It's time for Flash to die now, however it had a good run. We've had usable video on the web for a decade thanks to it -- and even now, HTML5 still hasn't caught up. Flash did a great job of advancing the web while open standards caught up.
There's more to flash than video. The company I work for uses flash extensively for interactive multi-touch kiosks. Like those big maps in shopping malls.
As a Rails developer I was very opinionated when I came here. But seeing the incredible performance they get using flash while running stunningly complex animations and interactions, I quickly changed my mind. While I still think there's no place for flash as a replacement for websites it's still incredibly powerful for rich interactive multimedia - especially off the web.
As an OS X user, I literally cannot remember a Flash site (other than a video wrapper) that felt completely fluid. You never get 60fps because Flash mostly always insists on doing things on the CPU.
Dunno what things look like on Windows, but I'm hoping WebGL takes off - it really seems to be best positioned to do complex things without sacrificing performance.
I'm not sure it's entirely relevant, but here's something the very-very senior flash dev at work said about that recent Dart port of the Flash API (which he thought was neat).
>> "This little game was developed with Flash and later ported to HTML5 in only 6 hours. The new HTML5 version runs with smooth 60fps, which is almost impossible to achieve with the Flash plugin!"
> This is the kind of sentiment that shits me. Flash is measured by the worst of its developers.
> Flash is capped at 60fps in the browser so as to limit the carnage, but can run at 120+ on the desktop. If the dude can't get his example game running at 60 fps in flash it's because he sucks, not the plugin. /rant
Similarly, be prepared for a slew of super slow "HTML5" apps.
> I'm not sure it's entirely relevant, but here's something the very-very senior flash dev at work said about that recent Dart port of the Flash API (which he thought was neat).
>>> "This little game was developed with Flash and later ported to HTML5 in only 6 hours. The new HTML5 version runs with smooth 60fps, which is almost impossible to achieve
with the Flash plugin!"
>> This is the kind of sentiment that shits me. Flash is measured by the worst of its developers.
>> Flash is capped at 60fps in the browser so as to limit the carnage, but can run at 120+ on the desktop. If the dude can't get his example game running at 60 fps in flash it's because he sucks, not the plugin. /rant
As far as I understand it, the API[0] author highlighted that the HTML5 port was consistently over 60fps (or constantly at 60fps if capped), whereas the Flash version was consistently under 60fps, and not even reaching the limit, hence no 60fps capping could be coming into play.
> Similarly, be prepared for a slew of super slow "HTML5" apps.
Inevitably, bad code will come. Flash on the web had one advantage: it was dead easy to block.
Just wait until the ad industry has caught up on to HTML5 and when they'll produce massively CPU intensive banners and other crap with HTML5. Its for the same reasons the the Flash player CPU utilization was capped in browsers, the same thing will happen for HTML5.
I don't know. I can write an application in flash and it will run on IE, chrome, Firefox, whatever. A lot of companies still use IE. I can also compile that down to run on ios, android, or blackberry (not that I'd want to). I can do all that from basically the same codebase with an ecma script language (as3) that I find much better for large scale projects than html5 (by which people actually mean js)
Flash is dying I guess, but it will be a long time until it actually dies, and that's good by me because html5/js still has a lot of catching up to do.
As an aside, I'm curious how many flash haters out there have actually written flash applications. Its really a good tool for a lot of applications, but the haters never really provide any specifics on what their problem is besides referencing poorly written apps that crash your browser, of which you'll find plenty of those in any language.
> As an aside, I'm curious how many flash haters out there have actually written flash applications.
In my experience, the folks who are most vocally anti-Flash have never written a line of code in their life. I've never seen a reasonable justification for the amount of hate it receives. If anything, Flash deserves high praise for playing such a key role in the evolution of a media rich internet, despite its flaws.
I don't think the haters realize how good it actually is compared to the historical alternatives. It makes me physically ill to think of a universe where RealVideo became the dominant format for streaming media.
I think most of the hate Flash receives is from the people whose browsers it frequently crashed. There was a period of many years where the Flash plugin was very unstable, and it was both normal and expected that opening a flash-heavy page might crash your browser.
Flash is hated cause of ads. Simple. I can't tell you how many times my browser (over the years) crashed due to some Flash ad. Not to mention the extra time it took to load the page.
Is that Flash's fault? No, of course not. Lazy programmer/graphics artist who didn't bother to streamline their code.
Flash lost the PR war. It's done. At least for the masses.
Could you elaborate? What justification would I be ignoring? Closed source runtime? Bad flash programmers? Plugin hate? Anecdotal "flash always breaks my computer" type stuff?
