Petition to open source Flash • Hacker News Board

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#141

Post by niutech » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 10:47 PM UTC

romwell wrote: post #122

notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

>Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. Pray, tell me of a universally-supported compact interactive vector graphics animation format, with sound, in a single file. Back in the year 2000 I could send a Valentine card with an animated message that could be downloaded as an email attachment and kept forever. So, what's the improved version of that?

There are many:

- (M)HTML with bundled/inlined SVG and multimedia files.

- SVG with embedded multimedia files (demo: http://xn--dahlstrm-t4a.net/svg/audio/html5-audio-in-svg.svg)

- PDF with embedded multimedia files

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#142

Post by karmaProtector » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

romwell wrote: post #122

notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

>Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. Pray, tell me of a universally-supported compact interactive vector graphics animation format, with sound, in a single file. Back in the year 2000 I could send a Valentine card with an animated message that could be downloaded as an email attachment and kept forever. So, what's the improved version of that?

Zipped Website?

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#143

Post by wolrah » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

romwell wrote: post #122

notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

>Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. Pray, tell me of a universally-supported compact interactive vector graphics animation format, with sound, in a single file. Back in the year 2000 I could send a Valentine card with an animated message that could be downloaded as an email attachment and kept forever. So, what's the improved version of that?

> universally-supported

I thought we're talking about Flash here? You know, the thing that only works on a subset of browsers on the three major desktop OSes and has absolutely zero modern mobile support.

Almost everything that has been done with Flash falls in to one of two categories:

1. Things that should be done in standard and truly universal HTML5, generally with assistance of Javascript, CSS, and SVGs. This includes every single media player and most non-interactive or lightly interactive animations, as well as all navigation elements for a web site. Your valentine's card example is definitely in this category.

2. Things that should be done with a proper game engine.

There's a very small margin in between those two mostly full of games too complicated to be practical in HTML+JS but too simple to really be worth the effort of a full game engine. Even that range is getting a lot smaller these days with the number of high quality game engines available for free to anyone who wants them.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#144

Post by niutech » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 10:55 PM UTC

sergiotapia wrote: post #137

notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

People want this to preserve internet culture. If Flash dies, a very large part of the internet we love vanishes overnight.

False. The standalone Flash Player will not suddenly stop running. In fact, you will be able to open your SWF files for a long time, just not in web browsers, but using Projector.exe or Swiff Player.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#145

Post by Lerc » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 10:57 PM UTC

captainmuon wrote: post #108

__s wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue with a plugin architecture is that it makes it difficult to compete. There essentially will come a pool of plugins which are expected to be installed on every user's machine, & without standardization or open source implementations you'll end up with 1 plugin being used on any base browser as opposed to different versions on each browser In theory we could create a basic browser with various HTML/JS/CSS spe…

You could also argue in the opposite direction: Without a plugin architecture, you are at the mercy of the browser developers to implement a certain functionality. If you need some native feature, browser vendors can force you to use a native app and thus go through their app store (think Safari on iOS). There is a large category of apps that you cannot make in HTML, for example anything truly P2P (not WebRTC, but ba…

In addition to this. Many of the new Web features came from people going "Flash does it". Plugins allow capability that can be used by people now. Those instances can then be shown to people who say one of my most hated phrases, "What's the use case?"

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#146

Post by notacoward » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 10:58 PM UTC

xupybd wrote: post #134

notacoward wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the currently-most-upvoted hater, I kind of agree. Flash was fantastic back in the day. I played many games and movies that way, and was thusly enriched. But the Sega Genesis was also great in its day. So was the vinyl record. Those days are gone. Flash has accrued negatives, which now outweigh the positives.

Sega has emulators, vinyl record players still exist. Open sourcing flash doesn't mean it will stay mainstream, it probably shouldn't. But there is valuable flash content. If they kill flash and don't open source it, the only way to run flash will be on old browsers possible in old operating systems. This will put a big burden on businesses requiring old flash apps.

Flash has emulators too. I think you just made my point.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#147

Post by niutech » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 10:59 PM UTC

gburt wrote: post #46

notacoward wrote: post #19

No no no no NO. It's time to get rid of Flash. Open-sourcing will make it live forever. Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. It's also woefully insecure. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" will only work for the most trivial bugs in the most common code paths. Plenty of vulnerabilities will remain. In open source, they'll be even easier for attackers to find…

Preservation and reduction of bit rot is a great reason to open source Flash or ensure there is always a definitive version available, even if all the browsers should ban it because it is a messy, unperformant security liability.

Dop not worry. The SWF files will be preserved and long playable after 2020, using Flash Projector, Swiff Player or iSwiff. Just no longer in web browsers.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#148

Post by slantyyz » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 10:59 PM UTC

xupybd wrote: post #134

notacoward wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the currently-most-upvoted hater, I kind of agree. Flash was fantastic back in the day. I played many games and movies that way, and was thusly enriched. But the Sega Genesis was also great in its day. So was the vinyl record. Those days are gone. Flash has accrued negatives, which now outweigh the positives.

Sega has emulators, vinyl record players still exist. Open sourcing flash doesn't mean it will stay mainstream, it probably shouldn't. But there is valuable flash content. If they kill flash and don't open source it, the only way to run flash will be on old browsers possible in old operating systems. This will put a big burden on businesses requiring old flash apps.

>> This will put a big burden on businesses requiring old flash apps.

And also consumers who may have devices like webcams that require flash to view the video feeds from a browser.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#149

Post by niutech » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 11:02 PM UTC

karmaProtector wrote: post #142

romwell wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Flash has very little to offer that is not at this point duplicated (or improved upon) by others. Pray, tell me of a universally-supported compact interactive vector graphics animation format, with sound, in a single file. Back in the year 2000 I could send a Valentine card with an animated message that could be downloaded as an email attachment and kept forever. So, what's the improved version of that?

Zipped Website?

MHTML is standalone and natively supported by IE/Chrome/Opera. There are extensions for Firefox and Safari too.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#150

Post by niutech » Wed, Jul 26, 2017, 11:05 PM UTC

soylentcola wrote: post #41

djhworld wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's not going to be in browsers, I wonder if there's value in open sourcing it so people can create applications that run flash apps. There's a lot of content out there made with flash, especially games.

Is there still a standalone Flash player? (or at least, will the debug version work?) Haven't messed with Flash stuff in over a decade but I remember having a standalone player to play downloaded SWF files back in the day. No idea if there's anything roughly equivalent out there in its current incarnation. A sandboxed player application would go a long way toward the uses mentioned in this thread, no? I wonder when w…

Of course there are many: Flash Projector, Swiff Player, iSwiffy, Eltima SWF Player, Gnash...