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Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

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Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#71

Post by halayli »

velcro wrote: post #42

Bugs are always bad (and security bugs even more so) - but I've always felt that Flash gets a disproportional amount of hate/hype in the media. To some degree it should be normal that the more widespread a technology is - the more it gets targeted for security exploits. If you run the popular browsers/plugins against the National Vulnerability Database, you'd get the following results (as of January 2014): - Internet…

You probably missed out on the hacking team leaks. These actions are triggered by the leaks. HT was sitting on a lot of flash 0-day exploits.

This leak was the best thing that happened to the web.

Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#72

Post by batou »

jacobolus wrote: post #68
paganel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> God will Flash just die already. 5 to 7 years ago I would have said the same thing, I hated Flash with a passion. But now, when it's almost gone for good, I see that it had its reasons. For example the new Google Street View is many times slower and lags so much as to give me motion sickness (when it's not blocking my browser) compared to the previous version, which was Flash-based, and which used to work like a ch…

The new Google Maps is also dramatically slower, laggier, and buggier than the old version which was a regular web app built to work on browsers from 2005. I think the terribleness of recent Google web front-ends (not only Maps and Street View but also Search, Mail, Groups, Gplus, etc.) is mostly a product of incompetent management process internal to Google, rather than an indictment of web technology generally.

I genuinely agree with you here.

I've gone back to a desktop mail client (Thunderbird) and moved away from the web for this sort of thing myself.

As far as the web goes, I am very impressed at openstreetmap. That is fast, accurate and has more useful mapping data than anything else rather than fancy overlays and imaging.

Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#73

Post by przemoc »

jacobolus wrote: post #68
paganel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> God will Flash just die already. 5 to 7 years ago I would have said the same thing, I hated Flash with a passion. But now, when it's almost gone for good, I see that it had its reasons. For example the new Google Street View is many times slower and lags so much as to give me motion sickness (when it's not blocking my browser) compared to the previous version, which was Flash-based, and which used to work like a ch…

The new Google Maps is also dramatically slower, laggier, and buggier than the old version which was a regular web app built to work on browsers from 2005. I think the terribleness of recent Google web front-ends (not only Maps and Street View but also Search, Mail, Groups, Gplus, etc.) is mostly a product of incompetent management process internal to Google, rather than an indictment of web technology generally.

FWIW, Google Maps are generally noticeably slower and laggier in Firefox when compared to Chrome.

Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#74

Post by paublyrne »

velcro wrote: post #42

Bugs are always bad (and security bugs even more so) - but I've always felt that Flash gets a disproportional amount of hate/hype in the media. To some degree it should be normal that the more widespread a technology is - the more it gets targeted for security exploits. If you run the popular browsers/plugins against the National Vulnerability Database, you'd get the following results (as of January 2014): - Internet…

They do get more bad press than perhaps others should. There is already a perception about Flash that it is not a great product, which feeds into this. Reasons are varied.

    - Performance has not been good on Macs (my 2007 Macbook Pro literally burned my legs when running anything flashy)

    - Flash updates mechanism seems a little spammy.

    - Long-term perception of Adobe as a maker of a somewhat buggy, somewhat bloated software

    - Steve Jobs' public denigration

    - Backlash against proprietary standards being used on the web
The best thing about click to play Flash is it puts a stop to autoplay videos on the less reputable sites I occasionally and shamefully glance at for sports news.

Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#75

Post by Mimu »

velcro wrote: post #42

Bugs are always bad (and security bugs even more so) - but I've always felt that Flash gets a disproportional amount of hate/hype in the media. To some degree it should be normal that the more widespread a technology is - the more it gets targeted for security exploits. If you run the popular browsers/plugins against the National Vulnerability Database, you'd get the following results (as of January 2014): - Internet…

I don't think the hate comes from bugs or exploits. I think people hate flash because it is laggy, slow, make things move in your screen you don't want, widely use for ads or to shit on the user experience, etc.

Granted most of it might be bad programming, but I still think he comes from here rather than exploits.

Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#76

Post by michaelpinto »

JonAtkinson wrote: post #57
HugoDaniel wrote: post #32

Unfortunately in this case avoiding the problem won't make it go away. Many old sites will stop working (my first site was done in flash) as well as many games that are still heavily played today by millions of people. Also flash IDE provides a good introduction to programming for self-taught kids these days: many of them still do their first code in flash after clicking on "that strange icon next to photoshop". Over…

> We need a real open-source alternative to flash player. We quietly built the alternative to Flash over the last 10 years. It's called the web. A standard document in the web browser can play audio, video, display vector graphics, utilise OpenGL, supports direct drawing via Canvas, and it is deeply scriptable with a mature, open programming language. What else do you need?

The age old test of any platform is the ability to run games, and HTML5 just isn't there when put next to Flash or native apps. And I'm not talking the bleeding edge stuff, but simple things like getting sound to work between browsers (a task that Flash did very well). Although to be fair the gatekeepers of browsers are Apple and Google who want you to pay the app store tax.

Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#77

Post by vultour »

HugoDaniel wrote: post #32

Unfortunately in this case avoiding the problem won't make it go away. Many old sites will stop working (my first site was done in flash) as well as many games that are still heavily played today by millions of people. Also flash IDE provides a good introduction to programming for self-taught kids these days: many of them still do their first code in flash after clicking on "that strange icon next to photoshop". Over…

When i wanted to start programming one of the things I tried was flash. I absolutely couldn't figure out what the fuck was going on even with tutorials, it's garbage.

Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#78

Post by maxerickson »

billpg wrote: post #53
AndrewDucker wrote: post #47

I have that setting already set - Flash is set to "Ask to Activate", which means it only runs on sites that I actually want it to run on. Which prevents a lot of autoplaying videos, and also pages sometimes taking a long time to load on slow connections.

They've implemented "ask to activate" badly by making it cover the whole page instead of per-element. They did it the right way in the past. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=886792#c41

Is it possible to activate Vimeo when using flashblock yet?

Which is a reasonable question in this context:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=886792#c1

Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#79

Post by vultour »

rockdoe wrote: post #10

Seems like only a temporary block. Mozilla isn't brave enough to put it out of its misery like it belongs. Still some big sites using it though, like Twitch.

If Mozilla finally managed to implement the encoding Twitch uses for mobile devices, I'd finally be able to uninstall that pile of shit. Sadly it's a licensing issue.

Re: Firefox makes click-to-activate Flash the default

#80

Post by Aardwolf »

ars wrote: post #48
Aardwolf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this will not make more content creators choose that annoying unity3D plugin thing that doesn't support linux for games.

> that doesn't support linux for games. There is support: http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html For me on debian it was install and it worked without even restarting the browser.

I tried it once, it also allowed the latest Flash, but then full screen got broken, and also Flash showing file dialogs got broken.
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