mbsmd said: Hopefully this accelerates the death of Flash. It's sad how many websites still require it.
I was under the impression that a lot of sites still used Flash when I had the plug-in installed. If you just block the plug-in and load it when it asks, sites still try to load it so it looks like the site needs Flash. If you uninstall Flash, a lot of sites switch to HTML5 content. It's so much better uninstalling it because the CPU usage is lower without the plug-in and things don't lock up so much. There are a few cases where it's still used but they'll switch if people uninstall the plug-in. For the odd cases that need it, Chrome works as a backup.
I always wondered why Google built it into the browser but as always when something seems off, it's because they're an ad company and a lot of ads are still authored in Flash. If they killed it, they'd lose money. Google generally tries to help push open standards and good security models but when it comes to protecting their bottom line, they clearly want to take their time. It also offers tracking ability that bypasses browser privacy settings:
"Can Advertisers Learn That "No Means No", a research study on flash cookies published in 2011, characterized online advertisers who used flash cookies to override user privacy settings as paternalistic:
Advertisers see individuals as objects. When conceived of as objects, consumers’ preferences no longer matter. Privacy can be coded into oblivion or be circumvented with technology. Our 2009 and 2011 work empirically demonstrates that advertisers implement paternalistic judgments that subjects of targeted marketing cannot make proper judgments for themselves.
Today, Google looks just as paternalistic as ad networks setting flash cookies to outfox people who try to delete their cookies."
They added a Chrome feature to delete the cookies but it's another tracker to be aware of that users have to deal with themselves and likely won't.
There's no excuse they can't switch their stock charts to HTML5:
I don't think Chrome has as much as 70% marketshare, mentioned in the article. W3C stats only track their own log files so that's just people interested in web standards - not IE users. Other sites put it closer to 30-50%. It looks like it has a majority over IE but there are still a lot of users on other browsers. Facebook games is a hurdle in getting rid of Flash:
The usual casual games Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, Clash of Clans have over 150 million monthly users. Adobe really needs to take the initiative here and start moving Flash out of the browser. Flash should be an app, not a plug-in. Their next security update should be an uninstaller for the Flash plug-in and have an optional app installer. The browser would then have a basic extension or a URL protocol that passes URLs to the app the way that iTunes links work. This way they can cache game assets for faster loading and people can play games outside of the browser without visiting any page. The app would contain a list of games that had been played and people would load them directly. It can also act as a tester for developers the way the iOS simulator works so Adobe Animate CC would author apps to it. It can be called Adobe Apps to move away from Flash and they can push native standalone apps too but the Adobe Apps environment would be for web app style apps that use a runtime interpreter to allow single binary authoring to multiple platforms. Adobe Apps would cache the binaries and only switch them out when they needed updating.
IMHO one reason why Flash is still around is the Flash developers. For two reasons. (i) they have an invested in Flash and hope they will be able to use these skills for quite some time to come (ii) Instead of (wisely) proposing to their clients to have their website run on HTML5, or move ASAP from Flash to HTML5, they stick with Flash and quietly hope that, when the day arrives that Flash becomes objectionable to use, their client will pay them to do the web design job all over.
Apart from security aspects, the reason why I myself despise Flash is that it forces a user experience onto the user that feels foreign to their computing platform, that doesn't evolve with new developments that are the responsibility of the user's OS (e.g., magic mice with "natural" scrolling direction, a system option that doesn't carry over to the Flash layer).
As a convenience to forum members wondering about all that "stuff" Google know about you here's a compiled list of resources that should cover all of it. It's not as secretive as you might have thought, or as intrusive as you've been told it is. (Or maybe it is)
Oh and don't forget YouTube. See how many times you've perused cute cat videos by looking at your YouTube search history.
Do you remember all the active permissions you've given various sites via your Google account, including those convenient website auto-logins? You can see what those apps and sites are right here.
As a computer technician I praise this decision. It was nothing but headaches dealing with the same issues over and over. It was always flash, flash and flash. Now the tricksters are going to change their sites and display you need to download HTML5 to watch this video, "download here" lol
As a computer technician I praise this decision. It was nothing but headaches dealing with the same issues over and over. It was always flash, flash and flash. Now the tricksters are going to change their sites and display you need to download HTML5 to watch this video, "download here" lol
Comments
I was under the impression that a lot of sites still used Flash when I had the plug-in installed. If you just block the plug-in and load it when it asks, sites still try to load it so it looks like the site needs Flash. If you uninstall Flash, a lot of sites switch to HTML5 content. It's so much better uninstalling it because the CPU usage is lower without the plug-in and things don't lock up so much. There are a few cases where it's still used but they'll switch if people uninstall the plug-in. For the odd cases that need it, Chrome works as a backup.
I always wondered why Google built it into the browser but as always when something seems off, it's because they're an ad company and a lot of ads are still authored in Flash. If they killed it, they'd lose money. Google generally tries to help push open standards and good security models but when it comes to protecting their bottom line, they clearly want to take their time. It also offers tracking ability that bypasses browser privacy settings:
https://www.piriform.com/docs/ccleaner/ccleaner-settings/cleaning-flash-cookieshttps://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/02/time-make-amends-google-circumvents-privacy-settings-safari-users
"Can Advertisers Learn That "No Means No", a research study on flash cookies published in 2011, characterized online advertisers who used flash cookies to override user privacy settings as paternalistic:
They added a Chrome feature to delete the cookies but it's another tracker to be aware of that users have to deal with themselves and likely won't.
There's no excuse they can't switch their stock charts to HTML5:
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=AAPL
http://developer.modulusfe.com/html5/
I don't think Chrome has as much as 70% marketshare, mentioned in the article. W3C stats only track their own log files so that's just people interested in web standards - not IE users. Other sites put it closer to 30-50%. It looks like it has a majority over IE but there are still a lot of users on other browsers. Facebook games is a hurdle in getting rid of Flash:
http://www.statista.com/statistics/278933/monthly-active-users-of-the-most-popular-facebook-games/
The usual casual games Candy Crush, Farm Heroes, Clash of Clans have over 150 million monthly users. Adobe really needs to take the initiative here and start moving Flash out of the browser. Flash should be an app, not a plug-in. Their next security update should be an uninstaller for the Flash plug-in and have an optional app installer. The browser would then have a basic extension or a URL protocol that passes URLs to the app the way that iTunes links work. This way they can cache game assets for faster loading and people can play games outside of the browser without visiting any page. The app would contain a list of games that had been played and people would load them directly. It can also act as a tester for developers the way the iOS simulator works so Adobe Animate CC would author apps to it. It can be called Adobe Apps to move away from Flash and they can push native standalone apps too but the Adobe Apps environment would be for web app style apps that use a runtime interpreter to allow single binary authoring to multiple platforms. Adobe Apps would cache the binaries and only switch them out when they needed updating.
(i) they have an invested in Flash and hope they will be able to use these skills for quite some time to come
(ii) Instead of (wisely) proposing to their clients to have their website run on HTML5, or move ASAP from Flash to HTML5, they stick with Flash and quietly hope that, when the day arrives that Flash becomes objectionable to use, their client will pay them to do the web design job all over.
Apart from security aspects, the reason why I myself despise Flash is that it forces a user experience onto the user that feels foreign to their computing platform, that doesn't evolve with new developments that are the responsibility of the user's OS (e.g., magic mice with "natural" scrolling direction, a system option that doesn't carry over to the Flash layer).