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Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

theguardian.com

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Re: Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

#31

Post by userbinator »

greggman wrote: post #4

I'm not 100% sure the death of Flash is a good thing. Maybe the death of "flash the buggy proprietary plugin" is good but there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of devs that are productive with flash and not likely to be as productive in HTML5. It would be nice if somehow Flash could export to HTML5 directly. That said, Flash still has features that are missing from HTML5. 1. One file distribution.…

I agree that it's the Adobe implementation which is the main problem here, and that dying is a good thing, but not the goals of Flash nor the SWF format itself. HTML5 and its related standards (CSS, JS, SVG) are a great example of "design by committee" leading to large amounts of gratuitous complexity and inefficiency. It's basically a document markup language which got coerced into a crude approximation of a general-purpose applications language, whereas SWF was designed from the beginning for vector graphics, animations, and interactivity.

Re: Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

#32

Post by PretzelFisch »

wtbob wrote: post #14
hacker_9 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. Thesedays disabling javascript would likely render any webpage unusable.

> Thesedays disabling javascript would likely render any webpage unusable. Not any web page, and not completely unusable, but it's getting worse every single day. It makes me sick to see the open web perverted so badly. Web pages should be documents to be read, not programs to execute!

I strongly agree with this. But until we put forth an application alternative, we will be doomed to suffer through the death of document centric html.

Re: Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

#33

Post by fenomas »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #22
codeshaman wrote: post #20

While I agree that it might be time for Flash (the proprietary plugin) to be retired, I'm totally against dancing on it's grave, as is the tone of this article. We have to respect it for what it brought to the world. Flash has enabled many technologies and companies, like online video (youtube?), music playback (....) , games, cartoons and so on. I remember how amazed I was by the perfection of the first flash websit…

> Flash has enabled many technologies and companies, like online video (youtube?), music playback (....) , games, cartoons and so on. We had online video and online music before Flash. The tag. > I remember how amazed I was by the perfection of the first flash website that I've seen. You could interact with spheres, it made high quality sounds and had cool animations and transitions. That was in Netscape Navigator 4.…

> The tag

When it worked, which was rarely. ;) Flash's contribution was to solve the codec problem, which realistically is what made content services like youtube possible.

> DHTML

It existed, sure, but on top of IE and NS having completely unrelated solutions, even within each browser the behavior varied randomly by OS and version, and defied graceful degradation. In those days if displaying correctly for a meaningful subset of both mac and PC users was important, you used Flash.

Re: Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

#34

Post by marcosdumay »

digi_owl wrote: post #17
distances wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using RequestPolicy [0] for selectively disabling JavaScript based on domains. It's usually a bit of clicking to allow crucial sources when I visit a new site, but I think it pays back with the reduction in distracting UI elements and loading times. [0] https://requestpolicycontinued.github.io

Been using Noscript for a number of years, and it seems to do pretty much the same as Requestpolicy.

Requestpolicy is much more fine grained than NoScript, what is both a blessing and a curse.

Re: Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

#35

Post by joonoro »

juggernautq wrote: post #18

Please help me understand this obsession about building a secure software. I understand there are sensitive information like bank account, email address(maybe? if you are important). But most of stuff on your computer is crap for, I'd say, 99% of the users(me included). And for an average user the convenience trumps everything. All of this is fine if there is a perfect replacement for flash. No, there isn't. I don't…

> Please help me understand this obsession about building a secure software.

You probably already know this, but it's so your things don't get stolen and your computer doesn't get exploited and possibly used against other people's computers. Wouldn't you agree that these are bad things?

> most of stuff on your computer is crap

And the 1% (such as your bank information) is the most important and would affect you the most if exploited, wouldn't you say?

> for an average user the convenience trumps everything.

You're completely right, which is why Flash wasn't disabled until things got really bad.

> All of this is fine if there is a perfect replacement for flash. No, there isn't.

This is also a valid point that could be argued for.

Re: Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

#37

Post by anonbanker »

greggman wrote: post #4

I'm not 100% sure the death of Flash is a good thing. Maybe the death of "flash the buggy proprietary plugin" is good but there are tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of devs that are productive with flash and not likely to be as productive in HTML5. It would be nice if somehow Flash could export to HTML5 directly. That said, Flash still has features that are missing from HTML5. 1. One file distribution.…

That's a whole lot of words to say "they took our jobs".

Re: Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

#38

Post by radmuzom »

hacker_9 wrote: post #2

Just because it's popular to hate on Flash everyone forgets about the good times it brought. Back in school, flash games were all the rage and you could bet if we were on the computers for a lesson 90% of the time would be spent on the helicopter game or motorbike sport!

Back in the day, a lot of my friends and me (mostly introvert and socially not very popular) used to spend a lot of time playing dating Flash games where the ultimate reward was sex. Good times!

Re: Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

#39

Post by juggernautq »

marcosdumay wrote: post #29
juggernautq wrote: post #18

Please help me understand this obsession about building a secure software. I understand there are sensitive information like bank account, email address(maybe? if you are important). But most of stuff on your computer is crap for, I'd say, 99% of the users(me included). And for an average user the convenience trumps everything. All of this is fine if there is a perfect replacement for flash. No, there isn't. I don't…

Yes, most of the stuff on anybody's computer is unimportant. Now, let me ask. How important is that small part that you didn't talk about? Because it's on the exact same computer, and will be compromised together with the "most" trash that you don't care about.

Really, I would do this un-safe stuff in Virtual Machines. Use secure setup for work and other.

Of course it is better to be secure, but that's not logically possible. Programmers make mistakes, it happens, you computer could be hacked, it happeneds.

Can I at least have a choice to be functional though unsafe? The only way right now is either you have a dedicated computer, or run virtual machines. Mozilla's move seemed more like an personal attack on Adobe than doing something good for the user. They could have make this a choice, have a setting to unlock.. etc. which they didn't do.

Then I could have run unsafed version in VM and block flash everywhere else. At least I'd be functional..

Re: Flash is dying a death by 1,000 cuts, and that's a good thing

#40

Post by juggernautq »

qntm wrote: post #26
juggernautq wrote: post #18

Please help me understand this obsession about building a secure software. I understand there are sensitive information like bank account, email address(maybe? if you are important). But most of stuff on your computer is crap for, I'd say, 99% of the users(me included). And for an average user the convenience trumps everything. All of this is fine if there is a perfect replacement for flash. No, there isn't. I don't…

Who are you to decide what on my computer is crap?

Mozilla guys seem to think they are all gold.

You need to make the decision. That's the point.

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