Google is banning Flash from its display ads

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/10/10957570/google-bans-flash-display-ads-january-2017

by cpeterso • 10 years ago

446 143 10 years ago

theverge.com

diminish• 10 years ago

Flash ads were a good way to target desktop office day time users for some conversion needs. Anyway had to go ..

Animats2• 10 years ago

I've blocked Google ads for so long I didn't realize they had been allowing Flash ads.

ChuckMcM• 10 years ago

Ha. One of the annoying things about the first x86 Android tablets was that Google would serve up a flash ad which wouldn't work, presumably because it was expecting an ARM processor. As a result a whole slew of apps which had video and ads were unusable.

Spare_account• 10 years ago

Which ad blocker do you use on mobile?

Animats2• 10 years ago

Ghostery on Firefox.

nv-vn• 10 years ago

uBlock Origin works well on Firefox IIRC. Alternatively, you could block apps system-wide.

kentonv2• 10 years ago

For Google ads specifically? https://contributor.google.com/

cazum• 10 years ago

If you're rooted, AdAway is fantastic as it not only blocks browser ads, but in-app ads as well.

olb• 10 years ago

We just (last week) launched an Android ad blocker with Samsung that doesn’t require rooting your device or switching to another browser (our app works with Samsung Internet, which is the default browser on most of their devices): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rocketship...

The ad blocker is also open source: https://github.com/rocketshipapps/adblockfast

dingo_bat2• 10 years ago

Firefox on Android with uBlock Origin.

josteink2• 10 years ago

Which ad blocker do you use on mobile?

Firefox with uBlock. Just plain old FF extensions. No root required.

Firefox for Android is seriously underrated IMO.

flo_23• 10 years ago

I'm using Blockr on iOS. It also blocks those cookie warnings! http://blockr-app.com

iopq• 10 years ago

you can use adblock as a proxy and connect to your wifi through said proxy

awqrre2• 10 years ago

The only Google ads that I still get is on the Youtube app on Android... which is one reason why I don't like to install any Google binaries on my computers...

throwaway2048• 10 years ago

http://forum.xda-developers.com/xposed/modules/app-t2547316

will remove ads in the youtube app if you have a rooted device, just install the xposed framework, then this.

Keep in mind you need to update it when the youtube app updates (youtube app might be showing ads, or behaving weirdly/crashing if you don't)

arrty882• 10 years ago

i've blocked flash for so long, most ads dont display for me.

erikrothoff• 10 years ago

Good for you that they are moving to HTML5 then ;)

bambax• 10 years ago

I bought a new Windows laptop last year. Of course the first thing I did was open IE and search for "download chrome".

Stupidly, I clicked on the first link, which was a Google ad for Chrome bundled with some malware.

Spent the next few hours getting rid of said malware.

I've used adblock (ublock) for a long time, but there was always a little bit of guilt associated with it; that episode cleared the guilt, completely and for ever.

phpsupport5• 10 years ago

bambax, its not malware. when you installed free software they created spam add-on in browser.

sshagent• 10 years ago

"IE the number 1 browser for downloading Chrome"

digitalengineer• 10 years ago

Same thing with VLC I (as a Mac user) once installed for a Windows friend... The malware/adware version scored nr 1.

tdsamardzhiev• 10 years ago

The web can be scary without adblocker. Many people have given similar examples here lately. Here's one from me:

I have a certain addiction I cannot control. Tried everything possible without any success at all. It's not as dangerous as drugs, but it's also related to buying a lot of expensive stuff. So, when I disable adblock, every website spams the hell out of me with ads related to my addiction.

This is nasty! And disgusting. I'm sure I'm not alone. Also there's probably a huge number of people that get influenced to smaller extent and don't pay attention to it (because it doesn't ruin their lives, y'know).

smaili• 10 years ago

I wonder if people may begin to go back to older browsers for surfing once ads have completely transitioned to HTML5 :-)

mschuster91• 10 years ago

With people shifting their layouts over to Flexbox, relying on "box-sizing: border-box", "display: table-xxx" and friends, older browsers will mess up the layout beyond belief. IIRC some older browsers even failed to apply an entire CSS file if they couldn't parse a single rule - good luck with ::before, ::after, ::nth-child and friends.

