The inexorable slide into a world without Flash continues, with Google revealing plans to phase out support for Adobe's Flash Player in its Chrome browser for all but a handful of websites. And the company expects the changes to roll out by the fourth quarter of 2016. While it says Flash might have "historically" been a good way to present rich media online, Google is now much more partial to HTML5, thanks to faster load times and lower power use. As a result, Flash will still come bundled with Chrome, but "its presence will not be advertised by default." Where the Flash Player is the only option for viewing content on a site, users will need to actively switch it on for individual sites. Enterprise Chrome users will also have the option of switching Flash off altogether. Google will maintain support in the short-term for the top 10 domains using the player, including YouTube, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitch and Amazon. But this "whitelist" is set to be periodically reviewed, with sites removed if they no longer warrant an exception, and the exemption list will expire after a year. A spokesperson for Adobe said it was working with Google in its goal of "an industry-wide transition to Open Web standards," including the adoption of HTML5.
"At the same time, given that Flash continues to be used in areas such as education, web gaming and premium video, the responsible thing for Adobe to do is to continue to support Flash with updates and fixes, as we help the industry transition," Adobe said in an emailed statement. "Looking ahead, we encourage content creators to build with new web standards."
"This story on Adobe Flash was supposed to turn out a bit differently.
The idea was to talk with some of the biggest websites still using Adobe's browser plugin, which has fallen out of favor within tech circles for its constant security issues and thirst for system resources. Maybe they could explain why Flash is still necessary, offering a counterpoint to the resounding calls to end its existence."
"In today's open source roundup: Is it time to remove Adobe Flash from your Linux computer? Plus: Adobe recently updated Flash to version 18.0.0.209. And how to remove Flash from your Linux computer"
"Well, it's been a week since we've heard about a security vulnerability in Adobe Flash -- that's like a lifetime in terms of this program. While the application is slowly receding, it's far from dead and that means users have reason for worry."
NOTE: Adobe Flash Player 11.2 will be the last version to target Linux as a supported platform. Adobe will continue to provide security backports to Flash Player 11.2 for Linux
YouTube has decided it's had enough of Adobe's perenially-p0wned Flash and will therefore now default to delivering video with the HTML5 <video> tag.
A post by the video vault's engineering and development team says the move is now possible, and sensible, because the industry has invented useful things like adaptive bitrates, encryption, new codecs and WebRTC that make the <video> usable work in the real world.
Those additions mean HTML5 is at least as functional – or more so – than Flash, and if YouTube detects you are running Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and beta versions of Firefox, it'll now deliver video using <video> and flush Flash.
YouTube's also decided to can what it calls the “'old style' of Flash
YouTube seems not to care a jot that its actions are inimical to Adobe, saying it's just doing what all the cool kids – Netflix, Apple, Microsoft and its competitor Vimeo – have already done.
Which is not to say that Flash is dead: those who don't run the browsers above will still get YouTube delivered by whatever technology works bes tin their environment. And that will often – perhaps too often* – be Flash. ®
Bootnote * Until they get p0wned, that is: Flash is so horridly buggy that Apple has just updated its plugin-blockers to foil versions of the product prior to 16.0.0.296 and 13.0.0.264.
"GNU Gnash is the GNU Flash movie player - Flash is an animation file format pioneered by Macromedia which continues to be supported by their successor company, Adobe. Flash has been extended to include audio and video content, and programs written in ActionScript, an ECMAScript-compatible language. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9."
[installing GNU Gnash http://gnashdev.org/?q=node/11]
"GNU Gnash is the GNU Flash movie player - Flash is an animation file format pioneered by Macromedia which continues to be supported by their successor company, Adobe. Flash has been extended to include audio and video content, and programs written in ActionScript, an ECMAScript-compatible language. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports most SWF v7 features and some SWF v8 and v9."
"Congratulations, you've got the latest version.
If you find any bug or you'd like an enhancement, please report here or here. Many thanks!
Main good news
Script Surrogate replacement for googletagservices.com (thanks Guest and barbaz).
Fixed XSS false positive in the new gmx.com webmail login and in other services (e.g. mail.com) using the same back-end.
Better compatibility with script inclusion enforcers such as Require.js.
Safer toStaticHTML() implementation (thanks .mario for reporting).
Several XSS filter improvements (thanks Masato Kinugawa for reporting).
