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Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

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Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#51
post #43

I got plugins disabled by default in Chrome for ages now (right click run plugin when needed). Before that on FF i had an add on that disabled autorun for flash also (very similar to how chrome does it with plugins gotta right click to load it). But if Google does it only for none Google adnetworks that's going to be a huge lawsuit. The article doesn't really clarify why would it work on Google own networks because t…

> I got plugins disabled by default in Chrome for ages now (right click run plugin when needed). that should be the default. And that's also going to be impossible now those annoying bits will be HTML5.

Well it's the chicken and the egg, you don't like Flash you block it, Google blocks it you have to deal with HTML5 now, it's the same thing as with Adblock...

People don't like ads they use adblockers, site revenues go down advertisers find new and even more invasive ways to display ads. Wont be surprise if in a year or 2 how content will work is that all (actual) content on the site will be encrypted and encoded into and then decoded using JS and the only way to get the decryption key is to load and play trough the ad to the end. Heck with how cheap symmetric encryption is becoming on modern CPU's not to mention GPU's it won't cost that much to implement. The CDN runs the content, the CDN runs the ad's one doesn't fully load without the other...

If i was bored enough or evil enough i would write this myself but any evil exec's listening you are free to take this idea :)

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH if a Flash crash or any other user space application crash causes a system crash it's an issue with the OS. Steve Jobs at the time said that every time MacOS crashes it's more often than not Flash's fault, which wasn't really true and would only speak "wonders" of how well MacOS isolates user space applications... On the security issues it's some what true because the nature of Flash, applications like these are…

They're not system crash but application crash, both are reported on MacOS X. So no, Flash didn't crash the OS, only apps like Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Isn't it enough ?

>They're not system crash but application crash, both are reported on MacOS X. So no, Flash didn't crash the OS, only apps like Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Isn't it enough ?

That wasn't what Apple (Steve Jobs) claimed... [1]"Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it’s because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, the world is moving to HTML5." Also Flash doesn't crash Chrome, doesn't crash FF for ages either. No clue about Safari the quote was debunked by everyone, even Apple backtracked on it to a more "we meant Safari in certain cases" type of statement. we can all move along.

[1]http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/steve-jobs-unleashes-...

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#53
post #38

I got plugins disabled by default in Chrome for ages now (right click run plugin when needed). Before that on FF i had an add on that disabled autorun for flash also (very similar to how chrome does it with plugins gotta right click to load it). But if Google does it only for none Google adnetworks that's going to be a huge lawsuit. The article doesn't really clarify why would it work on Google own networks because t…

But if Google does it only for none Google adnetworks that's going to be a huge lawsuit. The article doesn't really clarify why would it work on Google own networks because they convert to HTML5 or because they will white list their own stuff. It's because their ad network converts stuff, at least that's the only way I can read these sentences: Google said advertisers who are worried about having their ads switched o…

You don't need to be on Google's ad network to use swiffy (the conversion tool that they are using), it's open source.

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What irritates me is that flash is required for google music. I really like google music over all the other radio services, plus I have some music in my lib, but I've resorted to just looking up albums on youtube. If it's an absolute must have for some technical reason, a desktop client would be nice as an alternative.

And Google Finance... It is rather ironic half of their sites are going to break, unless they conveniently add an exception.

> It is rather ironic half of their sites are going to break, unless they conveniently add an exception.

Those sites aren't going to break, even without adding any exceptions. There's no definition of "essential" that would exclude Flash content on Google Finance. As mentioned above, the exact heuristics they're using are:

"TLDR, essential content is either: 1) On the same domain as the page 2) Considered "Large" (at least 298 x 398, certain aspect ratio, minimum total area), with an exception for tiny content (likely transport plugins)."

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#55
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're free to disable flash on your own system right now. Always have been.

Sure. Now I'm enabling it again just to access a website that requires flash because we haven't thrown it out yet. /web standards

WHy not just use the click-to-play option in Chrome?