CSS, unfortunately, isn't really backwards compatible unless you invest a LOT of effort into testing and development.

wlesieutre• 10 years ago

Good riddance. Those older browsers are also going to be full of unpatched security holes, and if websites don't work people will eventually quit using them.

frik• 10 years ago

Many recently updated websites of unicorns/startups look very bad or often completely unreadable on older browsers e.g. IE 9. Can they live without enterprise sales?

cpncrunch3• 10 years ago

Just add a bookmark to kill iframes, then you just click the button to instantly remove any iframe adverts (which includes all of google's ads).

pdkl952• 10 years ago

Why? This still allows the ad tracking and other malicious Javascript, and it still requires you to recognize that there are ads on the page. The cost in mental effort is significant; if you think it isn't, live completely ad free for a month or two to reset your tolerance.

technomancy• 10 years ago

In Firefox you don't need to use an old version; just do it from about:config: media.autoplay.enable = false.

manigandham2• 10 years ago

This is great progress. Google being the biggest ad network and going with a complete ban is probably the only way to move things forward but glad to see it finally being done.

ktRolster• 10 years ago

It sounds like great progress.......until you realize that Google uses Flash everywhere in their own APIs

manigandham2• 10 years ago

Progress = forward movement towards something. This is still great progress, regardless of how much there is left to do. Chrome was even the first browser to stop playing lots of flash ads months ago.

chc4• 10 years ago

Silly question: Do people not use Click-to-play? I thought it was enabled in browsers by default now, or at least Firefox.

Doctor_Fegg• 10 years ago

I do (even as a sometime Flash developer), but unfortunately it's not always practical. There are plenty of sites, including Vimeo embeds and Vine, which cover the SWF with an HTML element - making it impossible to right-click to play the SWF. So you end up disabling click-to-play just to see the video you wanted.

pdkl952• 10 years ago

Firefox has had a top-of-the-page notification for click-to-play for a long time, making this a non-issue.

CamperBob2• 10 years ago

Does anyone know why Vimeo does that? I refuse to disable Flashblock to use Vimeo, and I don't understand how requiring me to do so would benefit them.

jedberg2• 10 years ago

I use Chrome Canary, which doesn't have flash at all, and it seems that most sites automatically switch to HTML5.

Sometimes I'll go to a site in Safari or Chrome and and the flash won't play, but then I load it up in Canary and it works. I don't understand why those same sites don't just start with html5 if they already support it anyway.

yohui• 10 years ago

Chrome Canary has Flash. Do you mean Chromium?

hollerith• 10 years ago

Back when I still have Flash installed, I turned off Firefox's Click-to-play because I was unable figure out how to have it on without something like a speech balloon's popping up in the upper left corner of the window every time I visit a page that wants to use Flash.

I have a low tolerance for distractions and for anything that resembles nagging.

pippy• 10 years ago

One thing HTML5 lacks is the ability to combine all assets into one file. This makes Flash particularly handy for advertisements. Safari almost got there with its .Webarchive format, and Mozilla experimented with a file format but it didn't get anywhere.

austinheap• 10 years ago

Isn't that mostly moot with HTTP 2.0 multiplexing?

discreditable• 10 years ago

Almost. Compressing all of the files into one archive often results in a smaller file overall. This might work a little differently with brotli, which uses a precomputed dictionary.

The advantage of keeping the files separate is that it allows for procedural rendering. Multiplexing gives this a boost by allowing your client to fetch a lot of files at the same time.

lukeman• 10 years ago

Couldn't you use inline scripts and styles with images specified as data uris?

bosdev• 10 years ago

Yes, I've used bundlers before which package the scripts and styles into a single HTML file.

dheera2• 10 years ago

Data URLs for large images are horribly space-inefficient.

tantalor• 10 years ago

Doesn't seem like it would be very difficult to parse a zip file from a typed array (fetched with binary Xhr) and pull out images files, video files, etc. This has probably already been done but I can't find a project presently.

seanp2k2• 10 years ago

Bundles might make sense, but one large blob that couldn't be parsed until it was finished loading would probably be a big step backward for responsiveness. Parallel downloads also help speed things up.

