Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

gemal.dk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 181 posts

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#91

Post by Yaa101 »

sp332 wrote: post #88
kapowaz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There may not be any conceptual difference, but there is a very significant difference in how these things you describe are used. Flash, when used badly, becomes a self-contained sandbox for the entire experience of a website. Besides security concerns, this approach is damaging to the overall experience of that site, since developers end up needing to re-implement native controls and functionality (scrollbars, form…

Flash, when used badly, becomes a self-contained sandbox for the entire experience of a website. But if it's rendered as part of the page instead of in a black-box plugin, doesn't that whole problem go away?

No, It's about what is inside the Flash that defines your experience with it.

For me the best trade-off is still to use a flash-block and grant the flash running time when I choose to do so.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#92

Post by Tloewald »

Wintamute wrote: post #76
Tloewald wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A video element is a video. It's as well or poorly handled as, say, an image. (The QuickTime / MP4 container actually allows standardized text tracks etc. so it's capable of being more semantically tractable than most other media formats in the long run.) The other options are all, as you say, semantically impenetrable, but that's not all there is to it. WebGL has the advantage of delivering very lightweight and effi…

> WebGL has the advantage of delivering very lightweight and efficient graphic effects, whereas even native Flash was horribly inefficient at doing what it did. Fundamentally incorrect. Flash is actually an incredibly efficient file format for rich media, especially at vector animation. Look it up, you can fit amazing animations into just a few kb. Nothing can beat it on the web today for that purpose, and the Flash…

Flash's file format is fine w.r.t. compression. (It's beastly to parse, but that's a consequence of history.)

It does a terrible job of rendering graphics though (probably because the guys who wrote the lowest level parts of the engine did so a long time ago and have moved on). When Steve Jobs wrote his letter about Flash a big part of the deal was Flash's impact on battery life because it was so inefficient -- and Adobe struggled to fix this for years and then gave up.

I remember back when some Adobe blogger published a comparison of Flash to canvas animations showing Flash to be significantly faster. I, and several others, posted trivially optimized versions of the canvas code that crushed Flash like a bug, and this was Flash at the end of a long period of optimization where it carefully draws only the regions of the screen that changed, versus a pretty naive canvas implementation pretty much double-buffering its animation.

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

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#93

Post by robmcm »

davexunit wrote: post #80
OliC wrote: post #4

Why didn't this come out of Adobe a year ago?

Because Adobe has long been profiting greatly from their proprietary Flash player and other related software. Had the Flash format been a free standard and Flash player had no restriction on reverse engineering we would have had free Flash players for a long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#SwfDec

Adobe actually made their Flash money from tooling and supporting services.

If they open sourced the spec and turned it into a commitie it would be in the same mess as HTML 5 and lose it's advantages (fast development, adoption for example).

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#94

Post by nfoz »

gpvos wrote: post #24
spongle wrote: post #3

Great effort but I really don't want this. I've lived without Flash for a year now and all is good. We just need to break the crack addiction!

The main problem for me was that it was a proprietary, terribly buggy and insecure piece of code. In principle, Shumway should fix that. The other problem is autoplaying audio and video, which is annoying in the extreme. So I hope there will remain a click-to-activate option for this.

Isn't autoplaying now pretty much impossible to stop, short of disabling JavaScript (where that's even an option)? Web pages have become an alternative, yet equivalent mechanism to flash.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#95

Post by Pxtl »

So when ActionScript is compiled to JS, do they mean it's actually pure JS, or is this getting converted into ASM.JS? Historically, a big appeal of Flash vs. JS has been performance - ActionScript is an ugly language, but it's statically typed. And JS/canvas/whatever historically haven't been too efficient at moving vectored objects around the screen.

Then again, a the factor in Flash's favour isn't the run-time, its' the development workflow.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#96

Post by nfoz »

willvarfar wrote: post #54

This is excellent for security. In the same way that Mozilla's PDF.js does PDF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox, doing SWF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox makes the security nightmare that is Flash go away. ADDED: Mozilla blogging about security benefits of PDF.js, which apply here too to http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

Flash is awful, but Firefox and the other browsers don't exactly have a great track record on security either. The less code and business built-in to the browser, the better its security.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#97

Post by richardjs »

Tloewald wrote: post #66
willvarfar wrote: post #54

This is excellent for security. In the same way that Mozilla's PDF.js does PDF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox, doing SWF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox makes the security nightmare that is Flash go away. ADDED: Mozilla blogging about security benefits of PDF.js, which apply here too to http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

Ignoring flash does an even better job.

Sure, and not browsing the Web at all is even safer. But it's nice to see developments that make insecure technologies more secure.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#98

Post by robmcm »

Tloewald wrote: post #66
willvarfar wrote: post #54

This is excellent for security. In the same way that Mozilla's PDF.js does PDF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox, doing SWF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox makes the security nightmare that is Flash go away. ADDED: Mozilla blogging about security benefits of PDF.js, which apply here too to http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

Ignoring flash does an even better job.

Closing your browser trumps it though...

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#99

Post by Anonmattymous »

Tloewald wrote: post #66
willvarfar wrote: post #54

This is excellent for security. In the same way that Mozilla's PDF.js does PDF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox, doing SWF rendering in-browser and in-sandbox makes the security nightmare that is Flash go away. ADDED: Mozilla blogging about security benefits of PDF.js, which apply here too to http://andreasgal.com/2011/06/15/pdf-js/

Ignoring flash does an even better job.

Agreed, I feel like by building things like this it just hampers all the work that is being built to replace flash. The best way to change things is to make it so that learning HTML5 and JavaScript becomes worth it, and that is easily done by just not supporting flash.

Re: HTML5 Flash Player (Shumway) lands in Mozilla

#100

Post by davexunit »

robmcm wrote: post #93
davexunit wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Adobe has long been profiting greatly from their proprietary Flash player and other related software. Had the Flash format been a free standard and Flash player had no restriction on reverse engineering we would have had free Flash players for a long time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#SwfDec Adobe actually made their Flash money from tooling and supporting services. If they open sourced the spec and turned it into a commitie it would be in the same mess as HTML 5 and lose it's advantages (fast development, adoption for example).

It suffers from the biggest disadvantage of all: being proprietary. Flash is a massive wart on the free web.
Post reply on HN