Bye Bye Flash
Thanks for all the crashes and malware
If you really, really want to use the Flash Player plugin for Android and you haven't downloaded it already, you'd better move quickly. Tomorrow, August 15, is the day Adobe will pull it from the Google Play store. The software maker has said it will adjust the configuration settings on the Flash Player page in Google Play on …
Yes the Fandroids spent years saying how good Android was because it could run Flash, forget the fact that Flash still dosent run on most android phones and is a pile of shit anyway. The Fandroids will be quiet about this as is there way when dealing with reality.
Me, im glad Flash has another nail in it's long overdue coffin, it really was the worst piece of software ever created. I still find it hard to understand how people were paid to wright software that gets worse with more resourses. How the fuck do people feel good about creating software that when given more ram and processing power runs slower!
I think you've rather missed the point (much like the spelling and grammar classes).
The underlying message about Android being able to run Flash was - "Hey. Look at our open platform. It can run Flash (if we want to)". Personally I never bothered with it much, although the few times I did use it was because it handled Flash based websites better than Safari on my Macbook.
Android as a platform promotes individual user choice as opposed to iOS which expects things to be done the 'Apple Way' and requires you to jailbreak it to do otherwise. I've nothing against iPhones personally (I used to own a 3G, my girlfriend has had a 3GS and now has a 4S) but I prefer the more open approach of Android for my personal use.
Each to their own.
"To each their own" is grammatically correct *and* less sexist / exclusionist of those who don't have danglies between their legs. The Indefinite ‘they’ has been used by Shakespeare, C.S Lewis and Austen.
http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/singular-they-and-the-many-reasons-why-its-correct/
Kudos to those who try not to exclude anyone by gender in their writing.
The underlying message about Android being able to run Flash was - "Hey. Look at our open platform. It can run Flash (if we want to)".
that may have been the underlying message, but it wasn't the one that every Android user i've met in the last few years has said. they've just said "but can you run flash? no? because i can with my android and so that makes it better"
perhaps Android users should have been a bit more clearer in the messages they wished to convey and then they'd avoid having to find ways of making it out like they meant to say something else than what they did.
"Oh yes, I may have said you were an utter smeghead, but my underlying message was actually that I think you're okay"
You do realise that
"Hey. Look at our open platform. It can run Flash (if we want to)".
and
"but can you run flash? no? because i can with my android and so that makes it better""
are exactly the same statement? Android was a better choice if you wanted to browse the internet and be able to utilise ALL websites. Now it will be just as bad and restricted as iOS.
well times move on. Yes long ago when flash was about and was almost the defacto way that the majority of people used streaming content then yes flash was fairly necessary. Especially with the likes of BBC iplayer and youtube dominating the streaming market for the masses. Flash may have been crap and may have been clunky but people used it. Having a platform that supported it WAS a good sell.
Times change though, flash is a bloated piece of crap still and with HTML5 coming on scene why on earth would anyone use flash or AIR now? Iphone and android have the market share and if neither use flash then why bother coding for adobe at all? If MS could actually get silverlight to work properly then im sure silverlight would start to edge in - especially with its streaming DRM.
Seems a daft decision by adobe on the face of it.
Really? I beg to differ, Android has Firefox with a proper content aware ad blocker addon- something that I sorely miss on my iPad (the best it can do is a jailbroken hosts file blocker).
Lack of flash isn't really "restricted". I run with noscript on my desktop every day, and only re-enable flash to watch Zero Punctuation. Even that will move to something more sensible as their viewer numbers start to drop due to their choice of video player.
You do realise that "Hey. Look at our open platform. It can run Flash (if we want to)". and "but can you run flash? no? because i can with my android and so that makes it better"" are exactly the same statement?
No they're not.
I thought your point originally was that the Android user was saying "the platform is open, which makes it better, oh and also, as a result, i can run flash, yay \o/ lolz"
whereas what i was saying was that all the Android users i've encountered insisted that being able to run Flash was the key advantage of the platform over iOS. To them, the openness of the platform was a secondary consideration.
(which is weird, cos most of them a techies, so you'd think they'd appreciate the open platform, but it seems all they really cared about was the ability to run flash and also play divx and avi movie formats)
I love android and (having suffered iTunes for an iPhone and iPod Touch) wouldn't touch apple with a barge pole again. But I honestly couldn't give a damn about Flash.
Fandroid? well I love the fact I can plug it in a do what I like with it, I love many of the things that apple fans love, but without the strangle hold of apple. So call me that if you will, but don't ever suggest all android supporters have used flash as it's 'big seller', many of us are more intelligent than that (leave single features to the other team).
You'll find that html5/css3 stuff that now replaces flash actually uses a lot more cpu (e.g try run any canvas animation on mobile) and has a larger file size (doesn't compress as well as in a swf and needs lots of large external libraries like jquery). But html5 is the hip thing so yay for progress in a going back 10 years type way.
"Flash! I love you! But we only have fourteen hours to save the Earth!"
