Flash-Free Video in 2016

http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/08/flash-free-video-in-2016/

by flavioribeiro • 10 years ago

358 197 10 years ago

open.blogs.nytimes.com

grabcocque• 10 years ago

So, basically Flash lives on because advertisers are still looking for a way to track us without our permission.

Gee thanks.

gue5t• 10 years ago

All closed technology, on some level, exists to perpetuate coercion. This is the thesis of the free software movement.

matthewmacleod• 10 years ago

I think that's a rather extremist view.

ORioN63• 10 years ago

All closed technology, on some level, may be used to perpetuate coercion.

Maybe this way?

There are surely many examples of closed technology that isn't phoning home. The problem is that you don't get many garanties.

elorant• 10 years ago

They don't need Flash to track us. Google does it just fine without it.

bduerst• 10 years ago

The difference is whether or not you can detect it effectively.

dplgk6• 10 years ago

It's much easier to author and publish an animated ad using Flash than HTML/JS.

phkahler• 10 years ago

> It's much easier to author and publish an animated ad using Flash than HTML/JS.

I thought you just put a video tag and point it at the URL of a video file. What else is missing? ;-)

tensafefrogs2• 10 years ago

You can still track users just fine without Flash - the VPAID spec calls for allowing cross-domain "Friendly" scripting access, which is horrible for users.[1]

The only problem with Javascript adoption was the availability of Javascript based ads and support for this VPAID style tracking.

[1] http://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/VPAID_2_0_Fina... - VPAID 2.0 spec, section 8.1.3: "The VPAID ad unit is rendered within a friendly IFRAME (FIF) and can access the DOM of the page in which the player is rendered."

tbrock• 10 years ago

Sometimes I think Steve Jobs' greatest contribution may have been killing flash. Today is a glorious day.

martin-adams• 10 years ago

But he did give us iTunes on Windows, so in my opinion, that about balances things out.

dplgk6• 10 years ago

and also iTunes on Mac. And WiFi on Mac. and XCode on Mac. and App Store on Mac.

skocznymroczny• 10 years ago

I am not sure if replacing Flash with Javascript is glorious...

CodyReichert• 10 years ago

Please, tell us more about how JavaScript is worse than Flash.

epistasis• 10 years ago

This really wasn't a Steve Jobs contribution in the least, it was Adobe.

Flash on mobile was terrible, Steve Jobs may have been the messenger for that but he wasn't the decision maker.

rjvir• 10 years ago

Apple not supporting Flash was a crucial part of it's demise, though. Without that, we might be running Flash on mobile today, even though it was terrible.

sp332• 10 years ago

Being terrible didn't stop them from putting it on Android. I'm sure Adobe would have loved to be on iOS if they'd been allowed into the browser.

rifung2• 10 years ago

Flash wasn't even supported on iOS. I'd argue that was huge in killing off Flash, since anybody who wanted to make their site work on mobile could no longer use Flash.

Chris_Newton3• 10 years ago

There is a certain irony that after all the arguments about how plugins are bad and we must kill Flash, actually video on iOS devices typically still plays via a plugin today, just a different one. Moreover, because of Apple’s policy about browsers all having to use the same engine on those devices, no-one can provide an alternative browser that does better.

This situation breaks everything from basic cookie mechanics to possibilities for caching short videos for offline use, which should have been letting us do all kinds of interesting and useful things now that the videos are supposed to be part of the normal content on a page.

jmstickney• 10 years ago

If they still serve video via Brightcove, seems like a big win for the Zencoder acquisition, which included the video.js player. I do see video.js in the source.

flavioribeiro3• 10 years ago

there's no Brightcove neither videojs, VHS was built from scratch and we have plans to open source it.

eldod7• 10 years ago

Brightcove is following the lead though, they just released the HTML5 first HLS player: https://blog.brightcove.com/en/2016/02/say-goodbye-flash-bri...

cpeterso8• 10 years ago

btw, what does "VHS" stand for? It's an awesome name. :)

wanderfowl• 10 years ago

This is excellent, and sounds like the result of hard work and harder cajoling of the ad-men. Thanks, NYT, for doing your part.

artursapek• 10 years ago

"VHS"

bennettfeely• 10 years ago

Perhaps a little off-topic but it would be nice if NPR could HTML5-up their web radio player also.

smaili• 10 years ago

Fantastic news and congrats to the NY Times team.

