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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Following the link took me to a page demanding that I agree to additional terms of service first, but dragging that window out of the way revealed the indication that Google Music won't work without Flash, so I didn't bother going any further. More sites should provide that kind of information before signup; thanks for that.

Hopefully they'll create a non-Flash version at some point in the future, at which point I look forward to trying this.

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We've used flash for everything for ages. Hell, if you look at the competition Deezer is in flash. I know the tendency these days is for HTML5 and against Flash but really? Aren't you trying to be a hipster here?

We used asbestos for ages too, because it got the job done, and we didn't bother looking for alternatives to that until we had to.

HTML5 has gained ground against Flash for a reason, and I certainly didn't choose it for popularity. I use and prefer open software and open standards, and Flash doesn't provide either one.

If the Flash player ever becomes open, I'll probably install it for convenience, but I'd still use Flashblock and prefer sites based on HTML5 over sites using Flash.

well, <audio> had never been an advantage html5 has had over flash :) It's been pretty bad both in spec and especially in the implementations (edit: but finally improving!)

That said, someone told me they got google music playing in a UIWebView on iOS, so there must be some fallback mechanism.

Hardly. I use ClickToPlugin to improve general website performance which breaks Google Music, and I have to completely disable it to use the Google Music web player.

As a result, 100% of my Google Music use is now on my iOS device through the 3rd party gMusic app. It's so obnoxious to offer only the Flash version considering they already coded and offer an HTML5 player, just not to desktops.

Since it works on iOS, there should be a way to get served the html5 version.

Works fine if you change your user agent to iPad.

i think the issue is with content protection and I believe with ios they have a client side drm protection. What legal music services aren't using flash for the only reason of digital content protection ?

edit: check out section on encryption. http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/networ...

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