
Movement to get rid of Adobe Flash started 3 years ago. Flash is still alive - laex
http://occupyflash.org/
======
tyho
I never install flash on any computer I own. I don't run any closed source
software outside of a VM.

It is very possible to get by without flash. In the rare cases where flash is
essential to view a video, for example the SpaceX livestream a short while
ago, I stick the url into `youtube-dl` and I have yet to experience a
situation where it is not supported. In the case of the livestream, You can
do:

    
    
        $ youtube-dl -o- $URL | mplayer -
    

To stream it yourself. This is how I watch iPlayer.

As a side note, I found this humorous:

> It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral
> corporate control of web technology.

Google is your ISP (Fiber), Google makes your hardware (Pixel & Nexus), Google
maintains your OS (ChromeOS & Android), Google made your browser (Chrome),
Google strong arms web standards (http2), Google Decides what you see
(Search), and places ads on it.

To confine `unilateral corporate control of web technology` to the past is
laughable.

~~~
chriswarbo
youtube-dl is great. It has a bunch of functionality, like "-x" to extract
audio via ffmpeg (very useful for saving space).

I also like the "whitey" CLI interface to youtube, which uses youtube-dl to
get the video URL and can either download it, or feed it straight into
mplayer.

For iplayer, there's also get-iplayer (
[http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html](http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html)
), which is pretty fantastic; except that sometimes they enable some new
feature by default, which breaks the old behaviour (eg. automatically
transcoding everything to the same format, which is IMHO a waste of time and
quality).

Unfortunately the BBC have recently removed the programme feed that get-
iplayer uses, so it's no longer possible to list available programmes as text
(useful, eg., for grep). Instead you have to actually visit the iPlayer Web
site and navigate around to find each programme, which is a pain.

If the worst comes to the worst, it's usually possible to find the URL of a
Flash video using a Web inspector tool like Firebug, and perhaps a bit of URL-
unescaping. Protip: lots of Web sites don't care about user agents other than
(the most popular) Web browsers, so set the user agent of your download tool
(wget, cURL, etc.) to match some version of Firefox, to avoid inconsistent
behaviour.

~~~
tyho
Many sites do not have a simple url you can feed into mplayer, iPlayer being a
prominet example that uses some proprietary RTMP standard or something.

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jacquesm
Of course it is. The thing those 'movements' don't seem to understand is that
budgets are limited and that people (and companies) tend to build websites the
way they used to make paintings: once. Then maybe, over time they'll update
the content but flash is usually not seen as part of that content but as the
infrastructure, or 'deliverable' at the time they commissioned the website. So
if it worked at delivery time it is presumed to work for eternity.

And so all those flash bits are here to stay, possibly _forever_. That's why
there were a lot of people - me included - that were arguing against things
like flash, silverlight, binary components and other web-page plug ins because
they will sooner or later end up being unsupported. Besides causing gigantic
accessibility issues for the handicapped.

So, now we have a mess, and that mess is here to stay. That won't stop large
company 'x' from doing this all over again in a few years just because they
can but at least there may be a few more voices trying to stop the plug-in
madness before it gets out of control.

If it isn't in the html spec: don't use it. Welcome to a web full of non-
rendering holes that may or may not be functionality and an archive full of
websites that nobody will be able to see without powering up a VM circa 2004.

~~~
chriswarbo
What you say is correct, but a bit over-the-top. Compared to broken
hyperlinks, concerns over missing Flash content is pretty small. It's at least
conceivable to automatically load some JS-powered Flash implementation, but if
a link's target isn't available in an archive, there's no way to get it back.

~~~
jacquesm
Plenty of sites that were archived have their whole UI in flash, so for those
sites the pages are pretty much empty pages without flash.

I'm not aware of any JS-powered flash implementation or how that would solve
anything since presumably that would come with all of the drawbacks that the
non-JS powered flash implementations of today have (and that we are so keen on
getting rid of).

~~~
fmorel
Mozilla is working on it:
[http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/](http://mozilla.github.io/shumway/)

I think it's for mobile first where Flash is no longer available.

------
hunt
I find it strange Flash is still around, given that iOS and Android don't
support Flash anymore and that YouTube has made a lot of video content
available as HTML5. I thought that other sites would have followed suit. Is
there evidence of a mass exodus from Flash?

