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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

#111

Post by kuschku »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #11
kuschku wrote: post #5

> "essential" Flash content (such as embedded video players) are allowed to automatically run, while non-essential Flash content, much of that being advertisements, will be automatically paused. Can’t we just throw out all flash?

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

But that doesn’t mean websites will stop using flash.

I can disable JS, too. Or I can disable ad trackers on my system.

Doesn’t remove them for anyone else, though, and doesn’t mean I still get the same quality of browsing.

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

#112

Post by rythie »

shocks wrote: post #64

I've had pretty much zero consequences from disabling Flash globally in all my browsers. Where is Flash still essential?

I've been disabling by default for a few weeks, though many sites still use it, for example:

  - Facebook (videos)
  - Twitter (bizarrely uses it for gifs in Firefox)
  - YouTube
  - BBC news
  - The Independent and most of UK press
  - Basically any site with embedded video
  - even github prompts because of that copy+paste feature
I have no interest in Flash games or adverts, so it's annoying that these big sites all still use Flash.

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

#113

Post by tyingq »

harigov wrote: post #13
archon810 wrote: post #6

The irony is that while they recommend converting ads to html5 (or auto convert them with swiffy), the performance goes to shit as well, arguably even worse than flash would have been, at least on mobile. - http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/google-now-automatically-c... - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=467709 - https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/MtcZGJprWje

Just out of curiosity - could there be issues other than just performance here? For ex., could it be that Flash based ads can identify user/device contributing to privacy issues?

I'll suffer the downvotes, but going forward "Flash Ads" == non-Google provided ads. It doesn't hurt Google to hobble ads from competing networks.

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

#114

Post by jscheel »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #23
phamilton wrote: post #15

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

IIRC socket.io has a flash fallback.

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

#115

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

reboog711 wrote: post #103
ablation wrote: post #32

I hope that Google takes the next, bigger step and kills its YouTube Flash player. The HTML5 one is superior in almost every way and so many browsers now support HTML5[1]. It would be a really meaningful statement. This is just a bit 'meh'. [1] http://html5readiness.com/

The YouTube HTML player removed the "watch later" list button which I used to use a lot. So, there is a very specific example of how the YouTube Flash player was superior to the HTML5 one. At least for my use case. [I doubt this an HTML vs Flash issue, though]

I'm glad if they've removed it, I accidentally clicked it a lot.

You can still choose Add To > Watch Later.

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

#116

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

jsudhams wrote: post #66
ablation wrote: post #32

I hope that Google takes the next, bigger step and kills its YouTube Flash player. The HTML5 one is superior in almost every way and so many browsers now support HTML5[1]. It would be a really meaningful statement. This is just a bit 'meh'. [1] http://html5readiness.com/

I tried html5 on youtube for a week while scaling is nice (the video size increases for window/resolution size), the quality is very poor the same video with same 480p in flash much clear. Though I don't like flash because it crashes many times it is the only way to watch clear 360p or 480p video. Also flash detects 480p as default for my 8 mb internet connection whereas HTML5 will choose 240p now and then. Also you…

The quality is because YouTube's HTML5 player defaults to Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP. If you manually change the quality setting to something other than Auto, you get better quality.

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

#117

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

ablation wrote: post #85
skrause wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HTML5 player has been the default on YouTube since January: http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7926001/youtube-drops-flas...

Quite a few player embeds on the pages I visit still default to Flash, rather annoyingly. That's been my experience at least.

You're supposed to use an to embed these days, but some sites still use the flash-only /.

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

#118

Post by zastrowm »

jakob223 wrote: post #2

I use chrome with all plugins disabled unless I right-click to run them, and the only one that I regularly have to enable is the PDF viewer. I find it a much more enjoyable (and faster) browser experience and have no need for an ad blocker because flash ads are the only ones that really annoy me. I think it's a great idea to disable non-essential flash by default.

Disabling all plugins by default is a much better experience, especially for ads with sound. You can also opt-out the PDF viewer out of the click-to-play by visiting chrome://plugins/ and always allowing.

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

#119

Post by samsonradu »

ars wrote: post #12
kuschku wrote: post #5

> "essential" Flash content (such as embedded video players) are allowed to automatically run, while non-essential Flash content, much of that being advertisements, will be automatically paused. Can’t we just throw out all flash?

> 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.

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

#120

Post by userbinator »

archon810 wrote: post #6

The irony is that while they recommend converting ads to html5 (or auto convert them with swiffy), the performance goes to shit as well, arguably even worse than flash would have been, at least on mobile. - http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/25/google-now-automatically-c... - https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=467709 - https://plus.google.com/+ArtemRussakovskii/posts/MtcZGJprWje

arguably even worse than flash would have been

I'm not surprised. As someone who has worked with it (and even written pieces of a simple Flash renderer), SWF was designed to be an extremely compact format and is far simpler to parse and render than the HTML + CSS + SVG + JS replacement that's being promoted.

In that respect, all the complaints about Flash and mobile battery life should be attributable to the mere presence of Flash content. The reason why disabling Flash improves battery life is because the content doesn't get rendered. If the same content were present and rendered with HTML5 it would require more computing power, because the overhead of parsing (several!) text-based formats and using a complex rendering model originally designed for static documents compared to a binary format and rendering model designed for interactive animations, simply cannot be eliminated. I suppose new standards for documents, vector images, and scripting could be designed (WebAssembly comes to mind), but at that point you'll just be reinventing Flash/SWF...

For that reason, disable JS and you will get improved battery life too:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/2lent3/fwiw_disablin...

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