Does anyone know, who at this point still continues to use Flash?

dabeeeenster• 10 years ago

The BBC still do which I find infuriating...

kozukumi2• 10 years ago

Indeed. Frustrates the HELL out of me even more because all their videos are available in web-friendly MP4 for the mobile services and you can get to them if you spoof the user agent. I wish they would just let me toggle a "beta" feature or something.

chrisseaton• 10 years ago

I think it you tell your browser to claim its an iPad there is magically much more HTML 5 video content on the BBC.

jonknee• 10 years ago

ESPN does and it's dreadful.

benedikt• 10 years ago

Jerry Seinfeld on comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com

foodstances• 10 years ago

Only on desktop, on mobile it must be showing an MP4 file since it works on the iPhone.

rmk2• 10 years ago

Most of the German public broadcasters still use Flash (arte, ZDFMediathek, 3sat is one giant flash-blob etc.)

The most infuriating one is NDR, because they allow you to switch between Flash and HTML5 video. However, if you don't have Flash installed, it doesn't give you that option or falls back to HTML5 (which would be reasonable) but instead throws an error telling you to get Flash. Yup, you need to install Flash so you can disable Flash.

_jomo4• 10 years ago

Some of those sites use an open source player (I forgot the name). They actually changed the default priority order and put Flash first, so if Flash is installed (not necessarily enabled!) it will use Flash in favor of HTML5.

Firefox used to have an option that overwrites the list of plugins reported to JavaScript. Sadly it was disabled a few versions back.

Edit: The player is Projekktor [0], the FF setting was plugins.enumerable_names [1]. There's a new option coming that hides plugins when set to click-to-play [2]

0: https://github.com/frankyghost/projekktor

1: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1169945

2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1186948

coldpie5• 10 years ago

Twitch.tv, sadly.

_jomo4• 10 years ago

There's Beam [0], it's quite new but I've been quite amazed by their work. They invented some sort of own protocol built on web standards [1]. Also, their streams are actually live (i.e. minimal delay), it's all HTTPS and a lot of their work is open source. [2]

I hope this is going to be a thing.

0: https://beam.pro

1: http://forums.beam.pro/topic/168/where-we-re-at-with-html5-v...

2: https://github.com/watchbeam

emmett• 10 years ago

We're working on the switch (I announced at TwitchCon). It's particularly hard for live video, but that's just an excuse. Clearly the time has come.

mey• 10 years ago

Pandora

_jomo4• 10 years ago

Pretty much every music streaming service I know of. There were a few that used HTML5, but all of them shut down (most recently rdio).

For Spotify, there's a years old request on the forums [0] their support keeps linking people to, but it doesn't seem like they're doing anything about it.

Deezer uses Flash for "security reasons" [1] and they don't plan to use HTML5.

Someone mentioned Google Play might work, but I haven't tried that yet.

0: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Integrate-HTML5-...

1: https://twitter.com/Deezer/status/539344616580194304

agentdrtran• 10 years ago

Google Play Music does work without flash but it's a "Labs" feature.

NoGravitas2• 10 years ago

I was painfully annoyed when Songza shut down and redirected to Google Play Music. Songza worked happily without Flash, but Play Music requires it (so far). Also, Play Music has more intrusive ads than Songza.

throw7• 10 years ago

The superbowl website requested flash to be installed.

badwolf• 10 years ago

:-/ tinychat.com

asquabventured• 10 years ago

Good! Now move to https!!!

Secure the damn web.

atom_enger• 10 years ago

Was hoping someone would say this. This should be the only thing they focus on this year until it's done. I see that they POST to a secure endpoint when logging in but that doesn't make a difference once the session cookies are transmitted in the clear.

rifung2• 10 years ago

Only slightly related but even Amazon isn't on HTTPS, which I find to be a much bigger issue since they deal with credit cards

a4571862• 10 years ago

Both https://amazon.com and https://amazon.de work for me.

flavioribeiro3• 10 years ago

yep, this is on our roadmap

dplgk6• 10 years ago

Has anyone here that is excited about HTML5 video (and Flash being dead) ever written an enterprise video player? It's a total nightmare in HTML5. You have little control over playback and insight into video events. Meeting business requirements (that Flash fulfilled) with HTML5 video ranges from hard to not possible.

michaelbuddy• 10 years ago

an enterprise video player wasn't exactly a picnic on Flash. How do I know? Because even the "enterprise" players would crash browsers constantly.

tensafefrogs2• 10 years ago

I'd recommend one of the open source players, like video.js[1]. Unless you are doing some really advanced things it should cover your needs.