~~~
jinushaun
There is way more to Flash than video. You see a lot of Flash silently running
invisible in the background to enable modern web app features that aren't yet
possible or easily achieved with standard HTML and JS. For example, Flash was
used for web sockets before web sockets was a thing. Flash was also used to
facilitate uploads.

~~~
chriswarbo
This is definitely true, given how often I've had my keyboard become
unresponsive, only to find out that some little Flash widget had the focus and
completely bypassed the browser, requiring me to use the pointer to click on
some (hopefully) empty area of the page.

I will say that Flash isn't usually _required_ for most of these uses; just
like Javascript it should degrade gracefully to a fallback (eg. a POST form
for uploads). Except for web sockets, if they're powering something
fundamental (which is the same for JS).

The only time I've added a Flash widget to a page without a fallback has been
"copy to clipboard" buttons, which didn't have a decent alternative. In those
cases the button just doesn't show at all.

------
ars
Flash is not going away. There is too much content using it, for example there
are tons of flash games. And not just little toys, there are some very good
games. Also MMO's use it extensively.

Some games are transitioning to unity player - you can't really call that much
better though.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Re: unity, maybe a little, since that also implies the game can relatively
easily be ported to native platforms (iirc)

~~~
ars
You are thinking of the unity player rather than the web player which has not
been ported to Linux.

However I believe the games themselves are cross platform so there is hope.

There is an easy to install wine based port of the web player for Linux.

------
themartorana
The movement to get rid of IE 6 took like, 12 years and it's still around in
small numbers.

------
alkonaut
Has there been any serious attempts at creating a flash or a SilverLight
killer? Let's face it: flash and SL exist almost exclusively because of video
(yes I know there are other uses but most of them like sockets etc can be done
in other ways today, I'm talking about why it's still deployed for new sites).

Every other kind of snazzy desktop-like animated experience can be created in
js, and if you dread using js you can write them in another language and
compile to js. The js runtimes are fast enough these days.

But: video. Especially _live_ broadcast video. What is the best attempt a
replacing flash/SL there? The rights for sports events are worth billions, and
a single game can sell for $20-50, so an open unencrypted video service just
will.not.happen. The rights holders would rather retreat to cable. Whatever
the solution is will have to have the same features in terms of DRM and other
protection that flash has.

EDIT: just realized the solution is quite simple: just get off the web and let
those who want to watch e.g NHL Game Center use a special application, not a
web browser.

~~~
jacquesm
I earned my bread and butter for well over 15 years with just that: plug-in
free video. It's always been a hack and audio is harder than video (though you
can hack your way around that as well). So yes, those attempts have been made
and it was pretty successful. But, ironically, mass adoption of flash killed
it and now that flash is being killed there is nothing left to really replace
it (except maybe to revive jpeg-push for live streams but that's also not
really an option...). This Nov. 2013 post from wowza (one of the better
streaming platforms available today) is a good read:
[http://www.wowza.com/blog/a-note-on-html5](http://www.wowza.com/blog/a-note-
on-html5)

~~~
alkonaut
DRM extensions for html5-video could help, but at this point I'm actually
inclined to say keep html (and the web) clean from that and just use custom
applications for DRM video.

------
iqonik
The only thing I use Flash for is to allow a user to easily get something to
their clipboard. ([http://zeroclipboard.org/](http://zeroclipboard.org/)) -
until that is possible, afraid I will still be using it.

------
SG-
This new MacBook I got last month didn't come with Flash and I decided to not
install it. I also decided to switch to Safari from Chrome.

I was surprised how many sites and embedded video now offers HTML5, obviously
Youtube and Vimeo have been working for years, but just video on news sites
that use their own video solution work.

