Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Is Flash Dead Yet? - 2010

isflashdeadyet.com

25 pointsnapolux53 comments

Four years after YouTube started "experimenting" with HTML5, it still uses Flash by default to show me videos on the latest versions of Firefox and IE. If Flash is not installed, YouTube resorts to HTML5 <video>, which seems to play just fine, but still displays a big red warning about the missing Flash. Why can't they use HTML5 by default and resort to Flash if and only if the browser doesn't support HTML5? Why do they have to keep doing it the other way around? This is the kind of shit that keeps Flash alive.

On a slightly different note, I really wish "DRM on HTML5" fails and DRM users continue to be forced to rely on plugins like Flash. Not only do DRM users deserve the inferior experience, but also, if we really want to keep open standards open, there's got to be some fenced-off area where proprietary kids can play by themselves and the rest of us can ignore them. If there's one reason I want Flash to stay alive, that's it. Better Flash than some other bespoke ActiveX control like the Koreans use :(

Why do people keep equating DRM with proprietary? Granted, it does allow for lock-in, but it depends on who's doing the lock-in. I don't think the case has been sufficiently made that DRM is bad in and of itself. I am all in favour of open standards, no vendor lock in, I'm in favour of open source and free software. Let me reiterate just so there's no confusion, I use Ubuntu on the desktop, I use Gentoo on the server, I have an Nexus phone and tablet. However, I fail to see how DRM is bad in and of itself. I would prefer if all software was done in the open but I don't think proprietary software is evil or morally bad. I think it increases the likelihood of harm to the user somewhere down the line but I don't think the harm is inevitable. In the case of DRM I think the harm is even more remote, what do you think?

Side note: what irks me is multiple formats ... Say I'm, an old timer, I've bought an album on vinyl, I figure that should give me some deduction when CD comes out or digital only or DVD-audio or whatever, I think making people purchase the same content on different formats over and over again at full price with no discount and not taking into account that you've purchased that album before is unfair!

Harm doesn't have to be inevitable for something to be morally bad. E.g. drunk driving, unprotected sex, and so on.

Unprotected sex is morally bad?

If you know that there is a risk of harm -- STD or an unwanted pregnancy -- and fail to take reasonable steps to reduce that risk, I suppose that counts as "bad".

Example of unprotected sex that is probably OK: (both partners are STD-free) && (they are using a different method of birth control || they actually want a baby || it is impossible for a pregnancy to occur because they're same-sex or one of them is sterile)

> Why do people keep equating DRM with proprietary?

DRM must be proprietary. The whole point of DRM is that only the authorized devices get the "special source". DRM is closed source, obfuscated binaries, tricks and traps to drop people reverse engineering them. If it was open source then the functionality could be duplicated or the special sauce modified for any use.

There's no other conceivable way DRM can function.

I think it depends on what you define as DRM. If you see DRM as simply and securely distributing read access permission, then there's no reason this can't be achieved with OSS.

If however the provider doesn't accept the fact that the permission to read is equal to the permission to copy something, then you're in trouble.

The formula could be so simple - distribute your content on high bandwidth, highly available networks, give access on a per-device or per-account basis (and charge money for that access), thus enable people to watch anything they want instantly and safely, and you gain back pretty much all of the customers you've lost to piracy, that would have bought your physical media before. Restricting copies is mostly useless since there are copies floating around of anything anyways. There's always been means to get content illegally, it's just now that the illegal way has become easier to use, or more importantly, the only way to get the content in a reasonable timeframe in the first place. Letting most of the world wait years between release in the US and the availability to stream and then wondering why they dare to download it anyways, is just not a sane way to go about and it has nothing to do with using DRM or not.

What you're talking about is not DRM, much the opposite.

> If you see DRM as simply and securely distributing read access permission, then there's no reason this can't be achieved with OSS.

There is. If it's open source, the special sauce can't be special any more. The entire mechanism of DRM would be broken.

What I propose as DRM is nothing but an ACL. This is available with OSS just as you can have file permissions in linux. The reason today's DRM needs 'special sauce' is always because of restricting the copying of content they want to sell people - which is pointless IMO.

Agreed. Short of any break of the obfuscation, there's always going to be exposure of the media in an analogue form where a user can point a damn Polaroid camera at it. DRM just makes it difficult for the legitimate consumer and easier for the illegitimate one.

HTML5 YouTube plays just fine on my newish (2 years old) laptop, which has a discreet Nvidia GPU, with Chrome (no matter if I'm on Windows or Linux). However, the temperature of the GPU increases noticeably while watching videos (i.e. it is doing more work) and the speed of the fan increases, too. It's like this with every <video> element I put to play. With Flash, any increase in resource consumption is unnoticeable.

