Flash is fine. Dont be a Fundamentalist. | Hacker News Reader

Flash is fine. Dont be a Fundamentalist.

occupyhtml.org

33 pointssheaninesix44 comments

I'll give everyone a great example of why I hate Flash:

So I downloaded the new Flash 11 and installed it, the 64 bit version so I can now use 64 bit IE. I have IE 9 set to not accept third party cookies. In Flash, I don't want cookies set either so I go to the global settings and make sure no sites can save anything on my computer. Now Flash doesn't work at all. No where. It should work on some sites that don't require cookies but it won't even load. I'm not sure why this is but the only solution I've found is to completely uninstall Flash, restart my computer and then reinstall it and allow every site to store Flash cookies on my computer. I've replicated the issue with Firefox and Chrome.

Strangely enough Youtube worked during these issues - because of HTML 5.

Also, there's a bug in Flash 11 in Windows 7 where for some reason the taskbar doesn't get hidden when you full screen a flash video.

Flash could've been useful, but Adobe's coders are the worst in the business. All they had to do was make it small, efficient and easy to use. Essentially they did the exact opposite and only had a business model because there were no competitors. In addition, they have security issues and all these random strange issues which should never happen.

I liken Flash to Blackberry and how RIM is allowing Android apps on it's service. It has to do that to stay relevant because no one is going to use it otherwise. Adobe Flash would be dead within 5 years if they didn't switch their tools to work with HTML 5.

Now the question is, why would developers create two versions of the videos - one for Flash and one for mobile HTML5? Why wouldn't they just create an HTML5 video that plays on both mobile and standard browsers?

If only the site was Flash based .. I might have taken them seriously.

Flash is the only piece of software that has consistently taken down my computers at home and work (windows and linux). I'm jumping for joy to see it go.

Edit: I started my web career ~12 years ago using Flash .. it was magic but the browser has finally caught up .. let it die with dignity.

I see, I should uninstall Flash from my computer because you somehow have managed to have so much trouble with it. Now, I haven't had these issues but I'll go ahead and take your word for it that Flash is bad for my computer so I'll uninstall it immediately.

That's not what he said.

I know he didn't. I just get tired of seeing these statements of "this technology is obviously bad because 'I' have problems with it".

It's like people who say they'll never buy another Ford truck because they had transmission problems with one back in 1974.

I can assure you it's not just 'I' that has problems .. just about every co worker and friend, family member I know has had issues with Flash .. it's common knowledge just how bad a piece of software it is. It's not a personal poke because I couldn't install the browser plugin correctly.

But, this doesn't mean you have to ditch your Flash skills, from all accounts they are working toward production HTML5 exports .. but I could be wrong .. if so, check out: http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/ .. I'm sure they will be more than happy to fill the void if Adobe can't be a...

I understand, I wasn't trying to personally insult your intelligence. I'm assuming you've put some effort into it. But even with your ample evidence I still don't think that's enough to qualify it as bad software. How many people out there have absolutely no problems with it at all?

If that's all it takes to label a piece of software as bad then all software with a large install base can be labelled as bad.

Just to be clear, I'm not a Flash developer. I deal more with HTML/CSS/Javascript all day so Flash going away is not a bad thing for me. I just don't agree with generic statements that Flash is bad overall based on personal experience.

The point I'm trying to make is that it isn't exactly fair to say that Flash is bad software just because you, and people you know, have had problems with it. I also disagree that it is common knowledge. It may be common knowledge among people who think like you do but again; what about the millions of people who use it constantly who never have a problem with it and therefore you never hear about their experience?

Disliking Flash doesn't make me a fundamentalist. Flash is "fine" in much the same way IE 6 is "fine". Sure, it gets the job done, but who the hell enjoys using it, user or developer?

I do. Every time I visit YouTube. Or Hulu. Or Pandora. Or Amazon Instant Video. Or Amazon Cloud Player.

As someone else who disables flash, I hope this isn't all that I am missing. These are all video/audio applications, for which non-flash implementations of the same application (Youtube, Vimeo, Apple's HTTP Live Steaming) work strictly better for me: smoother, faster to load, more responsive UI elements, more generic => more able to be optimized in the future.

I am sorry, but every time I visit those sites on my embedded linux box I don't get much joy.