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#56

For anyone interested in the definition of "essential", see the source code: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... (See constants) and https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/master/... (See ShouldThrottleContent) TLDR, essential content is either: 1) On the same domain as the page 2) Considered "Large" (at least 298 x 398, certain aspect ratio, minimum total area), with an exce…

The only other regular 'tiny content' thing I can think of is ZeroClipboard (which puts an invisible flash movie over a button so you can click 'copy') as Javascript clipboard actions still aren't broadly supported [2]. ZeroClipboard is used by Github and lots of other sites for the little buttons next to repo URLs, etc. 1 - https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard 2 - http://caniuse.com/#search=clipboard

Github somehow manages to copy stuff to the clipboard with flash player disabled - apparently it's using the new HTML5 clipboard API.

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#57
post #35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Google's reasoning for the move is largely performance-based, apparently" Yeah, because WebGL never crashes the browser (not even the kind of small demos that seems to be all it's used for).

I've been developing WebGL content for the past 18 months and, so far, it hasn't crashed from any WebGL issues. And that's with my code which is pretty awful most of the time.

I've had WebGL crashes quite often on YouTube. Allot of the WebGL demos are also either forcing a WebGL crash from time to time or just hang browsers due to performance. You can say allot about Flash but atm it's performance and stability are better than WebGL in it's current state.

The problem with WebGL is that it pretty much inherited the mess of OpenGL every driver version on every GPU can implement different feature set of it (similar to the extension mess of OpenGL in Nvidia and ATI minidrivers at the time) which results in Browsers having to maintain blacklist/whitelists[1] for a very large array of hardware and software combinations (Chrome currently isn't maintaining a driver version based list other than a cut off date for certain drivers which also causes problems if you are running old hardware and the best drivers for it are considered out of date by Google).

WebGL it self is also not implemented in the same manner across different browsers Chrome and FF for example have quite a different blacklist/whitelist for WebGL, I don't know if this because of different in browser implementation or because of they are simply encountering different issues and adjusting accordingly.

The worse thing I've encountered so far is WebGL on switchable graphics (e.g. Nvidia Optimus) enabled laptops, some features might switch the GPU arbitrarily even mid execution which causes the whole thing to implode..

[1]https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/gpu/+/master/...

Whats worse is that WebGL can actually crash your graphics driver and if it's bad enough than Windows can't recover the kernel mode driver it's a complete kernel panic. This doesn't happen often but if you want to do it you can do it sadly too easily, Chrome/FF chase known DOS cases with WebCL quite well but they really don't catch all of them and if that feature isn't blacklisted for your setup well you can crash a machine with a single pixel draw ;)

And the introduction of WebCL would probably lead to some of the nastiest RCE vulnerabilities you can imagine soon enough you are allowing people to execute general purpose code directly on the metal and interact with Kernel mode components. There are already GPU rootkits out there soon enough they'll find an infection vector trough WebGL or WebCL and it will be a very unpleasant period.

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#58
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only other regular 'tiny content' thing I can think of is ZeroClipboard (which puts an invisible flash movie over a button so you can click 'copy') as Javascript clipboard actions still aren't broadly supported [2]. ZeroClipboard is used by Github and lots of other sites for the little buttons next to repo URLs, etc. 1 - https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard 2 - http://caniuse.com/#search=clipboard

Github somehow manages to copy stuff to the clipboard with flash player disabled - apparently it's using the new HTML5 clipboard API.

It may be using both.

Re: Chrome will begin pausing many Flash ads by default on September 1

#60
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only other regular 'tiny content' thing I can think of is ZeroClipboard (which puts an invisible flash movie over a button so you can click 'copy') as Javascript clipboard actions still aren't broadly supported [2]. ZeroClipboard is used by Github and lots of other sites for the little buttons next to repo URLs, etc. 1 - https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard 2 - http://caniuse.com/#search=clipboard

Github somehow manages to copy stuff to the clipboard with flash player disabled - apparently it's using the new HTML5 clipboard API.

IIRC ZeroClipboard falls back to flash if you're not using a browser with the new clipboard APIs.
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