The biggest surprise was visiting twitch.tv and seeing the live video stream
work in HTML5 (only in Safari, not Chrome).

~~~
kevincennis
Safari can stream live video because it supports HLS (HTTP Live Streaming),
which is Apple's own thing.

Sadly, there's still no good way to stream live video across multiple browsers
without Flash. Eventually, this will be possible via the Media Source
Extensions API, but even then, you'll still probably have the issue of
different browsers supporting different containers and codecs - which will
lead to people doing crazy things like converting MPEG2-TS to MP4 in
JavaScript web workers.

I had to keep a pretty close eye on all of this stuff when I worked at Aereo,
and it always bummed me out to think about the fact that it's still not really
possible to stream live video in a web browser without plugins.

------
dennisbest
I generally don't install Flash on my machines but recently I installed it
because a major financial site that my employer uses (I know, WTF!?, right?)
required it. I set the plugin to ask for permission every time and, holy cow,
nearly every site, particularly news sites, requested it. It's a key part of
the Web's advertising infrastructure.

------
bshimmin
I have a potential client project coming up where they will need to access a
user's webcam and record video and audio from it. They'll want this to work in
modern desktop browsers (let's say latest Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE10+). At
this point in time I don't believe it's possible to do this with HTML5
technologies alone.

------
laex
The website for Occupy Flash has outbound link to
[http://ie6funeral.com/](http://ie6funeral.com/). Apparently, some Japanese
funeral company has bought the domain. I find that quite funny.

------
_asciiker_
I don't understand the essence of this movement, by all standards it is the
mobile lobby who should be to blame.

Killing Flash is like killing the Concorde Airplane, it just means it is too
advanced for its time.

Everyone who knows anything about Flash and HTML5 knows that in terms of CPU
resources HTML5 is still far far far FAR behind on what the Flash plugin can
do... yes, even now.

HTML5:
[http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/html/](http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/html/)

Flash:
[http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/](http://themaninblue.com/experiment/AnimationBenchmark/flash/)

~~~
bshimmin
I don't think those benchmark links are really furthering your argument; in
both Chrome and Safari on my Mac I get roughly twice the FPS with the HTML5
version...

------
rnhmjoj
The only thing I regret is not be able to play nitrome games anymore.

------
billconan
a while ago, I wanted to create a real-time broadcasting website. I explored
all sorts of technologies, like webrtc, mediasource ... none seems to be
suitable for what I wanted. then, I asked how twitch does it? it's flash.

what html5 can do is what flash can do long time ago. the motivation for
replacing flash must not be technical but perhaps political.

why didn't adobe release flash as opensource to push it as a standard.

------
th3iedkid
"Help*less technically-oriented people understand and uninstall Flash Player"

Funny , remove the space and it looks a lot more different !

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gohwell
I wish i could, my jobs require's it to VPN

~~~
mrweasel
WHY! I mean... why?

Why would you need Flash to use a VPN? Is it some weird web-login? How do you
write a VPN client in Flash? Who thought that requiring Flash for a VPN would
be a good idea?

Your comment raises so many questions.

~~~
gohwell
its only used as part of the authentication process. Terrible design I agree

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upofadown
Yeah, but at least flash is way less alive than it was three years ago. I
rarely encounter the need for flash these days.

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dimsuz
What I find funny is that this website uses flash itself.

~~~
jbrackett
I don't think it does. It uses swfobject2 [1], a js project, to detect if
flash is installed and give you a frowny face if it is.

[1]
[https://code.google.com/p/swfobject/](https://code.google.com/p/swfobject/)

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MichaelCrawford
My favorite Quicktime of Ill Repute website, despite promising that it serves
up naught but ill-reputed Quicktime, now tells me that I don't have Flash
installed.

------
cm2187
Flash AND java (and one can argue javascript too...)

~~~
eng_monkey
You mean Java Applets, don't you?

~~~
tribaal
Yes, I'm pretty sure that's what he meant.

Most people who are not in "enterprise" IT (that includes many web developers)
only think of applets when they hear Java.

Sad, but true.