Adobe held back everyone from the web to desktops. I created the Arora web browser and countless times had 3rd party people put it on embedded devices only to turn around and ask me how to get the flash plugin working. I had no answer but to send them to Adobe and pray that they were using x86 and Adobe would be even interested in helping them and that the fee for helping wouldn't bankrupt the company.

Flash helped keep all of us on x86 more than people realize. The arm port was always a second class could you even imagine ppc or mips? And the idea of some other more radical arch? Forget it, Adobe would laugh at you for even asking. How many Linux users choose 32bit x86 (this for the OS that seems to work on everything!) for years because they knew that flash would work?

When I heard that news about its death I celebrated. I drank a beer. I would have sung a song if I was any good. While we knew it was coming having it actually set in stone was nice. The era of the web requiring flash is coming to an end and we can start to move onto interesting solutions and interesting hardware knowing that we wont have to grovel to one company hoping they will pity us and only charge us millions for a product that kills our batteries and pegs our cpu.

Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion and not of my employer.

Hear hear!

I long for the days when I can awaken my laptop from it's peaceful sleep not to have it crash the moment I hit a youtube page in a browser tab I left paused.

Um, quite possibly both.

I really hope you are not suggesting that since you apparently don't enjoy Flash therefore no one else could possibly enjoy Flash?

I like Flash on Hulu and Youtube. I also am a fan of many flash games.

It has its uses.

Exactly. There are ~50,000 applications on kongregate alone that wouldn't have existed without flash. The hatred is puzzlingly ill-placed.

That's a huge leap from the facts. There are 50,000 applications on Kongregate that happen to be made with Flash. Whether those apps would have existed without Flash is a different question. You might as well say that Microsoft Word wouldn't have existed without Xenix (since it happened to originate there), but I think probably Microsoft would have gone ahead with the DOS version anyway.

There's nothing wrong with programming using AS3. It's just another language and environment, and it absolutely gets the job done with minimum hassle.

Edit: always use the right tool for the job, of course.

Iunno, I'm not necessarily defending Flash's merits to the end user, but for the developer, AS3 along with what the Flash API provides are in many ways more advanced than even the latest browser-native technologies. Keep in mind browser implementations of canvas, css animations, audio APIs, authoring tools are still far from standardized. Of course, I look forward to when the situation improves in the coming years, but it's hardly comparable IE6 in my opinion.

For those unaware of what motivated that: http://occupyflash.org

Ridiculous. Who upvoted this?

I don't think much more needs to be said. Adobe has thrown in the towel themselves regarding Flash on mobile devices, as they couldn't manage to develop a solid experience. How can you argue maturity in this day and age while ignoring that Flash is dead in a mobile environment? (edit: until RIM saves it!)

For desktop it is a mature technology. The website doesn't say otherwise.

I just don't understand all the Flash hate going on.

I can't remember the last time Flash killed my browser or OS. It's been at least 5 years, probably more.

Flash was designed to compensate for the deficiencies of the web. That's great. Now that web technologies are finally catching up, Flash is no longer as necessary as it once was. That's great.

So now we find ourselves in a transitionary period where HTML5 and friends are able to replace Flash in almost all situations. That's great. And for those remaining use cases where only Flash will do, well, it's available on all major desktop platforms. That's great. If you want to do something on mobile that HTML5 and friends don't support but Flash does, well, you're SOL thanks mostly to Steve. That's not so great. That's less innovative apps due to functionality denied.

So where does this leave us? Flash is a mature technology that has served its purpose well over the years, and has started to gradually fade into the twilight as open protocols fill the same gaps it was designed to fill. Go ahead and use HTML5 if it works for you; that's what it's designed for. But why all the hating on Flash?

I'm guessing you use Windows. Flash is kind of OK on Windows. It blows elsewhere. It drains my MacBook Pro's battery, it makes my computer uncomfortably hot, it still hangs and crashes more than all the other software on my computer put together, and it has a much higher propensity than HTML5 solutions to break standard things like Services, bookmarking, right-click and the back button.

It runs fine on my macbook pro. It drains the battery in some instances, yeah, but then again so do heavy HTML5 sites like turntable (which is currently taking 50% cpu, the most power hungry process out of EVERYTHING I'm running, all for playing music and displaying some 2-dimensional sprites and a chat room).