[1] http://videojs.com/

jack9• 10 years ago

It's terribly primitive and altogether broken from some features (unfinished). Just an fyi

heynk• 10 years ago

Can you elaborate on this? At work we have a HTML video player that works with files, YouTube, and Vimeo all with the same skin, and we're easily able to do things like save state across sessions. I will say that the transcoding aspect can be complicated. What limitations have you hit?

dplgk6• 10 years ago

Listening for video events (cross-browser) reliably. When is a video loading, buffering, paused, what time is it? etc

thiagopnts• 10 years ago

there is also http://clappr.io

pdxandi• 10 years ago

I find that landing page truly frustrating. I can't do anything besides watch the background video and "Star" them on Github.

cabbeer• 10 years ago

This might help https://mozillalabs.com/en-US/Popcorn/

mmcclure2• 10 years ago

FWIW, I'm pretty sure Popcorn has been abandoned, which is a shame.

cballard• 10 years ago

You have little control over playback

This sounds user-friendly.

insight into video events

If "insight" means "tracking", this sounds very user-friendly.

jessedhillon• 10 years ago

If "insight" means "tracking", this sounds very user-friendly.

I personally would like advertisers and content producers to know at which point it is that users tend to bail on watching their video, or will click through to the content. That might allow business users to receive useful feedback and actually optimize their funnel, instead of wasting my time with a shotgun, best guess approach.

seangrant• 10 years ago

Obviously user friendly but businesses don't care when they can't get their metrics.

Someone1234• 10 years ago

If "insight" means "tracking", this sounds very user-friendly.

What about a slideshow which has a video of the speaker, and changes the slides for particular timestamps.

At the moment you'll have to detect the playback event and just hope that the video is playing back at the "correct" speed, and change the slides based on a JavaScript clock.

While that works most of the time, it isn't what I'd describe as reliable.

Alternatives exist, like making the slides part of the video too, but now text cannot be copied out, links cannot be clicked, and so on...

Chris_Newton3• 10 years ago

There are many cases where it’s much more user-friendly to have proper control over audio/video players and proper event handling: custom controls to change resolution/quality settings, synchronization of the audio or video with accompanying material, integration of video with other content, having interactions elsewhere on a page adjust audio or video to match, remembering which tutorials a user has finished so you can start with the next one ready to go next time, and that’s just what I came up with in a few seconds.

Sure, if you just want to play your free videos from a site where each page is basically just a wrapper around the video element, and you don’t need any configuration for quality settings and the like, then custom control and events might not be particularly interesting. However, HTML5 media elements should let us do much more than that.

a4571862• 10 years ago

Yeah keeping track of where you stopped watching a video so they can continue the video at that time automaticially is indeed user-friendly.

Are you going to tell me view counters are evil too?

dave2000• 10 years ago

Is there any technical or legal reason why it's not as easy to handle playing video as it is to show an image, from a site developer point of view? Why can't the browser do it natively? Why does it have to be handled via JavaScript and whatever else?

eldod7• 10 years ago

Today playing a video more complex than just decode a .mp4 file: most broadcasters use Adaptive Bitrate streaming formats like HLS and MPEG-DASH, that add a lot of complexity: How do you get the qualities and languages list? how and when do you switch the video quality? etc

In case of hls.js used by the NYT, you actually need to transmux the mpeg-ts content used in HLS into fMP4 to make it playable by the Media Source Extensions API used by the browsers.

eldod7• 10 years ago

When did you try doing it? Things evolved a lot in the last 3 years in terms of video streaming support in HTML5, and today everything that was doable in Flash is doable in HTML5 with MSN and EME. You have control over the playback almost up to the keyframe today. Do you have any specific features in mind?

sz4kerto2• 10 years ago

My bank introduced a flash-based internet banking half a year ago. Really. (only the login requires flash)

filipm• 10 years ago

You should probably get rid of them ;-)

sz4kerto2• 10 years ago

I know. Don't even know what they were thinking.

ashmud• 10 years ago

I hope you don't have to deal with ActiveX/SEED (South Korea), too.

Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEED

dude_abides2• 10 years ago

What I found most heartening about the article was that it spent several paragraphs describing why they initially had to use Flash, and how they managed to get rid of it, but not a single sentence saying _why_ they decided to get rid of Flash. We've come a long way! (Also, thanks Steve Jobs!!!)

TheCoreh• 10 years ago

Throughout the second half of 2015, Chrome, Firefox and Safari also began blocking the Flash plugin from automatically loading content unless users gave their permission. In order to continue providing a quality video experience for our viewers, switching exclusively to HTML5 video became necessary.

dude_abides2• 10 years ago

Hah missed that. In that case, thanks are due to Chrome+Firefox+Safari!

mtgx• 10 years ago

And yet it still doesn't use HTTPS. Wasn't it supposed to get it by the end of last year?

dayyvson• 10 years ago

We had to shift a few priorities last year, but we are working to get HTTPS support on our video player. So, stay tuned!

cpeterso8• 10 years ago

HTTPS is a challenge for video players because a player on an HTTPS web page must also stream video over HTTPS (to avoid HTTP/HTTPS mixed content errors or warnings), which can be costly. Flash doesn't enforce mixed content checks.

rplnt• 10 years ago

Let's see when Facebook converts. For some reason they love to serve Flash based SOLELY on user agent. So you have a chrome fork without flash? Here, watch this flash. Oh, and this gif is now flash as well.

I can't quite figure out why.. but I would vote for incompetence. Can't see any business motivation for doing that.

tomschlick• 10 years ago

They probably just have a whitelist of user agents that they have verified HTML5 video to work well on... If it's anything they don't recognize they serve flash.

mmcclure2• 10 years ago

I'm not sure if this is what you're referring to, but they also don't allow you to embed a custom HTML5 player, just Flash. So, if you're a content producer or platform that wants to use your own player, your only option is to embed a SWF.

The irony is that I'm pretty sure the reasoning has security in there somewhere.

waterlesscloud• 10 years ago

Yes, Facebook, full of incompetent engineers.

I'll never understand why HN is so desperate to believe something that clearly isn't true.

Practicality• 10 years ago

Because the alternative is some kind of conspiracy theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

vermontdevil• 10 years ago

Yet NYT does not bother with subtitling their videos. Feels like I'm back to the early 80's when less than 20% of tv shows including news were captioned.

Two steps forward, then three steps backwards. Great.

sparky_z5• 10 years ago

I know everybody here hates flash (for excellent reasons!) and is happy to see it die. But, as a user who doesn't work in tech, I really miss the ability to enforce click-to-play loading of videos. From my pseudo-outsider perspective, the switch to HTML5 has been really frustrating.

I happen to hang out around these parts so I understand the reasons for it, but if I didn't it would probably make me mad. It would feel like websites were just trying to get around my flash blocker and shove their autoplaying media in my face. Just goes to show how different things can look from the developer side of things.

0_00_02• 10 years ago

What do you mean? There are extensions for blocking autoplay HTML5 media same as flash...

sparky_z5• 10 years ago

They don't work reliably (some things still autoplay), and sometimes they break the media entirely or don't discriminate between things you actually want to autoplay. For example, the one I currently have installed also blocks "gifv" files from autoplaying in the browser, even though there's no play button to click on. Every time I click on a reddit link that turns out to be a gifv file on imgur, it stays frozen on the first frame and I have to click on "view image", manually change the url to "gif", and reload it. As others here have mentioned, they also tend to break youtube in odd ways. It feels like there are a million little annoyances like that. Back in the "flash era", click-to-play was effortless.

themartorana• 10 years ago

We're only happy to see it die because it was never well cared for. Flash was much heavier and much, much more insecure than it needed to be with Adobe-level money behind it. They were terribly poor stewards of the technology. I mean no offense to anyone that was on the Flash team, I am making a (flawed?) presumption that it probably didn't feel great inside the company either.