Re: second point, I disagree. Being better than alternatives makes something very good--better than everything else in fact. What you're saying is good is actually some kind of fairy tale perfect that doesn't exist and never will.
I mean, hey, use whatever you want, but have you ever written a flash application? And if so, what are the key problems?
My main complaint about Flash is how it completely breaks the normal web experience.
Want to middle click a link? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to run a spellcheck on that textbox? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to search the text? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to increase the text size (with reflowing)? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to use a screen reader? You can't, it's Flash.
Want to link to a particular page? You can't, it's Flash¹.
(And this is not even talking about more geeky stuff like Greasemonkey, blocking code without blocking text and images, etc)
Sure, there weren't any real alternatives for advanced stuff like animations. But you know what? It would have been better to have no way to do that stuff if it kept all the stuff that could already be done with HTML/CSS in those technologies.
¹ Yes, I know this and probably other issues can be fixed if only developers do such and such. That's irrelevant. I know, you know, and Adobe definitively knows that bad developers are everywhere, and Flash makes it a pain to do basic stuff that comes by default in standard web tech, therefore making sure we would be flooded with broken apps.
My main reason for supporting the removal of Flash is Adobe's lack of support for Flash on non-Windows platforms especially mobile. It took them ages to come up with a decent Mac OS version. And they already dropped further development and support for mobile. Did they ever get their mobile version working 100% correctly?
I think it was clear that Flash was going down years ago, but the fact that they've decided to drop support for the fastest growing computing segment should solidify the fact that everybody needs to move away.
HTML5 is pretty sucky in places but has the backing of several big players, it's open and works well on pretty much all platforms and it's being actively worked on. If Google, Mozilla and Apple give up, we just take the software and move on. Is there a downside to this scenario that I am missing?
Flash solves the problem of cross-platform development really well vs other platforms. You don't have to worry about making conditional statements for
specific operating systems or browsers. I feel the rapid deploying of browsers is just increasing the fragmented world of html + js. There are just way too many different implementations of html to make it enjoyable coding on.
And also, the way flash handles making animations and anti-aliasing almost makes my very non-artistic feel
somewhat versatile when tackling those things.
I feel the rapid deploying of browsers is just increasing the fragmented world of html + js
Not in my experience. I've recently finished writing a fairly large and reasonably complex HTML5 app and getting it to work across standards compliant browsers Chrome/Firefox/Safari has been absolutely painless. In over 6 months of development I have (without exaggeration) spent no more than 8 hours fixing cross browser issues and this includes cutting edge and vendor prefixed stuff.
I think that flash still has its place... it's still way better at doing things like client side image compression/encoding and has very sophisticated binary manipulation capabilities (if you need those).
It really is a technology of the gaps, and the number of gaps that it can exclusively fill is rapidly dwindling.
Please can you direct me to an open source HTML5 (or not) alternative to Flash for video that supports advertisements and DRM? Flash can't (and will not) die until such a thing exists. It isn't time for flash to die until there's something to replace it.
Open source and DRM are fundamentally incompatible—if neutering the DRM is a mere recompile away, what good is it to the sorts of organizations that require DRM?
DRM'd media is encrypted and cannot be "neutered" if you don't have the decryption key. [Well-designed] DRM relies on secret keys, not secret source code.
Here's the problem: either you have the decryption keys and can get to the content, or you don't and can't. If you can watch a movie on your computer, you already have everything you need to pirate the movie.
Which, of course, is true for any cryptography, regardless of the openness of its implementation. It may be harder to keep the keys obscured in open code, but then the keys usually don't stay secret that long anyway.
XOR is the best DRM. Since all DRM is breakable since you need the decryption key to play the content, the purpose should be to trigger the copy-protection-protection stuff in the DMCA, and XOR is the simplest way to do that.
It's actually coming. If you go to about:flags in chrome, there's a flag called "Enable experimental Encrypted Media Extensions on the video elements.".
Your bank account details don't reside in a published, yet controlled space on the internet?
I know you're not trying to flog your effort (monetary savings in this case) on a pay-to-view basis, but why (beyond the impossibility of securing the rights) are people who wish to try and sell their effort to those willing to pay, and attempt to restrict those who are unwilling to pay for their effort, somehow intrinsically wrong?
It will (eventually) if it's not included in browsers/OS by default. It'll essentially be relegated to RealPlayer's market if that's its only differentiating factor, and advertisers won't put out content for a plugin that can't reach audiences.
It'll be a long time yet though, that's certainly true.