Some days ago I booted my old (5-6 years old) desktop, which only has Intel integrated graphics, with Chrome. In HTML5 YouTube, playback skipped a lot of video frames, and often sound would have interruptions too (especially if I switched tabs or windows and went to do something else). The CPU became much busier. This would happen on both Windows and Linux. With Flash, videos play just fine, and the CPU definitely doesn't get as busy. The version of Chrome is the same on all four OS installs.

Conclusion: while I like HTML5 video much more than Flash video (if not for anything else, because I don't need plugins, even if they are bundled with the browser), it still has a long way to go, as currently it uses much more resources than Flash to achieve the same goal. I believe this is the main reason why YouTube still makes Flash the default: if they made HTML5 video the default, it would play poorly for a lot of people, and make their computers super slow.

I've noticed that videos with ads don't load in the html5 player.

Funny I forgot about html5. I tried some nojs + proxy plugin that would replace flash with it, the benefits were two folds :

- lower cpu usage

- better network buffering; their latest flash player heuristics don't go along with my ISP bandwidth ~limitations.

ps: I can also try to forward the stream to vlc or mplayer/mpv in the hope it would use even less cpu.

I love that I can send it via AirPlay to my Apple TV. Lets see Flash do that!

Maybe because HTML5 video still has fractured codec support, which means every video, in every resolution they provide, needs to be encoded in at least WebM and MP4 using H.264 (which is a licensing drama in itself) -- including video ads. Could practically double their storage requirements.

Man I hate Flash. But for all the shit it gets, I can't help but be grateful for it. Because of Flash, we've had easy to use video on the Internet for a decade. It's 2014, and browsers still can't do video as well as Flash.

Yes, it's time for Flash to die. But it really stepped in and moved the web forward when the browsers and W3C were too slow. It deserves an honorable discharge.

It was a huge step up over the genuinely awful RealMedia. For a while, that was the de facto standard for audio and video on the web.

Lmao! Oh god yes Real Player!

Is the Real Player still going?

I also hate flash, but my view is that in combination with IE, it kept the web back 10 years.

When I first started out as a dev, barely anyone knew HTML or CSS, because flash was all you needed. It's seems bizarre now but I took a lot of ridicule from people when I tried to insist on building things the standard compliant way back in 2004. I remember being told that things I had personally designed specifically to be built in HTML couldn't be done. The situation was bananas, flash had turned everyone into zombies. And while you wouldn't be fired for mentioning JavaScript, you would jump to the top of the naughty list. Advocating JavaScript back then was like advocating kiddie fiddling.

And so web standards were kept back. So browsers were held back. (Why should Microsoft make a better browser? Nobody uses HTML or CSS anyway?) and so the whole web was held back. I look at a lot of the stuff we do today, and I see no reason we couldn't have been doing it back in 2004 other than the fact that flash was easy. It's was the crack that turned the web into a digital ghetto with developers high on their own success, site owners tripping off the rich, colourful and "fully immersive experiences" (there's a phrase you don't hear anymore) of their own all singing, all dancing and utterly unusable websites. Meanwhile, users were left to scrounge around in all that dirt looking for scraps of anything barely edible.

If IE was Hitler, Flash would be Stalin. Sure Hitler was a bad guy and he shoulders all the blame, but he was rank a rank amateur compared to our friend and ally Joseph "evil personified" Stalin.

On top of all that, the flash player is a piece of junk. Always has been, always will be and I make no apologies for feeling smug when they started scrambling to get it working on mobile. "Oh no!" I would say, "have all those years of showing nothing but contempt for the people who have to run you're buggy, resource hungry piece of shit plugin left you up shit creek without a paddle?" Good riddance I say.

Oh, and and I don't agree that flash is better for video. I would argue that the current state of affairs, while tricker for a dev is much better for the end user. I'd also argue that back in the dark days, there was QuickTime, which was measurably and undisputedly better than flash both for developers and for end users.

It's some kind of synergistic relationship. I don't think Flash dev planned to use it as a standalone video interface. I believe video was added first as prerendered animation embedded in flash applications. Whoever decided it would be good to use it as a video player made flash ubiquitous.

update: I take it back, Jonathan Gay (futuresplash/flash creator) was the reason behind flash video https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Gay#Flash_video:_Tin_... .. crazy

ps: in 2010 he stopped programming computer to program nature : breeding grass fed beefs http://www.coldhardflash.com/2010/05/flash-co-creator-jonath...