Another interesting idea for JS-heavy sites is server-side pre rendering (yes, having the server generate HTML like the good old bad days) like Ember FastBoot http://tomdale.net/2015/02/youre-missing-the-point-of-server...

LukeShu• 10 years ago

Flash programs could start running before the whole things was downloaded. Hence custom loading bars on flash movies on Newgrounds.

spankalee• 10 years ago

HTML Imports basically give you bundling, at least for CSS, JS, markup, and things you can fit into data URLs. It'd be awesome to explore how HTML can serve as a better bundling format for ES2015 modules and generic files like video.

glass55• 10 years ago

You could encode assets using "base64" and put everything in a single JS file. There may be a file size issue though, but I did that a few times (actually I did that with html files using data uris)

mintplant2• 10 years ago

WARC, maybe?

http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/

greglindahl• 10 years ago

WARC has proven to be useful in web archiving contexts, I'd love to see browsers use it for good. http/2 is headed in a quite different direction already.

munchbunny• 10 years ago

Google more or less invented the .adz file for that. It's a glorified zip file with a few naming conventions and a few other things. Many of the more common pieces of ad serving software support it.

This is from the perspective of the person who is uploading the ad, of course, not from the perspective of the browser that is downloading the ad later.

kalleboo• 10 years ago

Another old format in that space is/was MHTML - a MIME document with all the resources needed for a webpage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML

eveningcoffee• 10 years ago

They should also bad video ads (including their own).

0x0• 10 years ago

How can they continue to allow "video ads built in flash"? Isn't a video flash just like any other .swf, that happens to use the NetConnection, NetStream and Video classes? Or will they supply the .swf part and the advertisers just the .flv/.mp4 part?

Also, what's to stop a "html5 ad" from inlining swfobject.js? They've fallen for malvertising before, so how could they not fall for an obfuscated swfobject.js? :)

viraptor• 10 years ago

I think there's a lot of confusion in terminology here.

"html5 ad" may mean "videos in formats supported by html5 video tag"

"video ads built in flash" may mean ".flv in our own player", but also "we're going to unpack your .swf and strip anything apart from <run from frame 0>"

Also "From January 2nd next year, Flash ads won't run" does match up with "Google says that Flash video ads aren't included in the cull "at this time.""

The article is pretty confusing though...

jdangu• 10 years ago

This is because video ads use an obnoxious ad API called VPAID [1] that is mostly used to track viewability of video ads (which in turn conditions the billing event for advertisers). This is most effectively done with Flash and so 90% of video ads use Flash if given the opportunity.

[1] http://www.iab.net/guidelines/508676/digitalvideo/vsuite/vpa...

cpeterso3• 10 years ago

The NY Times' recent post about their transition from Flash to HTML5 video highlighted VPAID as one of their big challenges. It sounds like they had to pull the ad vendors, kicking and screaming, into the HTML5 world.

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

tyingq2• 10 years ago

I suppose this means dropping it altogether (like from Chrome) can't be too far away.

My only regret with that would be that we use flash as a way to allow one-button copy to the clipboard (using this http://zeroclipboard.org/).

We had tried non-flash solutions, but none of them worked.

This sounds like it might work https://clipboardjs.com/, so I guess I'll be adding a backlog item to look at it.

zymhan• 10 years ago

I use that feature a lot, surely they can't all be Flash based.

tyingq2• 10 years ago

Flash used to be the only thing that worked, cross-browser.

Chrome, I know for sure, changed their minds several times on whether they would allow it...security model thing, you could make it work only by tweaking some internal chrome setting.

The sales pitch at https://clipboardjs.com/ makes it sound like perhaps things have changed enough that a reasonable cross-browser solution is possible now.

jpwgarrison2• 10 years ago

re: dropping [flash] from Chrome -

NOOOOO this is what Chrome is for! The only flash I have is the built in to chrome flash.

sparky_2• 10 years ago

I also do this. Firefox is my primary browser but I have Chrome installed solely to view flash-based video sites.

josteink2• 10 years ago

I'm not going to cry rivers over this, but yeah, the only reason I have Chrome installed is for sites insisting on running flash stuff.

