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Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

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Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#51

Post by brandonwamboldt »

exodust wrote: post #50

I have Flash enabled all the time. No probs here. Smooth and efficient. I have no agenda or need to kill it. So much viral hate. Plugins have a right to exist. You gonna declare war on all plugins or just Flash? HTML doesn't necessarily run its full suite of tricks on all browsers and platforms. And my iPad3 often slows to a crawl because of bloated well-known websites. Browser memory maxes out and I can't even switc…

Flash is a closed source binary plugin with a long history of security vulnerabilities that Adobe was slow to patch. For the most part, JavaScript engines are open source, don't have a history of security vulnerabilities (to the same severity), and are typically patched quickly.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#52

Post by pluma »

sp332 wrote: post #30
martin-adams wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite so straight forward, a lot of their videos were interactive for hidden gems. They will be lost when moving to a linear file format.

With access to the source, it should be possible to export them to HTML5 using Adobe's flash authoring tools. I've never tried it though, and I don't know how good the HTML5 versions would be. Edit: huh, it kinda runs with Mozilla's Flash-runtime replacement, Shumway. Another few rounds of bugfixes and we might not need any Adobe code to play these files just as they are.

The problem with most current Flash-to-HTML5 conversions is that they only barely support ActionScript, if at all. So anything meaningfully interactive (like minigames) is pretty much out.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#54

Post by Tloewald »

eosrei wrote: post #38

Amazon is switching to JavaScript animated ads to support all devices. This isn't anything against Flash, this is a business decision to reach more eyeballs. Flash is fast. JavaScript/HTML5/WebGL/etc are just recently getting close to the performance we had in Flash 10+ years ago. Flash is perceived to be slow because it was used to make obtrusive advertising, like JavaScript is used now. The evil dictator has been r…

Flash's speed on desktops is not the main strike against it, although it was actually quite bad for many things (the 3d stuff worked better for it because it bypassed its aging 2d rendering engine which no-one left at Adobe understood or could fix). Flash's speed on mobile was abysmal and Adobe tried and failed to fix it for years (after Steve Jobs' famously pointed all this stuff out).

The fact that Flash would store user information separately from the browser in such a way as to circumvent security and privacy models, and did so for years after Macromedia (i.e. pre-Adobe-merger) knew about it, and that Flash had and has as many vulnerabilities as any two operating systems is simply icing on the cake.

Here's a discussion -- also from 2010 -- of Flash's abysmal 2d performance (which entailed fixing an example created explicitly to show how awesome Flash was):

http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3362

Bear in mind, this is Flash's nearly 20-year-old/mature rendering engine optimized to only do minimal screen updates against a five minute hack using a canvas.

And, finally, you need Javascript anyway. Flash actually needs Javascript to even load properly (thanks to the stupid Eolas lawsuit), so it's a case of giving up one evil dictator while keeping a not-nearly-so-evil-and-much-more-useful dictator.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#55

Post by samsonradu »

marquis wrote: post #6
larsiusprime wrote: post #4

If we want to speed up the demise of flash, there are several roots that need to be whacked simultaneously: 1. Tons of existing flash content people want to access 2. Give current flash devs a reasonable alternative The first one is a thorny problem and is somewhat solved by things like Shumway but still needs more work. As for the second, things like Unity and HTML5 have not covered all of flash dev's use cases, so…

Media players: browsers don't have native support for H.264 over HLS or RTMP, and MPEG-Dash seems native to Chrome only. If the browsers could accept these natively, this would certainly speed flash's demise. Until then, what are the alternatives?

Exactly. Much of the live streaming on the web defaults to flash, the alternatives (hls, rtsp, webrtc) are all underperforming.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#56

Post by Tloewald »

e40 wrote: post #15

I tried to uninstall Flash, but my bank (Citi) uses it for their one-time credit card # applet. And, I miss a lot of videos on the internets, but I can live without those. The bank thing, I cannot. (Yeah, I complained and was told moving away is "in the works.")

Trust banks to use the worst possible implementation of the worst possible technology at any given time.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#57

Post by async5 »

sp332 wrote: post #8

You know Flash is dead when Homestar Runner says it's dead! http://www.homestarrunner.com/flashisdead.html For those who don't know, this site was a legit phenomenon in the early 2000's, and it has always been 100% flash-based. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner

Shumway can be used as a runtime for those movies - the site owner just to need fallback to its HTML player. It plays common ActionScript 1/2/3 usages well.

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#59

Post by cpeterso »

edpichler wrote: post #17

The only thing I will miss on flash is the Copy to clippboard feature (e.g http://zeroclipboard.org/ ). Is there other way to do the same when flash will be extinct?

Detecting and preferring HTML clipboard API is on ZeroClipboard's roadmap:

https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/580

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

Re: Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

#60

Post by cpeterso »

wnevets wrote: post #33
thrillgore wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Chrome for Flash uses Pepper (a NaCl extension) for its plugin support so its not a vector for attack. You can always turn it off from chrome:plugins.

>plugin support so its not a vector for attack. I wanna say this is untrue, I vaguely recalling an exploit within the past month or so.

Hacking Team’s Flash 0-day: Potent enough to infect actual Chrome user

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/hacking-teams-flash-...

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