CAPS-independent, finer-tuned version of the "Allow local links" feature."
"Congratulations, you've got the latest version.
If you find any bug or you'd like an enhancement, please report here or here. Many thanks!
Main good news
Script Surrogate replacement for googletagservices.com (thanks Guest and barbaz).
Fixed XSS false positive in the new gmx.com webmail login and in other services (e.g. mail.com) using the same back-end.
Better compatibility with script inclusion enforcers such as Require.js.
Safer toStaticHTML() implementation (thanks .mario for reporting).
Several XSS filter improvements (thanks Masato Kinugawa for reporting).
CAPS-independent, finer-tuned version of the "Allow local links" feature."
"Congratulations, you've got the latest version.
If you find any bug or you'd like an enhancement, please report here or here. Many thanks!
Main good news
Script Surrogate replacement for googletagservices.com (thanks Guest and barbaz).
Fixed XSS false positive in the new gmx.com webmail login and in other services (e.g. mail.com) using the same back-end.
Better compatibility with script inclusion enforcers such as Require.js.
Safer toStaticHTML() implementation (thanks .mario for reporting).
Several XSS filter improvements (thanks Masato Kinugawa for reporting).
CAPS-independent, finer-tuned version of the "Allow local links" feature."
[... GNU Gnash is GNU's response to closed source Flash media players from Macromedia. The goal of the project is to provide a free and open source flash player for everyone to use that's more reliable than it's closed source counterpart. ...]
With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world's largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec -- VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web's dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).
This ability to offer a free format on YouTube, however, is only a tiny fraction of your real leverage. The real party starts when you begin to encourage users' browsers to support free formats. There are lots of ways to do this. Our favorite would be for YouTube to switch from Flash to free formats and HTML, offering users with obsolete browsers a plugin or a new browser (free software, of course). Apple has had the mettle to ditch Flash on the iPhone and the iPad -- albeit for suspect reasons and using abhorrent methods (DRM) -- and this has pushed web developers to make Flash-free alternatives of their pages. You could do the same with YouTube, for better reasons, and it would be a death-blow to Flash's dominance in web video.
If you care about free software and the free web (a movement and medium to which you owe your success) you must take bold action to replace Flash with free standards and free formats. Patented video codecs have already done untold harm to the web and its users, and this will continue until we stop it. Because patent-encumbered formats were costly to incorporate into browsers, a bloated, ill-suited piece of proprietary software (Flash) became the de facto standard for online video. Until we move to free formats, the threat of patent lawsuits and licensing fees hangs over every software developer, video creator, hardware maker, web site and corporation -- including you.
You can use your purchase of On2 merely as a bargaining chip to achieve your own private solution to the problem, but that's both a cop-out and a strategic mistake. Without making VP
ow, however, with Strobe, its just announced Flash framework, Adobe looks like it may be getting more open-source friendly as well.
Strobe, which will show up in the 3rd quarter of 2009, is an open framework for creating SWF (ShockWave Flash) server-side players. With Strobe, content creators and Web developers will be able to easily create sites that host their own video.
To make sure that the Flash family beats out the likes of Microsoft's Silverlight and its Linux little-brother Novell's Moonlight, Adobe is also considering open-sourcing its flagship Flash player.
As part of the Open Screen Project, Adobe has already opened up much of Flash.
To make sure that the Flash family beats out the likes of Microsoft's Silverlight and its Linux little-brother Novell's Moonlight, Adobe is also considering open-sourcing its flagship Flash player.
As pa
Flash versus Open:
Perhaps one thing we can all agree on is that the future of the web, mobile or otherwise, will be more or less open. That would be HTML, MP3, H.264, HE-AAC, and so on. These are not propriatery Adobe products, they are open standards…unlike Flash.
In confusing codecs with UI, Wilson keeps asking, "why is it tha[t] most streaming audio and video on the web comes through flash players and not html5 based players?" The answer is rather pedestrian: HTML5 is just ramping up, but Flash IDE has been around for many years. Selling Flash IDE and back-end server tools has been a commercial focus for Adobe, while Apple, for example, hasn't paid much attention to QuickTime technologies and promotion in ages. It's thus reflected in adoption patterns.
Hopefully, this summary will clear Wilson's blind spot:
Apple is betting on open technologies (as it makes money on hardware) while Adobe (which only sells software) is betting on wrapping up content in a proprietary shackle called Flash.
