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Petition to open source Flash

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Re: Petition to open source Flash

#201

Post by stuaxo »

Lerc wrote: post #145
captainmuon wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"

Ugh, that phrase is used to kill anything vaguely creative fun or artistic.

It is probably why we all have flat windows 3 inspired UIs now.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#202

Post by ygra »

77pt77 wrote: post #162
niutech wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> PDF with embedded multimedia files That a larger can of worms than flash itself.

PDF can also contain Flash, so you get the same can of worms, just nested ;-)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#203

Post by firmgently »

Houshalter wrote: post #166
andai wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come they won't open?

I have no idea. Whenever I try to open the file, firefox and chrome just download it. It used to work fine. (Also even back in the day some flash games had built in DRM that required contacting an external server to run. And I have no idea how to fix that.)

Maybe your .swfs need to be embedded in an HTML page to work? If they use external assets referenced by relative URLs the path is relative to the embedding HTML page (this used to cause some confusion).

If you really want to get them working you can try:

- Opening them in the debug player, maybe you'll see a trace that gives you a clue.

- Decompiling (with the right software this is often quite successful... 'Sothink' used to be pretty good) , opening in the Flash authoring environment and re-exporting.

- Trying older versions of Flash Player (Adobe still provides them for download)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#205

Post by bugmen0t »

captainmuon wrote: post #53
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…

Do you think Flash is insecure in principle, or in implementation? I think it is very much a problem of the implementation. I don't know if Adobe/Macromedia could have done better, or if the backwards compatibility requirements make it impossible to maintain, but I'd like to see for myself. Anyway, you have no reason to be afraid. All mayor browsers are dropping support for plugins anyway. An open source flash player…

There are some noteworthy security problems with Flash in principle.

If website.com embeds a flash file from flash.example, it will run in the context of flash.example, the embedee. If website.com embeds JavaScript from js.example, the code will run in the context of website.com, the embedder.

This will and has caused problems with interoperability in so far, as I'd call it an ugly and dangerous wart.

See web security literature like "The Tangled Web" (or https://code.google.com/archive/p/browsersec/wikis/Part2.wik...) for more.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#206

Post by simion314 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #140
simion314 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use the VM solution you probably need some open VM format, in case in a few years the current formats are dropped.

Just use a raw disk image? What format is there to lose?

VirtualBox uses an XML file that stores your VM settings, and for disks there are a few options,for my work I use the disks that grow (so I set the disk to 100Gb but if I use 20 Gb now it will use 20Gb of my real disk space)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#207

Post by simion314 »

mnem wrote: post #111
simion314 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you know but Adobe open source the Flex framework, is now part of Apache and it continued to be used in projects. If Flash and AIR could be open sourced, we could ahve an alternative for GUI application development(nothing wrong with choice) and AIR could compete with Electron

I've had the misfortune to work with Flex - I really didn't enjoy it. It was also incredibly difficult to make Flex apps accessible in a meaningful way. AIR did hold promise, but ultimately suffered from being terribly cumbersome to extend when you wanted to access native features or platform standard libraries (I've created several AIR native extensions over the years). However, one of the big problems with using Fl…

I would not start a new project in Flex/AIR but I am stil bug fixing existing projects. I use Intelli IDEA, I do not need the drag and drop GUI editor I learned how to make good layouts editing the XML and it is much more simpler to layout components using Flex(or other GUI toolkits , I used Qt and WPF ) then using divs and css(thought he new flexbox in css improved the situation), So in Flex(Qt,and others) you have components like listboxes, dropdowns, DataGrids that are very flexible , you want an item to look different you create an item renderer and reimplement the paint method in AS3 or if is simple enough in plain XML(or using the GUI Designer) In HTML5 land you do not have such flexible components as standard so you need to find an open source or buy this compoenents or implement one. You can say it is easy to implement a dropdown(built in one can't show icons and can't be customized), you hack some divs,lis and some css and it is done. But later you find that you did not consider corner cases, your implementation opens outside of the screen if dropdown is on the bottom of the page, the dropdown has no property where you can ask "show max 6 element, probably you did not add all the standard hover effects, and not implemented all the events, My point is that in Flex and other toolkits you can do a good GUI with good layout using the built in stuff and no hacks(I am thinking at css where some obvious thing did not worked for me until I found on SO that I need to set min-width to 0 so the css engine finding this useless rule would take a different path and display the expected thing). Can you share what GUI toolkits you used and what features you loved from each one? Thanks

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#208

Post by simion314 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #136
simion314 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would have then to create a Flash VM, probably based on Linux not XP, but you may have issues with 3d acceleration, and it will consume a lot of extra resources. For now you can use the standalone player for some flash content but that could change in a few years and the player may not work in new Windows or Linux releases.

I wonder if it works in ReactOS?

I have no idea, but I know the standalone Windows version was working fine under Wine for some games I was playing), this only means that the features those games were using worked fine. Reimplementing Windows is hard, I was playing some old RPG games, Fallout3 and Skyrim works fine in Wine(with mods and such), Fallout New Vegas and Oblivion had issues for me(works for others) I got stutters under wine, Oblivion under Windows10 I get a black screen that I could not find a soluton that worked. So old games don't always work latest Windows, I am not sure if a VM would help since 3d and VMS is slow.

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#209

Post by stevekemp »

k__ wrote: post #156
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…

What is a real alternative? What tech can do what Flash does and is as easy and approachable as Flash for non-developers? I mean sure with WebGL and mad computer graphic skills no problem, but with out?

I want to say "Java Applets", but that feels like trolling.

Really flash had its place for animations, games, and sound/video stuff. There isn't any single alternative, although a lot of things it was used for can be supported directly nowadays. (Things like using the clipboard, etc.)

Re: Petition to open source Flash

#210

Post by karmaProtector »

chickenfries wrote: post #183
jacquesm wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate Flash. And yet, I fully support an effort to open source it. Just like I hate MS Word and would support an effort to open source it. Open sourcing code does not carry any of the risks you mention because those risks relate to browsers, not to Flash, besides that the whole point is to 'make it live forever' so that the millions upon millions of hours spent building Flash stuff will not have been wasted. Open so…

Exactly, I can't believe the number of people in this thread suggesting that keeping it closed is somehow the right thing to do?

Well, its pretty simple. Why should people be against open-sourcing it?

I think 90% of those who are against it, are against it, because they want to forget flash and never see it again.

So somehow, they must have made so bad experiences with flash, that they do not want to get it for free or even someone else to get it.

So you next question is probably: What could have been such a bad experience? Probably not a just one. From my own memory:

Good experiences with flash:

- youtube, etc.: Flash was overcoming the codec problem we had in the past. By providing a minimal set of supported codecs it was setting a defacto standard for video streaming. But that problem is solved today.

Bad experinces with flash:

- Flash menus (please install that macromedia plugin before you can actually use this website)

- Flash menus (please wait until this uber cool animation finishes to render before you can click on that link)

- Complete 'websites' in flash (Please install that plugin before you can see if this website is of any use at all)

- Header logos with large file sizes, as they are animated like hell

- a laggy computer just because some website embeded a flash animation which uses all of your CPU power

- Contact forms which disallowed copy and paste.

- Websites which you could not find again because the search engine could not find them.

- decisions about being vulnerable vs. actually seeing flash content at all

- tracking cookies beyond normal cookies

- extra applets which are there just to make sure you are a real browser.

So I think nobody has a real problem with those gift cards or the games. But given the history of flash we would better not receive a gift, just to make sure we will never have to experience those moments again.

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