For me "easy to use video on the Internet" always was a direct link to a file that I can download just like any file, and play in my media player of choice just like any other video file. Flash never worked so well; it only ever caused grief for its crashes, slowness, security problems, nonportability, compatibility issues, etc. So far HTML5 hasn't worked much better.

I don't see how flash moved the web forward, it certainly didn't do so for me as a user. Maybe it did for the guys upstream who would rather have control over all my access to their data, instead of letting me just download it and do what I want with it.

For me the great thing was it allowed streaming video in a quality not matched by the terrible RealPlayer and the like. Downloading videos is easy now but back on slow ADSL to download a video was an overnight task but streaming was pretty much instant.

That makes no sense to be honest. If you have the bandwidth to stream a video for uninterrupted playback, you start downloading that file and begin playback while the download continues in the background. In fact there's no difference between streaming and downloading in this case, it's exactly the same thing. The use of the former term in a scenario like this always bothered me.

There's two kinds of video on the web.

If I'm going to watch a movie, would I prefer to use VLC? Sure.

But do I want to download 10 second YouTube clips? God no.

Given a direct link to a file, you're free to deal with it however you like. You don't actually have to wget it to your ~/Downloads/ if you don't like.

Regardless of what the user interface is going to look like on your end, you're still getting the same bytes and playing them the same way. There are two types of video: video you play back and video you play back. For both, you need to download (or "stream" if you're hip) these bytes.

I feel like some kind of web luddite for saying this, but does anyone else actually like flash?

yes, people abused it and most flash apps were crap, but now I'm seeing more and more of the same done in css animations/javascript. It's worse too, since most people just do something like jQuery.animate and update the dom every frame.

I personally liked the actionscript 3 graphics api a lot more than javascript + canvas. I did work with it a lot so I could be biased..

The death of a closed platform like flash is good for the future of the web, but some of the hate is undeserved. Hopefully it will have a second life as a desktop app platform.

It's also easy to block Flash (I have it disabled by default), but not so easy to block JS or CSS animations selectively.

Having done some decompilation/deobfuscation stuff I've worked with the Flash file format directly at the byte level, and it's really quite nice and efficient for its purpose - although you wouldn't see that from the direction Adobe's plugins have taken. IMHO it was good when it was still called Macromedia Shockwave Flash.

Adobe isn't even trying anymore. Last I checked they bundled a toolbar with the flash installer..

here's an app I wrote in the good ole days, about 20k loc: http://www.partkart.com

info: http://www.cnczone.com/forums/opensource-software/106198-par...

code: https://launchpad.net/partkam (yeah, launchpad. I have a habit of backing the wrong horse)

Oh god. You've just reminded me of hacking the Nitto 1320 drag racing game: it was a "desktop" app that was actually a Flash exe. Decompiling it was a lot of fun, seeing Jeff build a completely hacked client and doing it myself...

Fun times. I had a lot of time on my hands as a kid.

Flash is more alive than ever.

Facebook video, Google Street View, half of YouTube - it's amazing to me that Google allows this to go on (or maybe they're just strategizing against mobile platforms they don't make native apps for).

Also, almost every video player these days outside of the biggest companies. I recall trying to watch some US govt streaming stuff recently that didn't work.

We must continue the fight. The lack of HTML5 street view is particularly telling, imho.

YouTube is ~99% HTML5 in my Firefox profile that lacks a Flash plugin and is in the http://youtube.com/html5 trial. It's still somewhat lacking because Firefox stable doesn't enable Media Source Extensions yet, but that should be fixed in a few months.

I also see an HTML5/WebGL (?) Street View in the new Google Maps.

99%? Based on what? Number of videos? Or number of videos watched? Source, please?

That's just my guess, based on not running into any Flash-only videos. I've loaded a few hundred YouTube pages in the last month. I see that VEVO videos and the rare RTMPE-protected videos still require Flash.

Street view uses WebGL in the current Google Maps. I don’t have Flash installed in my office Firefox and it works fine.

Flash is such an incredible innovation. I wonder why can't Adobe just make it open to the public instead of watching it die slowly.

