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Comment by icarus_drowning | Hacker News Reader

For me, this seems pretty simple: if it is shown that Adobe can create a version of Flash that alleviates problems with poor battery life and terrible performance, obviously it will be "better to have Flash". So long as those problems persist, Flash seems like a lot more of a liability than an asset.

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I'd add 'security' in there, too. The situation is already looking worthy of concern on Android and other open mobile OSs. Do we need one more attack vector? Particularly a platform with a history like Flash?

CSS3 is also worthy of concern. It's true that the security concern is different, and it's true that the security concerns are in general cumulative, but it's not like you can decisively say "things that add to the attack surface are bad".

I think it's pretty safe to say that Adobe code bases have more or less earned themselves a special line item in the security concerns list at this point.

You could --- and I'm not just saying this to be argumentative --- say the same thing about parts of Webkit.

I want to be clear that I agree that Flash adds more than a banana-equivalent dose of insecurity. I just worry about the notion that the rest of the system is much better.

You make a good point that I wouldn't want to try to disagree with.

I'd argue the same could be said for the functionality of Flash. Yes, watching video via Flash can start the fans flying, particularly on OS X before Apple allowed them access to the hardware. But, it's not like displaying highly encoded H.264 and allowing people to manipulate the resulting output is easy. The last comparison I saw showed only IE9 convincingly beating Flash in this task, and the big outliers were some of the browsers like Safari on Windows which was abysmal, whereas Flash was solidly good across platforms and browsers. And I'm guessing that performance in other areas is a clearer win for Flash.

I have ideological reasons for not liking Flash, but clearly my brand of ideology isn't as good at mass-mind control and reality-re-defining as the Apple-ideologues. I'll be glad to see it go, I just wish it was because people thought that core web technologies should be open with multiple interoperable implementations, rather than because of a concerted campaign of misinformation and misdirection about performance.

I think you may have accidentally replied to the wrong comment.

Your point appeared to be that Flash is insecure, but that the things proposed to replace it e.g. Webkit, CSS3 implementations suffer from similar issues. My point was that, similarly, its performance problems with video are shared by other browsers when implementing the same functionality.

They'd also have to alleviate the UX problems with Flash - most notably the fact that it's a development tool for mouse-based UIs, not multitouch UIs.

It's notoriously difficult to design for an environment in which you don't know whether the user can mouseover or not, whether they can use multitouch gestures or not, whether there needs to be scrollbars vs. draggable content, and you don't even know if the pointing device will be a pixel-accurate mouse pointer or an inaccurate finger.

Is the situation in HTML/JS applications any different, though?

I kinda like the flashbanner-free world that is my iPad.

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