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Comment by bohm | Hacker News Reader

guess it's time to disable flash for a few weeks...

A significant portion of the web using community (including myself) stopped using flash 6-12 months ago, when all the zero-days became a monthly occurrence. The plugin is no longer strategic for adobe, they've stopped any forward-looking development on it, and are now in the mode of whack-a-mole reactive security patching.

I have not once every missed having flash on my system. It's not just the case that the web is useable, it's that, with the single exception of the BBC, it doesn't seem to use it anywhere I visit.

The BBC site will use non-flash videos if you browse it on an iPad, but they don't seem smart enough to serve these to you if you use a desktop browser with flash disabled.

Presumably they could implement a non-flash fallback for users but unfortunately they just haven't bothered.

I tried to cheat by modifying my User-Agent to pretend to be an iPad but had no luck...

I was going to agree with you, but I've just double-checked, and you CAN access video content on the BBC sites on a desktop (MacOS X Safari) by setting your User-Agent to iPad. However, it's important that you've removed Flash completely from your system (using Flash Uninstaller), rather than just disable Flash (hoping to use Click-To-Flash). For some reason, they detect Flash by some kind of file-path-detection code...

That's irritating! I'll have to take a closer look at what they are doing, as I'd like to keep flash around on a click-to-run basis.

I'm surprised that websites can do any kind of file path detection on a client...

What horrible browser lets a website inspect the filesystem without permission?

Browsers give away far too much information: https://panopticlick.eff.org/

>A significant portion of the web using community (including myself) stopped using flash 6-12 months ago

That seems unlikely. Maybe HN users, but that's not really representative of web users overall

I'm on some troubleshooting pages for canon that require flash. Seems they are in the process- as there are html 5 vids on the site as well.

> The plugin is no longer strategic for adobe, they've stopped any forward-looking development on it, and are now in the mode of whack-a-mole reactive security patching.

[citation needed]

About four years back Adobe committed to HTML5 on mobile platforms, and noted they would only provide bug fixes and security patches.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/adobe-abandons-flash-player-on-m...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8879783/Adobe-aba...

Simply because at that time both Google and Apple have banned Flash on their respective platforms, otherwise nothing would change.

I'm not sure what your point is, but the reality on the ground, is that if you want to provide access to video, or other rich content, flash is incapable of reaching the largest audience, and the audience that's growing the fastest. Adobe has made it clear there will no longer be any development of flash on the mobile platform. HTML5 is the strategic platform for adobe moving forward.

Absolutely no new major content sites as of around 2014 or so support flash as an option - they are all starting with HTML5 and/or thick local clients.

Flash needs to be EOL'd, and the sooner the better for the security of the Internet.

Citation needed comments are lazy and useless.

I've been running without Flash for a couple of years now. The only thing I can't do that I would like to be able to do is to watch Facebook videos. Other than that, not having Flash installed is not a problem for me.

Facebook doesn't use HTML5? Why?!

They will if you force a mobile user agent. I wish I knew why they didn't on desktop.

Facebook now supports HTML5 video for Windows 7+.

Swap the "www" in the URL for "m" on a video page and you'll get a low resolution HTML5 video!

I just set it to only activate when I approve it, for if I'm on a trusted website.

No, it's time to uninstall all plugins for good.

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