Others may tell you I'm wrong - it's about standards and open technologies and whatnot. But personally (and for people I work with that I can speak for) Flash failed because Abode failed Flash.

radley• 10 years ago

I agree - was definitely poor stewardship, but also there was a perceptual problem for developers. Flash was created for designers and artists, the coding part was secondary and thus traditional developers found it extremely frustrating.

The internal team became obsessed with changing it to something more focused towards developers with AS3, Flex, Flash Builder, and Flash Catalyst. Instead of improving something successful, they tried to twist it into something it wasn't.

The final straw was Jobs, not because Flash was bad but because iOS was extremely locked down. There was no way he was going to share his new platform:

"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform."

Without iOS, there was no future for Flash (Android was still in it's infancy) so Adobe pulled the plug. Just a few years later Apple will go on to hire Kevin Lynch, former CTO of Adobe, to be VP of Technology at Apple focusing on the Apple Watch.

guelo• 10 years ago

The real reason Flash died was not technical, it was because Steve Jobs didn't want a whole platform he didn't control running on the iPhone.

samstave• 10 years ago

Would you say thatvthey were terribly poor stewards due to it being a product of macromedia which adobe bought and then a ton of the core group at macromedia cashed out and left after the purchase leaving tech debt vacuum at adobe wrt flash...?

runn1ng2• 10 years ago

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-html5-auto...

sparky_z5• 10 years ago

I may have to switch to Chrome (from Firefox) and see if actually works as described.

coldpie5• 10 years ago

Firefox has the setting "media.autoplay.enabled" for this. It mostly works, although some websites (notably Youtube) assume that autoplay succeeded and so the player acts slightly wonky, e.g. the played/paused state is backwards.

I would be interested to know of any extensions that do similar and work better.

paol2• 10 years ago

I have autoplay disabled in FF. The trick in Youtube is to double click the play button the first time. After that all works normally. (For some reason double clicking the video area doesn't produce the same result.)

sparky_z5• 10 years ago

Believe me I've looked. As far as I can tell, there's no way to make one that works for everything because the HTML5 standard* doesn't have a clear distinction between things that autoplay and things that don't, the way there was between "flash content" and "everything else".

*I'm not a tech guy so I may be using the wrong terminology here.

cmurf• 10 years ago

Autoplay video on mobile makes me really angry. Both Chrome and Firefox on Android always autoplay videos on CNN, BBC, and other sites that mix video and text. All I care about 9 times out of 10 is the article, just to skim it, watching video is completely annoying and inefficient.

At first I'd yell profanities out loud. Now I stop going to those sites.

blinkingled2• 10 years ago

Now if they could make Firefox play those videos on Android all would be good.

Are NYT videos DRM enabled or use a codec that FF doesn't support on Android? FF should be just using the platform provided codecs and if it works in Chrome it should work in FF - but I just get a Video/Mime Type unsupported error on FF when browsing NYT.

eldod7• 10 years ago

There are no DRMs on the NYT streams (hls.js supports AES encryption, but it's not exactly a DRM liek Widewine or Playready).

Firefox Android doesn't have Media source Extensions, that allow HLS support in HTML5 : http://www.jwplayer.com/html5/mediasource/

cpeterso8• 10 years ago

Firefox on Android is supposed support MSE (for MP4/H.264, but not WebM/VP9). For example, YouTube MSE works in Firefox. Is it broken for you? That JW Player page is out of date. It also says MSE doesn't work on Firefox desktop. :)

pjbrunet• 10 years ago

Turn off Flash for YouTube https://www.youtube.com/html5

shmerl• 10 years ago

I hope DASH will remain patent free. There was some attempt to attack it. It's quite important for Web video.

akoumjian3• 10 years ago

It should be noted that the native browser decoders for h264 still produce worse color presentation than flash players. Also, the flash runtime's pseudo-streaming is faster than Chrome's http pseudo-streaming (it takes longer for the same h264 file to start playing back).

I love HTML5 video, but there are still huge areas for improvement that show up frequently.

modeless• 10 years ago

YouTube in Chrome starts playing video practically instantly, before the page is even finished loading. It's faster than Flash ever was.