Please edit the title to include 2010, so others can at least avoid the slow realisation as they read the article that this is not a contemporary analysis.

totally agree - I do not see the point in posting (and even worse: upvoting) such outdated links. it would be a different thing if it was regularly updated, but the last update was from nov 2011.

when I was younger, Flash was <the thing> in interactive web development and UI awesomeness. you couldn't get anywhere close with HTML and Javascript and Java applets were just about to die. 10 years ago we still had the Flash Festival in Paris, where I saw some of the coolest interaction concepts til now. those things weren't just websites, it was poetry! (and don't get me wrong here, I'm not stuck in the Flash age, but it really was poetry and really amazing UI)

that's about the time I started writing ActionScript and learning how to use (Macromedia) Flash to do some basic animations. I got as far as teaching myself the Flex Framework, almost had a paying customer for a Flex project, but it actually never went beyond the hobby phase. the Flash picture portfolio I wrote for myself is still out there and I love it. it's ActionScript 8.0 but I never had any compatibility issues with any browser or Flash version. I looks the same everywhere. and I bet the compiled swf file, which is still online, dates back to 2003 or something. nowadays thefwa.com has been rebranded to "the Favourite Website Award" - it used to stand for "the Flash Website Award". that's where I discovered group94.com a Belgium-based advertising agency who were writing some crazy ActionScript back then. nowadays their website has gone HTML. it looks boring. and basic. it looks just like all the other agency portfolio websites out there. it used to be funny and clever and poetic. it used to be well... flashy. take a look at the Flash scene 10 years ago and take a look at how web interaction has evolved: nowadays you want something cool, you get it parallaxed... millions of websites all taking on the same design element. the Flash websites I saw were all different in many ways. the Flash world was a place of inspiration.

I don't really remember when I stopped reading thefwa.com (which I used to do on a daily basis). I didn't really notice when Flash got replaced almost everywhere by HTML(5). I just did now. and I feel sorry for it, because Flash used to be (and still is) a great tool and a great concept.

EDIT: I'm not talking here about the mediocre Flash world. there's plenty of bad Flash websites out there. I'm talking about the glamorous one. and in my opinion the glamorous Flash world from 5-10 years ago is still more artsy than the glamorous HTML5 world nowadays.

I haven't had any form of Flash installed for a long time. For sites that show me a message saying Flash is "required" to view something, it's amazing how often that "requirement" instantly evaporates when User Agent is switched to spoof an iPad. We can see that Flash is not only correlated with bad taste, but lying too! ;)

"solid cross-platform graphic animation"

If this was true, I might have always been a happy user of Flash. In reality I remember a few years, around the time Youtube came on, in which many websites didn't work on my Linux machine. As time went on Flash is still the slowest thing on all multi-tasking platforms...

Flash will probably make a comeback when mobile hardware can support it without burning batteries(I wouldn't count on adobe optimizing it any time soon, making non bloated software isn't in their dna). For all it's faults, flash is an incredibley fully featured authoring tool for 2D multimedia and casual games. Html5 may be technically capable of matching flash functionality, but it's rarely as easy or convenient and requires a ton of wheel re-inventing.

It really won’t. iOS is never going to support Flash, current browsers are making it click-to-play by default, Adobe shows no interest or ability in optimising the mobile plugin any further and every day advances canvas/WebGL tooling. The best Flash can hope for is maintaining its niche in non-Web interface (e.g. Scaleform UI in games).

That reminds me of these quotes from the SWF format spec (from v9, but still there probably in the latest version):

"Simplicity - The format is simple so that Flash Player is small and easily ported. Also, Flash Player depends upon a limited set of operating system features only."

"Scalability - The files work well on limited hardware, and can take advantage of better hardware when it is available."

Looking at the rest of the format spec, you would get the same impression, that a fully functional player could be written much better than Adobe's. Almost makes you wonder, did Adobe kill Flash?

I dont hate Flash. On the scale of hate Flash doesn't even come close to Internet Explorer. I just wish it was a lot better. I also wish it was open standard. It has its chance with Apple if it wasn't eating battery like X.

It also allows games that were previously no available on the web. Its creation tools are top class compared to even today's Web Technology standard.

You have to remember that Flash is driving a $100+ billion industry in online advertising aka ad banners (although you're all using ad blockers right)? And this goes from banner creation all the way to ad serving technology. I just can't see this going away any time soon.

based on the quote 'Much smarter people have written far more words about this sort of thing; you should read what they have to say.", it seems like this guy is either comparing them to himself or steve jobs

Title made me wonder whether it was about NAND flash and SSD endurance at first.

without flash my business would never take off - www.broadbandspeedchecker.co.uk . There is so far no other technology that would accurately show file download progress

The XMLHTTPRequest2 spec has a progress event for both uploads and downloads. It might not be fully supported yet[1] but there’s a path away from Flash for your business.

[1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=xhr2

Yep, HTML5 promises, but Flash delivers.

flash is comic sans

tl;dr

No.

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