Adobe will kill Flash by 2020: No more updates, support, tears, pain... Adobe has officially set a kill date for its beleaguered Flash. The Photoshop giant said today it plans to end support for the hacker-prone multimedia browser plugin by the end of 2020. This means no more updates for Flash Player after that date and the end of support on many browsers, including Chrome, Internet Explorer and …
My Chrome crapped itself refusing to install flash as a security risk, and rerouted me straight to the beta site. (was it Chrome?)
Windows 10 offered me to install the mobile version from Windows store on one occasion. Even the app is cell-phone shaped. Anyway, that doesn't rely on any browser and can be killed instantly.
I don't know what part exactly turned Flash down, if it was AVG Antivirus (hahahahah perhaps no) if it was actually Chrome, and what other part routed me to the beta site.
TLDR; I don't know WTF happened but the Flash version of Ookla was stomped and killed with fire ON SIGHT.
If you're using Firefox, many sites that want Flash will demand you enable it if the plugin is set to "Ask to activate," but if you set it to "Never activate," then and only then will you get the HTML5 version.
I'd much prefer it if FF acted like it didn't know what this "Flash" content type was when it's turned off rather than to tell the site, "Well sure I have the Flash plugin installed! It's just not enabled at the moment." That way I'd get the HTML5 version of a site if there is one, which of course is vastly better than enabling Flash, and it would save the "please enable Flash" prompt for sites that truly have no other option (looking at you, US National Weather Service). I probably still won't enable it (how will the webmasters learn if we don't teach them?), but it's good to have the choice and to know what the options are.
I believe Speedtest.net have actually moved away from flash (I was presented with the choice of legacy flash or something else last time I visited), but as has been said elsewhere speedof.me is better. It looks like dog poo but works well in a purely HTML5 interface.
Sure, the whole flash thing was like a drunken driver turning down a narrow alley with a flaming dumpster at the end, but it wasn't all bad. A whole lot of creative people expended their precious time to make really cool stuff like Hapland (needs flash). Lunacy of that sort is only now becoming possible with modern web code. Maybe.
There are hundreds or thousands of fine swf's out there that represent a fair bit of our early web culture, and as such ought not be forgotten. Kinda sad really.
Every year, at Halloween, we hang a semi-transparent white sheet in our living room window, then project a spooky pumpkin / graveyard animation at it, to let passing greb-finks children know that they can raid us for sweets.
The animation, of course, is done in... **cue moaning ghosts, rattling bones...** Flash!
What will the poor children do*, when I can no longer let them know that they can raid our home for sweets?!?!?
*Go to the dentist less, probably...
"The animation, of course, is done in... **cue moaning ghosts, rattling bones...** Flash!"
use ffmpeg or mencoder to convert it to something else?
either that or have a necromancer summon the Flash Player for ya, just for Halloween night. Muahahahahahaha!
(icon for the 2nd part, and because the original poster had it too)
Those same loading screens for content in HTML5 are going to be much better because its all bootstrap and semantic? The content is not going to vary in delivery size is it? If doing the same thing as 2001 takes about the same time or slightly longer due to the technology is that progress? Lets do animation for the web with 8bit colorspace on a linear timeline using pixels instead of vectors because #progress?
There's always Acrobat (reader)!
...and its loveable mid-meeting, 1/4 screen pop-ups, enabled by default, informing you that "A NEW VERSION OF ADOBE READER IS AVAILABLE! WOULD YOU LIKE TO UPGRADE NOW?"
Adobe produces to excellent products (I'm a big fan of Lightroom), but they could use a lesson in manners.
There is going to be a steady stream of flaws in the HTML5 rendering engine that will no doubt get built into systemd. It will get pwnd by someone using some specific background colour in their CSS, but will be closed as won't fix because users shouldn't use such a stupid colour anyway.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
I run Firefox without Flash installed. Never had any problems. The 17% of the web must be shitty games, educational bullshit and other toss only 12yos want to look at. My kids say they have to have it installed then complain their machines run like crap. I take it off reboot and show them it's Flash - you makes your choices. Installing Flash is one I would avoid.
you have a choice, I don't. My kids do another school curriculum, after school, and 3/4 of the interactive stuff is flash-based, and they pull it from various projects. So we start off with firefox, I see the first "x" (all those blockers! ;) and we switch to... Internet Explorer (shudder). But they will move away from flash. Eventually.
Here's to hoping that they keep AIR and the standalone player around, or atleast open source the damn thing.
But the Adobe corporate leaderships are idiots. All of their big successes have basically been coincidences or at best skunk-works projects.
Flash is a damn good platform to develop stuff for. Trying to do some of the stuff you can do in Flash in HTML5 WebGL whatever, or a GUI toolkit, is just... pain and suffering in comparision.
No need for a plugin. I'm not referring to stuff that runs in a browser.
>Here's to hoping that they keep AIR and the standalone player around, or at least open source the damn thing.
They've already OS'ed what can be, the (3rd party) licensing is too complex to release all - according to a very reliable source back when Flex etc was gifted.
The AIR roadmap was published today also - that's supposedly not going anywhere - still a fairly large developer base for this, particularly on iOS ironically, but as Adobe aren't making any money from AIR (Animate is dreadful as an IDE) it's hard to see what they'll gain from investing properly in the SDK.
There's a lot of stuff that could be opensourced without any license issues - basically all of the runtime itself. There are codecs and other third-party stuff of course, but there should be enough to get a working Flash Player, just without support for some file formats and such. Maybe Stage3D would have to go as well (parts of it were developed by a third party IIRC, don't know about the license) but that's replacable.
Hell - to the best of my knowledge there isn't even a current open source version of avmplus, which is under a Mozilla license.
For protected SWF files of proprietary software which has long been abandoned, Adobe should offer a way to retrieve the contents so it can be rewritten. Using swfdec only gets you so far. Would say the same for Adobe Air files.
Otherwise it'll just be (hopefully) unplugged from the Internet.
It won't stop the script kiddies and virus/trojan peddlers from sending out "Your Flash install is out of date, please update to the latest [trojan riddled] version here." popups in dodgy adverts.
As part of it's death, Flash ought to self-destruct on any computer receiving the last update and leave behind a small piece of plug-in code that pops up "Flash is dead, this is a virus-ridden site don't go there" before automatically re-diverting to Adobe's page about Flash's retirement whenever a website with any flash content gets loaded.
They can't because there ARE things for which high-ups will reply, "But it's the ONLY way we can administer our stuff!" because people like Cisco (Identity Services Engine) don't offer alternatives on their dime (and since this is high-end enterprise stuff, they're expensive, too). You'd be cornering these firms who got the stuff long ago in good faith; they can't use Flash in an environment where they MUST use Flash.
I think Adobe has decided to kill off Flash they know they are fighting a losing battle.
Flash is and has been a buggy, security hole ridden pile of [insert word here] for many years.
"Where we’ve seen a need to push content and interactivity forward, we’ve innovated to meet those needs. Where a format didn’t exist, we invented one – such as with Flash and Shockwave,"
Sorry Adobe but I think you'll find that Macromedia may have had some involvement.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
