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Comment by hundchenkatze | Hacker News Reader

Serious question - are they're any popular (define that how you like) sites that prominently use / require Flash?

Ikea has a closet planner[0] that is actually quite good. It lets you visualize closet frames in 3D by placing them within a virtual bedroom, then add shelves, drawers and other accessories inside of them. Then once you're done, it can put all of your items into your cart or generate a shopping list.

It's probably ~10 years old at this point, so it would seem they've had long enough to see the writing on the wall and port it to a newer technology. OTOH I'm not sure that, even today, the stability or penetration of WebGL is comparable to where Flash was at its height (to say nothing of the available talent pool.)

I've taken a screenshot[1] so anyone who doesn't have Flash can take a look.

[0] https://www.ikea.com/us/en/planner/pax-planner/

[1] https://imgur.com/a/WW1lDCB

The larger issue than stability is that WebGL is an entirely different framework, serving entirely different ends.

For the abstractions Flash supported (objects with behaviors, scenes, timelines), WebGL is way, way too low-level. WebGL is more the kind of thing someone would write Flash on top of.

I think it’s OK to say that work is ongoing in this area.

13 years ago I was working on a project for IKEA, a room planner. We used Flash and it was a seriously ambitious project. The level of interactivity that was possible when using Flash was unrivalled for a long time. It appears that most of these type of “sites” has been replaced by native apps, even though the web platform has most of the required capabilities now. Flash was fun to develop with, as everything was well integrated and just worked, and pioneered many of the technologies we now see as part of the web platform APIs. A lot of the criticisms of Flash is due to shitty timeline-based banners which used up the CPU. You could definitively make efficient, fast performing apps/sites using Flash/AS3 if you knew what you were doing. Of course I moved on to JS/TS development, but it isn’t as fun.

Xfinity Stream, the web viewer for Xfinity cable TV subscriptions, required flash as of a few months ago (haven't used it recently)

Just checked, seems to use HTML5 video now. Works for me and I don't have Flash.

If I remember correctly, Xfinity Stream used Flash as a fallback when Widevine was unavailable. I just use the iPad app now.

Kongregate. Flash games are still out there, like elementsthegame.com

A good chunk of educational tools. I've had to fight with Chrome quite a few times since schooling from home started.

My company contracts with a security training site. All the videos requires Flash.

<sigh>

I hope this training is about physical security, not IT security.

LOL! You fail the moment you login in with Flash!

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Maybe it was a pentesting lab and you get credit for the number of Flash instances you pwn.

Are there any plans to move the content to a non-Flash solution?

The only thing I use on a semi regular basis that requires Flash is flight school lessons from King Schools. It's probably the only time I use Chrome.

I'd imagine businesses and organizations where software and tech isn't their primary investment would take some time to move away from Flash, especially if they have a business that depends on Flash still working. It's probably similar to the scenario where there's some vital app that requires computers to stay on Mac OS X Snow Leopard / Mojave / Windows 32-bit.

A large amount of the crap that was sold to U.K. schools is still random bits of rancid flash. The same schools also bought crates of iPads galore on which none of the software works. It’s a mess.

The Citi credit card has a feature to generate "virtual card numbers" for one-time use but unfortunately, it's not purely web-based and requires the Flash runtime.

Discover card used to have that feature. It was also a web-based flash app. I was hoping they'd rewrite it to not use Flash and keep it but they just killed the feature off.

I don’t think any popular websites still use flash. Corporate internal systems though...

Only reason I've used flash in the last few years was to file PTO.

Homestar Runner has been youtubing its old Flash content, but something is lost because the content was interactive. Hope they work something out with Ruffle or similar to archive the old site as is. The kids of today deserve to play Bronco Trolleys, Stinkoman, and Trogdor.

Finland's government-owned railway company, VR, has a notoriously bad train ticket reservation system that still uses Flash. They've only recently started to roll out more modern versions of the app (that are actually surprisingly ok quality from what I've seen). At some point (like years ago) when browsers started dropping support for Flash, we got some nice hacky solutions [1] from tired consumers because VR themselves weren't stepping up their game. At some point I even saw VR promoting that project on their Twitter as a solution when someone complained that they couldn't book tickets. They should've paid the author and just put it on their site.

[1]: https://github.com/tuomassalo/vr-no-flash

A lot of banks unfortunately.

I wouldn't say popular, but many of my internal network or SAN management items are flash based. Many are EOL'd, and can't be upgraded.

The only option is throw out working hardware just because we can no longer manage it...

Or another example, older VMware setups that may not be fully upgraded yet (again perhaps with older hardware preventing upgrades). All flash managed.

Can't you just run old browser versions with Flash in a VM somewhere? (Or a dedicated system.)

I was a contractor for a large insurance company (Fortune top 10). One of the main applications they used internally for managing mailings to people was a flash app. When I was hired my first question was when are we rewriting it and was told "It's being planned". I left in December and they still didn't have a plan.

Adobe Connect (Zoom equivalent) still uses Flash in the browser. Had to use it for some uni courses.

I had to use Adobe Connect recently and they also had the option to install Adobe Connect as a desktop app that seemed awful lot like it was just Chrome/Electron with Flash preinstalled... Also no Linux support, which was fun to notice just before the meeting.

Haha, I actually had the exact same flow. Guess I'll have to keep the dual-booted Windows for a little while longer.

Things like the web interfaces for UPSes, network storage, and blade server chassis of a certain age seem to be pretty evenly split between Flash and Java Applets, which is even worse.

livestream.com (owned by Vimeo) still requires Flash when I access it with Firefox. I occasionally used it to find obscure/minor motorsports livestreams from random parts of the world (before lockdown put an end to most of that).

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