple's strategy, right?

Flash was infamous of it's constant security vulnerabilities. I don't think that JS virtual machines have nearly as many

I'm not convinced that the JS virtual machines are any better.

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/6761/Adobe-Flash-Player.h...

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/3264/Mozilla-Firefox.html...

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?...

That's a whole browser you're comparing Flash to, not just V8. And still, Chrome has 10 times less code execution vulnerabilities than Flash.

It is quite clear if you look at the source of the data.

Flash is (was) Adobe's own rich content creation and distribution system with lots of investment on many different sides. Adobe can make the rules and implement anything it wants at its own pace in its self-contained product, unlike Google and Apple that have to feign “innovating the Web together” while actually solving their own problems. As they got their own sheep to shear (smartphone consumers), it was decided to strangle the competitor.

I should remind you how many years it took to make HTML5 video work for everyone on Youtube. I should also point that on older systems Flash video player works (worked) noticeably better than HTML5 video player, making it clear that “open standard” does not, in fact, need less resources. Next time you wonder why modern web is so taxing on multi-core multi-gigabyte system, look this way, among others.

As for security, Flash was as broken as any complex system of its age. Most of the attention to its security can be attributed to the fact that corporations only care about security if that's of someone's data they can benefit from. Oh, and it's the same with governments — they don't care about the abstract security for everyone.

And any talk about “openness” accompanied by what Google does with Chrome on desktop and mobile is just pathetic.

TL;DR It's corporate cool-aid.

I wish the plethora of enterprise software I have to deal with on a daily basis didn't require Flash (I'm looking at you, ADP).

Open always wins, given enough time.

Well, it helps when one major player unilaterally chooses not to allow support for the closed thing.

*Google always wins, given enough market share.

Not really. For example, I wouldn't call Native Client a success. asm.js and WebAssembly won out over it. Here's the Native Client deprecation announcement:

https://developer.chrome.com/native-client/migration

No it doesn't.

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