LineageOS 22.1 released

Flash and ActiveX were and are well designed and of great value to a large number of users, web developers, and software vendors. Flash is no longer supported by the major browsers primarily because it was too heavyweight for a 2007 era Apple iPhone, had a series of security vulnerabilities that Internet Explorer 6 could not handle, and there are plausible if slower and less efficent alternatives in the form of SVG and Canvas. Security vulnerabilities would be easy for someone like Adobe to solve using a combination of static analysis, fuzz testing, careful review, and safe C/C++ compiler technologies if not porting to a relatively safe language like Rust.

Active X is even more useful if you carefully control which ActiveX controls can be activated on a web page, obtain them only from trusted sources, filter them by domain, and if the developers, distributors, and vendors apply the same techniques that would be necessary to make Flash or any binary browser plugin safe to use. Safe C/C++ has a lot of potential even for the Linux kernel even though it is still an active area of research insofar as C and C++ compilers are concerned.

And the best part about ActiveX or comparable binary plugin technology such as Netscape plugins is the ability to closely integrate with desktop applications such as Quickbooks from Intuit or various desktop email and calendaring programs. When Microsoft dropped support for Internet Explorer and Windows 7 it made my job much harder and required my primary client to develop a much more byzantine, slower, and more difficult to install alternative at substantial expense.

Our ActiveX control used for synchronization with Quickbooks had to be rewritten in the form of a Win32 C++ bridge program distributed and installed through a different channel and a browser extension that Google has approval authoritity over and makes a dozen different demands regarding. Mere users and system administrators are not allowed to install Chrome extensions unless they go into developer mode which is not even extension compatible with the same software released through the Chrome web store.

We also previously used Flash for a sidebar menuing system for an online web application and had to abandon that implementation and write two different alternatives in Javascript that did not work nearly as well including one from ExtJS and one coded from scratch And of course Adobe and Adobe Coldfusion do not support Flash anymore either so our use of the Flash gateway and the more efficient Flash binary message system was out as well and had to be replaced with code that used XML RPC over HTTPS in the modern Javascript style as well.

Furthermore as developers and designers of a general purpose construction management and construction accounting system we wanted to integrate with numerous software packages or interfaces that have traditionally only been available on the desktop including Quickbooks, Planswift, AutoCAD, Crystal Reports, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, and a large number of desktop only accounting or construction accounting systems. It is much harder to do that these days and somewhere along the line the Chrome people have approval authority over everything.

So we are not particularly fond of Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and Google effectively killing or refusing to support so many technologies these days including many of their own products. Microsoft for example used to recommend that everyone integrate the technology behind Internet Explorer into their applications and now they have abandoned it completely, run campaigns advising people not to use it, and no longer support it even though there are a number of companies that would like to use it indefinitely and would pay good money to do so.

So any version of Quickbooks Desktop more than four or five years old no longer runs properly on modern versions of Windows, Intuit has been trying to kill off Quickbooks Desktop over the objections of their customers for about ten years now, and have them much a much inferior version of Quickbooks Online, and pay them yearly subscription fees that are much higher than what most small businesses used to pay to purchase versions of Quickbooks which were stable and usable for years at a time.

It is also unfortunate that Postscript, PDF, and high quality print oriented rendering and display including support for page numbering, page headers, and footers, rendering html cleanly across page breaks and flowing textual content from one page to a continuation on a different page, and a number of other things that just about every business oriented web application on the planet and many others could use and benefit from is a third class citizen on the modern web at best. I am not sure why none of the major browser developers seem to think that is a problem worthy to solve although Apple seems to have made some moves in that direction. The general attitude among web developers and software as a service providers is either hold print output in contempt or require PDF generation to get anything usable to print cleanly.

In that regard and a number of others the modern web is a much more hostile environment for developing business and other applications than it used to be and there are so many things that would make it much better that have been abandoned and would be relatively easy to fix, or added as commonly supported extensions to html rendering engines and CSS. There is a long list and among them I wonder why every browser on the planet does not support Display Postscript, why Microsoft gave up so quickly on Silverlight and dot NET on the web, and why Oracle has basically abandoned support Java applets.