JohnTHaller• 10 years ago

parent is referring to pseudo-streaming (aka downloading a video over http), not proper streaming (aka YouTube, etc)

serge2k• 10 years ago

native browser decoders for h264 still produce worse color presentation than flash players

which browsers? Which platforms?

akoumjian3• 10 years ago

Last I checked Chrome's h264 had less accurate color presentation than most off the shelf flash decoders. I can't seem to recall how Firefox's webm decoding stood up when the file was comparatively accurate to the h264 the flash player was using.

eldod7• 10 years ago

Pseudo-streaming is (and should be) less and less used, and actually loads a lot slower than the new HTTP adaptive streaming formats like HLS and DASH.

cpeterso8• 10 years ago

One advantage of Flash over HTML5 video (in Firefox, at least) is that Flash has its own H.264 decoder for platforms that don't include one (like Windows XP or the "N/KN editions" of Windows for Europe and Korea). Flash can also use the GPU for decoding or compositing of video on XP, providing better performance than Firefox playing VP9 using a software decoder.

YouTube recently relegated Flash to the bottom of its list of preferred video formats. Firefox users on XP who used to get hardware-accelerated 1080p video using Flash now get VP9. Many older XP machines can't keep up decoding VP9 in software. I recommend Firefox users on XP install the "YouTube Flash Video Player" add-on, which will force YouTube to use Flash again:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-flash...

Pxtl4• 10 years ago

XP machines? In 2016? That's solving the wrong problem.

cpeterso8• 10 years ago

XP is still a big problem. About 14% of Firefox users are running XP, about the same share as running Windows 10. Google says they will drop support for Chrome on XP and Vista in April 2016. They already extended their XP EOL twice before (from December 2015 and April 2015), so there's a good chance they will need to do it again.

cooper12• 10 years ago

Youtube also serves VP9 in preference to H.264 in general. I had to install a browser extension to trick it that my browser doesn't support it so I'd get hardware acceleration. I don't know if the decision is based on ideology or bandwidth savings, but it certainly isn't nice on my CPU.

j2bax3• 10 years ago

I was at a primarily Flash based company during the glory days of Flash and then through the transition to HTML5/JS. While I understand perfectly (and even support) why the shift happened (thanks Steve!), its still frustrating sometimes to know that now, years later we still aren't able to provide the quality of games that we were in Flash 3-4 years ago. We can do a lot, and things have come a ways, but right before the major shift happened, when Flash gained GPU support, the effects and performance possible in most major desktop browsers was pretty awesome. I realize that HTML5 is now capable of utilizing the GPU, but its browser support is still not where it needs to be for us to offer it as a mass consumer option for most of our clients.

I look forward to the day when we can say HTML5 is so much better (than Flash) for interactive/media content on the web, but sadly we still aren't there. I have hope that we will get there eventually. Until then, we will continue providing slightly dumbed-down games and content with the benefit of it working on mobile, tablet and desktop browsers.

neals• 10 years ago

I totally agree. I've worked with AS3 up until a few months ago but have also been moving to HTML5 for a few years besides. The amount of brainpower that is wasted on quirky legacy browser behaviour and the lack of consistency between them makes me long for the days where I could position and measure and control with ease and speed as in Flash.

StillBored• 10 years ago

I might say much the same things about web development in general. Twenty, years later I still think its easier to create a desktop application with a remote SQL back-end than a web app for any moderately complex application. Data aware visual components and the like have only pale imitations in html/javascript/css. Things like crystal reports have been ported to the web environment but along the way seem to have lost the convenience they had, where it was possible to add them 3/4 of the way through a project. Now you have to rework 1/2 the back-end code (it not the entire project) to add a package like into the mix.

aikah• 10 years ago

The amount of brainpower that is wasted on quirky legacy browser behaviour and the lack of consistency between them makes me long for the days where I could position and measure and control with ease and speed as in Flash.

Big AS3 fan here, it is less true today. I accept the fact that, while AS3 and Flash IDEs were exciting technologies to work with ( I worked with cool artists, musicians, video producers on crazy futuristic projects...), The underlying tech was bad, for 2 reasons

- security. this one is obvious.

- closed source tech. Flash is now almost dead since Adobe basically pulled the plug on the IDE and there is nothing AS3 devs can do about it. Yes the compiler is open source, but the player is not.

I made me appreciate the how important open technologies are. They do not solve everything. But they are important.