What I really notice is that all of these web technologies designed to improve the user experience chew through multiple orders of magnitude more CPU than a native app. 2-4x more I could understand. Hell, I'd even settle for 10x, but when it's going over 100x for poster-child quality HTML5 or Flash sites (which are not by any means impressive compared to a native app), something's definitely wrong.

On my unibody MacBook, Flash can peg the CPU pretty easily if I'm not running FlashBlock. It may be more that I leave many tabs open. I used to just use Chrome when I really needed to see a Flash-heavy site, but recent releases have much worse performance than before. For example, a video in Flash will use 200% CPU under Chrome, but < 100% under Safari or Firefox.

It blows elsewhere.

And it runs fine on my 64-bit Linux box. Crashes are incredibly infrequent compared to what is generally reported on threads like this--I don't even remember when it happened last. Probably sometime in the last year.

It blows on every Ubuntu Linux machine I run as well - though the Flash-Aid Firefox plugin certainly helped.

You seem to think that the entire mobile platform runs iOS. Apple only has something like 15% marketshare.

"You seem to think that the entire mobile platform runs iOS."

It's silly to assume that someone on HN would be unaware of the players in the mobile marketplace.

Adobe themselves said that Apple's move to block them proved to be the clincher: http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-o...

Quote: "This one should be pretty apparent, but given the fragmentation of the mobile market, and the fact that one of the leading mobile platforms (Apple’s iOS) was not going to allow the Flash Player in the browser, the Flash Player was not on track to reach anywhere near the ubiquity of the Flash Player on desktops."

If your site needs Flash, develop it in Flash. But it sure doesn't seem like there are that many sites that really need it these days.

I'll up vote anything promoting binaries in vm's rather then the organized mess of interpreted web-languages today.

How ironic. They talk about providing the best user experience on the web, yet their site offers a sub par experience on my phone. The text doesn't scale when zooming, so basically it's unreadable on the phone.

Which is _exactly_ why HTML is not by definition better than Flash!

If the site was in Flash, my phone wouldn't be seeing anything. Like whenever I try to visit a restaurant's site and the WHOLE thing is in Flash.

On my phone Flash works fine. On a WAP phone, I wouldn't be seeing anything. Like whenever I try to visit hacker news on my nokia 7110.

Which is of course no excuse to make flash only restaurant sites... Nor is it to make canvas only, webgl only, image only...websites.

Stop this occupy madness, even worse is upvoting it, let it die.

A modern website needs to be accessible on PCs, tablets, and smartphones. While there are arguable reasons for segmenting off the last option as an outlier (though some devices offer the resolution and capabilities exceeding some desktops), it is less justifiable making a distinct version for a tablet.

So you end up making a rich "HTML 5" version for tablet and smartphones.

Why, then, would you bother with Flash for the PC? If you have a modern simile for Tablets, Flash is just completely redundant.

Flash is a sign of a derelict site. It would be hard to justify its use for greenfield development.

     If you have a modern simile for Tablets, 
     Flash is just completely redundant

I'm against Flash but this argument doesn't hold. It's like saying - if you have a modern website designed for mobile phones, than a native iOS app is redundant.

Flash is not redundant if it allows you to escape the browser's limits. Here, I'll give you an example -- try doing chat-roulette without Flash.

If HTML5 doesn't do it now, it soon will.

http://devworks.thinkdigit.com/Internet/Native-webcam-suppor...

Pretty soon a 'chatroulette' type app without Flash will be a reality. Plus, it will work with tablets and phones, something Flash soon won't be doing.

It was just an example -- the browser is by definition limited. This also has advantages, but experimenting with new capabilities is not one of them.

Bigger question:

How does Flash jive with responsive web design techniques, meant to provide one flexible interface for desktop and mobile form factors?

Answer: It doesn't.

Actually, it sucks. Don't equivocate.

(Skip intro)

The best use for these CPU hungry, crash-happy little rectangles that represent portals into some pocket Universe, disjoint and separate from the web surrounding and encompassing it, is for audio and video. As that use becomes redundant Flash will have very little to justify its existence.

Time for occupyoccupysites.com...

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