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

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131–140 of 179 posts

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

#131

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…

Thanks for the sleuthing. I wish more folks here on HN read such parts of source and reported back what they found.

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

#132
post #60
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ZeroClipboard doesn't use the HTML5 clipboard APIs yet, but there is an open issue:

https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/171

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

#134
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can’t we just throw out all flash? Way too much stuff needs it. For example fun little browser games. For example http://www.kongregate.com/ http://www.miniclip.com/ http://www.friv.com/ At least in my browser (Firefox on Linux) flash plays better than html5 for video.

+1 for this. Another example would be live streaming. yy.com comes to my mind right now, it's fully flash and used by millions of users. gaming.youtube.com does Flash too on Firefox, not to mention all of the adult streaming sites. Funny how everyone is asking for Flash to just disapear, if it had never been around we'd all be screaming for a plugin that makes all the above possible.

No, we wouldn’t scream for a plugin making that possible, but we’d scream for a web standard.

We already have a way to transmit two-way video live in browsers (WebRTC).

It should be not to hard to use the codecs existing for that to make a one-way live streaming in browsers.

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

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are millions of flash games that my kids would not appreciate losing access to; YouTube still uses flash by default I think; iPlayer (BBC program player) and news websites still mainly [or exclusively] use flash.

YouTube uses flash if it thinks you have flash. Otherwise if no flash installed or plugin disabled it defaults to HTML5 (Firefox on GNU/Linux and Mac)

For Firefox users, YouTube is supposed to prefer HTML5 video if an H.264 platform decoder is available and then fall back to Flash. YouTube should be serving HTML5 video to OS X, Windows Vista+ (except for some variants without codecs like Windows Server 2008), and Linux (if ffmpeg is available).

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

#136

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.

In GM settings, you can opt in for HTML5 audio. I have been using it for more than a year, it works extremely well.

Thanks for this. I'm not sure why they wouldn't use a fallback mechanism instead of making this an explicit setting?

Edit: This is strange. I went to change the setting and it is greyed out and cannot be changed. This is in both chrome AND firefox. Both are up to date with most recent version, and my macbook was bought this year. Neither have adblockers enabled.

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

#137

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

My favorite workaround to this is Trello, where the "keydown" event on CTRL selects some hidden text, so then if the user then hits C (still holding CTRL), the desired text is copied to the clipboard.

EDIT: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6152501

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

#139

Is this anti competitive?

That occurred to me, too. It certainly hurts any competing ad networks who don't have a Flash-to-HTML5 converter ready.

On the other hand, I think Chrome is the only major browser that ships with the ability to play Flash, so one could argue that it is just altering the benefit that Google has been providing to all Flash providers for years.

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

#140
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 int…

Yeah, but it's just an arms race at this point. If I can decrypt the content by performing X, I can make by browser either simulate X or report to your servers that I did X.
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