Frankly, as someone said somewhere else in the thread, Adobe killed Flash, by not opening the plugin's source code, by not trying to make it unnecessary. A lot can be done now with WebGL, C++ compilation can be done with Emscripten , Web APIs now cover a lot of what Flash used to do, and where was Adobe on that ? Edge Animate ? what a joke.

With the fall of Flash there are opportunities though, so that's a good thing. I'm thinking hard about it.

acdha4• 10 years ago

I look forward to the day when we can say HTML5 is so much better (than Flash) for interactive/media content on the web

That depends on the kind of media we're talking about about: HTML5 video was noticeably faster and higher quality on day 1 and Flash never caught up on performance, which is a big deal for laptop users. Even if you're plugged in, having the fans running constantly and still seeing dropped frames is a terrible experience.

I suspect the story is still different for WebGL but the only benchmarks I've seen are fairly old by now.

fenomas3• 10 years ago

HTML5 video was noticeably faster and higher quality on day 1 and Flash never caught up on performance..

Flash video was never perceptibly slower than html per se. The only thing that really affects video performance is whether or not it's hardware accelerated, and in cases where flash used HW it performed the same as html. The reason it seemed slower is that AFAIK there's never been an HTML video implementation that falls back to software, whereas flash would do so if HW wasn't supported.

Pxtl4• 10 years ago

Not only that, but the GPU exposure to HTML5 creates a massive stability and security risk.

Flash failed not just because it was a browser plug-in, but also because it was terrible - Adobe no longer knew how to tame the beast they'd created and the result was terrible performance and bad user-experience. I'm sad a more sane platform for game/video content didn't win. The browser doesn't need to do everything.

HTML5 for this kind of work is the ultimate square-peg-round-hole solution. HTML is still fundamentally a document platform, and Javascript was never designed for games or video.

We'll get there, but only by the most roundabout fashion possible.

BatFastard3• 10 years ago

Disagree, Adobe's problem was they made it too easy to create crappy content which could give the browser bad performance. And by make it too easy to deploy that bad content to the web. Now that the majority of bad flash developers are gone, and it's being used less for ads and more for mobile, maybe it can make a come back.

ilaksh• 10 years ago

WebGL is not a massive security or stability risk. That security stuff was mostly paid FUD from fraudulent demos that faked data leaks. The stability issues have mainly been avoided by not including WebGL content on non-graphics pages.

bobajeff• 10 years ago

I agree that HTML5 can't do 3D stuff very well across the board yet. But if we're honest here niether could Flash.

I remember trying Flashes Unreal demo and though it ran it was barely playable.

Most of the games I've played in Flash could definitely be done in HTML5 using the 2D Canvas.

clouddrover3• 10 years ago

we still aren't able to provide the quality of games that we were in Flash 3-4 years ago

What's an example of this? The HTML5 and WebGL games I've seen match anything I've seen in Flash. It's true that you need an up to date and capable browser, but that's true of any platform.

forrestthewoods2• 10 years ago

10 years ago there were a dozen sites dedicated to flash games that raked in millions of views per month. I couldn't name you a single WebGL site dedicated to games.

Where is the modern day Newgrounds? There isn't one. It doesn't exist. And that's a damn shame.

j2bax3• 10 years ago

I'm not saying it's not possible. I've seen some incredible HTML5 and WebGL games/tests with limited modern browser support. Unfortunately our clients (large children's entertainment companies) require their games can be played on every device in every browser. Sadly, it costs us more to do less in so many environments.

gmfawcett• 10 years ago

Live streaming is still a pain-point in HTML5. I can play a live HLS stream on my Android or iOS phone, or I can play a live RTMP stream through Flash on the desktop; but everything else on the desktop is flaky, or experimental and flaky (MPEG-DASH), or just nonexistent (in the browser, that is -- not including video clients like VLC). I would love to see 2016 be the year where this gap is closed!

mentos• 10 years ago

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

mschuster91• 10 years ago

Chrome, Firefox and Safari also began blocking the Flash plugin from automatically loading content unless users gave their permission.

Fuck auto-play websites, made possible by HTML5. Even LOADING content unless the user explicity consented is horrible behavior.

Not everyone has an unlimited tethering plan or WiFi, fuck you very much.

Flash-Free Video in 2016

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