If Chrome stops supporting Flash I honestly have no need for it.

mccr8• 10 years ago

This is a pretty common use case for Flash. There's a clipboard API of some sort now: http://caniuse.com/#feat=clipboard

cpeterso3• 10 years ago

There is a ZeroClipboard feature request to use the HTML5 Clipboard APIs, where available, and seamlessly fall back to Flash elsewhere. Hallvord R. M. Steen, editor of the W3C Clipboard API spec, started working on it here:

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

gtk40• 10 years ago

An internal app we use at work requires an extension to do one button clipboard in Chrome and Firefox. And if you're using another browser, you're out of luck. I use it enough that I have the extension, but now the version we have and the extension it supports isn't "signed" in Firefox, so I have to make an about:config change.

This is all for a password manager.

jbob2000• 10 years ago

We use clipboard.js in our product, it was the perfect replacement for flash copy. I highly recommend it, our users were none the wiser when we swapped it out.

beedogs• 10 years ago

Good, and good riddance. The less Flash on the Internet, the better.

codazoda• 10 years ago

I've never installed Flash since it was an ad on (or maybe I just disable it, I can't remember). It's ONLY used for ads these days. I avoid the few video sites that use it.

lsalvatore2• 10 years ago

Nope. The Superbowl was streamed with Flash Player on CBS own website. Hulu still streams with Flash Player. Zynga and King use Flash player in all their multi-million dollar earning Flash games. It's not going anywhere.

amdavidson• 10 years ago

... It's not going anywhere.

Yet.

kmfrk• 10 years ago

Just in time for the launch of AMP.

sandworm1013• 10 years ago

Google does ads?

Honestly, it has been a very long while since I've seen ads. Adblock aside, my phone is so old that any significant ads effectively causes a crash, total non-responsive phone. So I still don't see them.

finnn2• 10 years ago

How do you think Google makes money if not ads?

sandworm1013• 10 years ago

How do you not get sarcasm?

obelisk_• 10 years ago

I haven't had the Flash plugin since 2012 and only a few couple of times I've encountered something I wanted to use which required Flash since when I stopped having Flash. In every case where Flash was required I simply Googled the relevant keywords and found what I was looking for provided by other non-Flash sites.

luxflux• 10 years ago

Twitch is the only thing keeping Flash on my system, and as soon as they make the switch to HTML5 video I'll be uninstalling it completely.

AlphaSite• 10 years ago

Twitch has run over HTML5 for the better part of a year (maybe longer).

atomic_cheese• 10 years ago

If you use Livestreamer and an IRC client, you can run Twitch streams outside your browser. That's what I've been doing - I haven't had flash installed since that cross-platform RCE bug late last year.

TD-Linux• 10 years ago

Livestreamer works well for Twitch.

throwaway3289• 10 years ago

Add &html5 to the Twitch URL to force it to give you HTML5 instead of Flash.

stanley• 10 years ago

Surprised to see this in the news now. As an advertiser, we received notice from Google around July of 2015 that our flash ads will soon be disabled. Something like a month or two later the change went into effect.

eyeareque• 10 years ago

I use firefox at the moment and do not have flash installed. In the rare occasion that I cannot view a video because I need flash I will fire up chrome to watch it.

Also, I use adblockers.. so I haven't seen a flash ad in ages.

spacehome3• 10 years ago

I beat them to this a loong time ago.

arrty882• 10 years ago

ive been blocking flash since 2012. no biggie.

bikamonki• 10 years ago

Flash is like DLLs. Enough said.

Outdoorsman• 10 years ago

I don't look at ads...that's remiss of me, as some ads probably contribute to my salary...

When I see a three column layout on a client's page, with the right column "blinking" I think, usually, that they're probably barely holding on...just from experience...

module17• 10 years ago

woohoo!

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

Ironically, one of the very few places I find Flash still used, that I miss it, is in Google Finance pages.

They're desperately wanting a rewrite.

phpsupport5• 10 years ago

Google main focus is ADS

ksec• 10 years ago

( What took you so long? James. )

The sentence that came across my head when i read the title.

* Quote from the 007 movie Spectre

k-mcgrady• 10 years ago

Anyone else see this and think "Why the hell didn't they do this years ago?". I was really surprised it was still allowed.

Google is banning Flash from its display ads

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