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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

I am super excited to see Apple push Flash out of the browser.

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/safari...

Flash has been in decline since the first iPhone, but is still used to track people with unkillable cookies and to make obnoxious ads. Hopefully those days are now over.

I wish Google and Microsoft would follow suit. Google probably will resist the most due to the entrenched interests of DoubleClick and YouTube.

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>I wish Google and Microsoft would follow suit. Google probably will resist the most due to the entrenched interests of DoubleClick and YouTube.

This has been a feature in Google Chrome for at least a year. It isn't on by default, but you can change the browser to block any plugins until you specifically allow them on the page.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/142064?hl=en

This is a case where defaults matter.

Advertisers won't stop using Flash because 0.01% of Chrome users dig into their advanced settings and turn it off.

Apple is working backwards from, "what's best for our customers" here and I think that's great.

I'm confused about what your goal here is. Are you trying to get advertisers to use HTML for their ads?

Partially yes. The problem with Flash ads is that they are difficult to block (without blocking Flash wholesale), because we don't have access to the runtime. There's no reasonable way for the browser to deep-inspect a Flash embed and determine whether or not it's abusive or relevant. There's also no way for your browser to alter and reformat content - it's either shown precisely the way Flash wants it to be shown, or not at all.

HTML ads will be rendered by software the user actually owns and controls - the browser market is healthy, largely driven by open source, and there is choice in your "runtime". Making all ads render in HTML will be a tremendous win for the user.

As someone else mentioned also, Flash is one of the worst pieces of software known to man when it comes to bugs and exploits. Nary a day goes by without a serious 0-day Flash breach being discovered, and it is still notoriously crashy.

I want advertisers to continue to use Flash, precisely because Flash is trivial to block and is almost always advertising.

There are approximately two exceptions, Youtube and Vimeo, and they can be handled with any of several click-to-play Flash blockers.

Making all ads render in HTML will make them much harder to block, because there will no longer be such a common telltale for animating, distracting cruft.

quick note about vimeo's html5 video player: It's amazing, it runs on almost all videos.

it's lightyears ahead in terms of scope (number of videos' that will play using it) and style compared to the youtube html5 trial.

> scope (number of videos' that will play using it)

Many videos don't play in HTML5 on Youtube because of mandatory ads (displayed as overlays) and various settings available to right holders. The Youtube HTML5 player is perfectly potent...

> and style

... and on par with its Flash-based sibling. Now if you want to argue the Youtube player (be it HTML5 or Flash) is not as stylish and functional as Vimeo's, so be it.

Worst case scenario somebody will cook up a "unanimate" browser-extension for Firefox and Chrome.

If HTML5 ads becomes the defacto standard, you know somebody will be annoyed enough to actually build it.

People block Flash for a variety of reasons; ads are only one. Drive-by security breaches and terrible energy performance are two others.

I don't know for the GP bit I'd actually like the ads to be HTML instead. That would be the real end to the pages forcing Flash down your throat taking the content in hostage until you've seen the bloody 5sec ad. They'll find a way to force something down our throat anyway, avoiding HTML lessens the pain.

What's best for our customers or what's worse for our competitors.

What are you actually trying to argue?

Precisely.

Not sure if you miss-read the above, but Flash has been OFF in Chrome by default for over a year. Users have to actively turn it on.

While I like their opposition to Flash[1], IMO you will eventually just end up more advanced HTML ads that are harder to detect.

[1] primarily because there are no viable competing implementations to what Adobe puts out

While many people like to block Flash for content reasons, Apple's motivation is more about security and performance.

Or, more specifically, Adobe's lack of interest in addressing such issues in a timely manner; at least on OSX.

In my opinion a flash animation still outperforms a CSS-based animation in many cases. The problem with flash was never that it was inherently slow, but that people abused it to do slow things. On the security front though, you are absolutely right.

But it's within Apple's control to improve the performance/battery consumption of CSS animations. It's not within their control to fix Flash.

The performance side has nothing to do with animation performance and everything to do with the resources used to achieve it. Flash will murder a macbook's battery and generate an absurd amount of heat, doing nothing more than streaming h264.

That's so true, and as more and more ads go HTML you will see crappy devs animating the dom resulting in poor performance on iOS devices and damaging battery life.

So the cycle continues.

This is already happening and it's driving me nuts.

So many sites consume way to many cpu time with js.

> Flash has been in decline since the first iPhone, but is still used to track people with unkillable cookies and to make obnoxious ads.

And games. A lot of games. As long as the major companies making money off Flash games don't move to a different technology, Flash will never go away.

So much of the advertising industry is so entrenched in Flash. It's a big beast to turn, especially when you consider that not just the last mile delivery servers need to support CORS and videos need to be in a compatible format (webm, please), but also the entire production pipeline needs to evolve their processes and tooling.

I've been kicking and screaming to get more of our partners onto HTML5 for a couple of years now. I've met with some success, but there's an awful lot of hoop-jumping to get there. Many advertisers are still of the mindset that "HTML5 is only for mobile", if they're even aware of it.

Maybe once this battle is won we can look at a smarter VAST standard!

Flash has been in decline since the first iPhone, but is still used to track people with unkillable cookies and to make obnoxious ads. Hopefully those days are now over.

No, they’re not. HTML5 supports session storage which will lead to some very nasty cookies stored for an eternity on your machine.

Google bundles their own build of Flash in with Chrome, the normal Flash plugin doesn't work with Chrome. It's the only browser on Linux that still gets new (non-security updates) versions of Flash.

Besides, they've been moving YouTube to HTML5.

> Besides, they've been moving YouTube to HTML5.

I wish this was working properly. I am using the HTML5 trial and embedded videos will randomly not work, and many, many other videos will simply show static with "You need Adobe Flash to view this video."

For some strange reason, the exact same videos work fine on my iOS devices — just not on a no-flash desktop web browser. I'm suspicious that YouTube purposely allows a larger selection of their content to work with iOS using HTML5, and purposely fails/requires flash on a desktop under HTML5.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/87011

This is what you want.

Thank you! I didn't use exactly that script, but it led me to the YouTube5 safari extension which works beautifully and has some great features.

I get the opposite, I get videos that play fine for a web-browser, but won't work at all on mobile, even though it should. I've even taken a video, uploaded to my account and it STILL says "the owner has indicated that this video not show on mobile" or words to that effect. Though when I uploaded the video, there was no setting to click to make it unavailable to mobile users.

Especially when changing useragent to iPad Just Works

Nice to see proper flash blocking in Safari. Previously, I ended up deleting the plugin and having to wipe out the package receipts to convince Apple to stop re-installing the plugin.

Sure, because blocking HTML5 ads is soooo easy.

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