Hacker News Reader

Comment by kgwxd | Hacker News Reader

While millions of kids are doing remote learning? That seems like a terrible idea, there is tons of educational sites using flash.

View on HN

Not sure how many people are still stuck with flash, though I wouldn't be surprised. Either way, while it'll suck, maybe a lot, if there are businesses still selling/offering flash-based products, they need to change, immediately.

I'm sympathetic to people who want to keep flash around to play games or experience the "old web", but education and enterprise still requiring flash for <x> is beyond absurd at this point, as long as it's been deprecated and Adobe has been ringing the death bell.

Maybe this isn't a fair sentiment either, but I feel like both teachers and students would benefit from upgrading to a product that doesn't require flash. I know it's more complicated than that, but geeze.

> Not sure how many people are still stuck with flash

My mom is a school teachers and a lot of the web materials provided for their curriculum are still flash-based. Although the publishers have started to transition, the older flash apps tend to be richer in content and less buggy.

They'll never stop using Flash until it's taken away from them, because there's no financial pressure upon them to invest in ongoing maintenance and upgrades otherwise.

This is also going to break a massive chunk of the food permit and driver's ed markets overnight.

Well, overnight after years of warnings, anyway.

They knew and they chose not to prepare, so while I regret that normal people are being punished here, I certainly have no sympathy whatsoever for the companies that chose not to act.

It’s not overnight. Much like the removal of 32bit apps on macOS, this was mentioned time and again. Not paying attention to soft wear that you’re business depends on is not an excuse, neither is “thinking of the children”.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Flash needs to go away, for sure, but my kids' teachers have still been assigning Flash websites as school tasks - "play this educational game" sort of stuff - in recent months.

My teachers are also using Flash-enabled sites for their quiz and presentation :(

This is simply because the site owners haven't moved on yet for some unknown reasons.

> for some unknown reasons

ka-ching

educational and government contracts need disruption and this is a symptom

Where "disruption" means "waste a bunch of time and money for people to rebuild something that worked perfectly fine until the entire platform it was built on went belly-up"?

I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if your budget is next to nonexistent.

Maybe building on proprietary platforms was a bad idea from the start and a poor investment of public resources.

Back in the early 2000s there were no equivalent to flash in terms of features and ease of use. It's bordering on whig history criticising people back then for not going FOSS

> I mean, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, especially if your budget is next to nonexistent.

Oh, it was broken alright. From a security perspective, Flash was a nightmare to the extent that you almost had to wonder if Adobe was making it vulnerable on purpose. By using Flash today, organizations are putting themselves and their users at serious risk. Ransomware, identity theft, all of the bad things. School children would be an easy target for hackers to gain access to the parents computer, so it's especially appalling that learning software is still using Flash.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/p...

Well, that problem will quickly fix itself because now that will just not work and there is no workaround. And coincidentally that is why you need to make sure there is 100% no workaround.

And the onus is on those educational sites to transition away from Flash. We knew for several YEARS it's being decommissioned.

If these websites needed a disrupting event to nudge the transition, then this is it.

These educational sites are probably dead - writing educational material is exhausting and not free.

None of my machines use flash nor do my 3 kids have flash-based apps.

I'd like to know what these sites are...

Here you go: https://ambrasoft.nl/ambrasoft-school/

It is utterly ridiculous, this company is still selling their Flash crap to primary schools. They are part of Noordhoff, the largest publisher of the education system in The Netherlands.

My 4yo son has an iPad but for home schooling due to COVID we had to install Chrome with Flash and teach him how to work with that on a laptop.

It's not like we didn't know it was going... whose responsibility is it then if some site continues to use it?

It has been a LONG time we knew this was coming, anyone still using it, I don't know what could make them switch outside breaking changes.

I've got flash based devices in foreign offices that were due for upgrade or replacement this year, which has been..... shall we say challenging?

> whose responsibility is it then if some site continues to use it?

It's still a hard pill that a finished and working interactive resource has to be rewritten from the ground up in a different technology after years of working unattended.

There is a big free interactive course to learn Catalan from beginner to advanced entirely in Flash at parla.cat. Hundreds of lessons/exercises, it's been working by itself for years.

>Microsoft and Google are planning to disable Flash Player in their Chromium-based web browsers, but no official word has been given as to when this will happen.

So you have two copies of flash on your Win10 computer. One is an OS library that you can see a bit of in the control panel. This is what Microsoft is removing with this update. The other is a containerized copy that Chrome and Edge ships with. That copy isn't going away until MS and Google say so, and if their metrics say there's a lot of flash use, then its going to stay for a while, maybe forever as a whitelist-only legacy technology. Its kinda this already, but I'm guessing it could be stricter, like forcing people to go deep into a menu to activate flash instead of helpfully popping up about it.

MS and Google have already said so. Flash will be blocked from loading in every version of Chrome next month, and the next version of Chrome to ship will remove all Flash support entirely from the codebase. Chromium-based Edge will follow suit.

https://www.chromium.org/flash-roadmap#TOC-Upcoming-Changes

https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2019/08/30/update-removi...

Is firefox safe from the purge?

No. Firefox will drop support for the Flash plugin with Firefox 85 (January 26, 2021), but there's a cutoff date of January 12, 2021 in the plugin itself, after which it will not work even in earlier versions of Firefox.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-support-adobe-flash

newgrounds is known for hosting flash animations. They created their own flash player desktop app so you can keep watching content that was flash based : https://www.newgrounds.com/flash/player

Flash animations are easily converted into webm/mp4/mkv/put any video container here.

Flash animations could mix bitmap and vector resources. No video container can offer artifact-free scaling of vector resources.

If they are standalone they may work perfectly under Gnash/Lightspark, unlike games using external assets and lots of quirks.

There's a neat program to handle that too: https://github.com/Herschel/Swivel

Those sites have had 5-10 years' warning. Some things need to die and the benefit to everyone outweighs the needs of a few. If Flash wasn't killed then people keep writing for it.

The kids will be fine. It's their teachers who will need to do more work to find new resources and update their lesson plans.

How much time did they have to update?

How much they have to wait just because kids have math to do?

Teachers can work around it

Many have moved on to html5.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com