That's my favourite line from any film, even above "We're going to need a bigger boat".
Those three rows of icons remind me of the panel Ming used to select disasters. What shall I inflict on the readers of this post: Nuclear blast? Wildfire? Chemical hazard? Plague of trolls?
Truer than you think, because this is clearly a downgrade. Google stats recently showed something like 99% of Chrome users used flash on the desktop in the last week. Steve Jobs was hopelessly wrong on this one, and the web is still not ready for a flashless world.
Used flash or had flash run in their browser without them actually wanting the content?
Remember two points with that 99% statistic:
- flash is default bundled with chrome
- not all requests for flash are desired by the user. some secondary content on pages (e.g. ads) still use flash.
I would also suspect that people with Chrome are more likely to visit Googly sites like youtube which probably still prefer flash on chrome to HTML5 playback.
Incidentally the reason I won't touch Chrome is because they bundled Flash. I don't trust it as it can basically run as an independent agent in my browser while ignoring all my browser security/proxy settings. The fact they release a security fix version of flash frequently doesn't particularly add to my confidence of the product.
Eh, would that not be a good thing? Compared to the number of other bits of software I update often, such as safari, chrome or firefox that pretty much always have some feature in.
Don't get me wrong, I hate flash but really don't see why it gets as much bashing as it does for crashing/performance, is it really worse than your average piece of software, just more noticed beacuse of it's prevalence?
I use flash on mobile devices and it's never been a problem, always been very useful.
I also use it in Chrome on the desktop but have it disabled by default. This gives me the "full web" as Jobs envisioned it, and it remains a mass of grey boxes many years after he announced that vision. I don't enable all of the boxes, but I enable a lot of them and do so at least once a week. Flash works and it's still a requirement.
For the last Coward I'll make the following correction:
99% of people who have selected "Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google" use flash each week and are not forced to be tracked by Google. Why do people still not get this?
...and the people who are forced to enter a Google ID to use their Android phone? (Which has a GPS in it, camera, microphone, uploads address book to Google's servers...)
So not only do they know *every* dodgy search you have ever done, they now know who your contacts are and can know *where **you** are* at all times.
No doubt you will say 'well just make a new ID' p- roblem with that is Google are smart at joining up the dots. Oh look - two Google IDs from the same home broadband IP - that's a link. Also it only takes one accident, and what about your email? Don't use Google email you say? Very wise.
I believe there is a build of Android somewhere which is anonymised to remove the forcing of Google ID usage - the fact that this exists proves this is a concern for many.
I would not trust that company *at all*.
AOSP does not require Google ID usage, and unlike other systems you can side-load apps, so it's not limited to system apps when you don't give it an ID. The fact that this exists proves that it should not be a concern for any.
You would not trust that company *because you're ignorant*. Would you trust Apple? They usually get a free ride on this sort of thing even though all your worries above could be applied to Apple, and not all can be applied to Google.
You don't have to use a Google account on any version of Android I've used. You can just skip the account setup at first boot. You won't get backup or contacts sync without loading some more apps, and you will have to use an app store other than Google's (e.g. Amazon, but then you need an Amazon account, oh noes), but that's about all you would lose.
I'm no fan of Flash (it can cause my desktop PC to cane CPU cycles, let alone a mobile device). I'm new to this smartphone malarky, and whilst it is a fine new toy (and occasionally a handy tool) its battery could last longer.
That said, it is nice to have the option of using it (when I'm near a wall socket). I currently have Flash preinstalled on a Sony phone that is due an ICS update next week, and I'm new to this smartphone malarky; will I need to obtain Flash (and other things) after an Android OS update?
"I think it uses Adobe Air on phones, but on my tablet it's just a shortcut to the web"
Android iPlayer is a Flash app and, yes, it does just act as a bookmark to the iPlayer website for tablets.
The use of Flash has made the whole iPlayer experience less than ideal completely shite (just look at the comments on Play).
My hope is this will force the BBC to produce something that actually works on most devices, but I expect the reality is they will move to Air like ITVPlayer (and that, if anything, is even shittier then iPlayer).
The real irony is that the BBC killed off the 3rd party iPlayer clients BeebPlayer and myPlayer and used Flash (because of its DRM facilities) in order to protect their content on Android devices. The reality is that they have produce such a poor user experience that they have probably driven more people to "pirate" sources than if they had just left BeebPlayer and MyPlayer alone and/or produce a decent (but un-DRM'd) native Android app.
>Set your browser to pretend it's mobile safari and the BBC will give you the non-flash version.
Not on a Nexus 7 using Dolphin. UA set as ipod or ipad gets you to the "click to play" screen (instead of the antequated "you must install flash player" screen) but clicking the button to play the content does nothing.
Queries to the BBC result in being fobbed off with something about something happening at some point in the future. Applecolytes fully catered for, but Androidians mostly left swinging, despite, as some earlier poster pointed out - the thing should work perfectly in Adobe Air.
What was that about being "platform neutral", BBC?
(Maybe if their tech division hadn't been privatised.)