The end of Flash
Given this progress, and in collaboration with several of our technology partners – including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Mozilla – Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats."
Posted Jul 25, 2017 18:29 UTC (Tue)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link] (19 responses)
I still remember this being one of the most noticeable issues, when I first switched to Linux and stuck entirely with FOSS from Debian main.
That got *much* easier when scripts like youtube-dl (and its various predecessors) came around, and still easier when major sites started switching to HTML.
These days, sites actually using Flash without any HTML alternative have become vanishingly rare, and simply choosing to ignore them and move on doesn't cause any significant problems for me.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 9:23 UTC (Wed)
by dsommers (subscriber, #55274)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2017 1:30 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
No matter what you do that would be the case: some people just somehow believe that if you repeatedly ignore warnings then "problem" would just quietly go away. It does not. There would be outcry and lots of heat... for a couple of months. After that - solutions would be found and Flash would finally go away.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 13:55 UTC (Wed)
by ledow (guest, #11753)
[Link] (16 responses)
Because what's to say that the next big thing doesn't just do the same?
Instead of Flash, we now have to deal with HTML approval of DRM, instead. I'm not sure that's a step-up. At least Flash was a virtual-machine that we could have implemented given enough time and effort. DRM just stops us dead in the water.
Hell, nobody ever managed to make Yahoo / AOL / MSN Messenger video work right on any reimplementation, even with decades of effort, for the entire visible lifetime of those protocols.
It's worrying to me that we can't even play catch up any more, to be honest. And we don't seem to have much in the way of user-visible innovation, either. The new window manager projects are all dead or dying, we have Linux consoles now (SteamBox), but we appear to be playing catchup in that regard too. Systemd et al changed everything on the backend but at the end of the day, the average Linux desktop is basically unchanged in the way it's used by a non-administrative user.
We really lack any kind of unique selling point (not that I think anyone should be selling Linux). Imagine if VR or similar worked so-much-better on Linux and was plug-and-play and slightly faster. Things like SteamBox and the big projects would snap it up. But we don't seem to have anything like that.
There was a time where playing catch-up was secondary and our networking was superior, our software and deployment processes were superior, etc. but I don't think we have something like that. About the only thing that really pops into my head is smartphone usage, but that's really the Android eco-system, not Linux directly. There's nothing "Linux" that makes Android possible, or makes it impossible to port to anything else in theory.
Even virtualisation, we appear to be playing second-fiddle to HyperV and VMWare, and that's something quite techy and core to the OS, and somewhere where we were ahead of the game in terms of concepts coming from virtualised multi-user operating systems of old at one point.
I fear that we'll always be playing catch-up, never leading again, and that even playing catch-up with a mainstream tech like Flash is beyond us as a community.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 14:15 UTC (Wed)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (15 responses)
You forget that flash-delivered video and audio was typically DRM encumbered. So given the choice between a proprietary platform/VM, language, and runtime with DRM, and an open (and well-specified and documented, with multiple independent implementations) platform/VM, language, and runtime with DRM, I'll pick the latter, every single time.
> Hell, nobody ever managed to make Yahoo / AOL / MSN Messenger video work right on any reimplementation, even with decades of effort, for the entire visible lifetime of those protocols.
That's not true, or fair. The problem was that the goalposts kept being moved -- often for the sole purpose to make interoperability more difficult (I'm looking at you, AOL). After all, 3rd party clients bypassed the forced advertising of the official clients.
> It's worrying to me that we can't even play catch up any more, to be honest.
"Catching up" is a losing proposition, because "they" are far better funded than "we" will ever be. Everyone wants their walled garden/silo so they can sell the eyeballs to advertisers. Which leads me to..
One has to stop thinking about software in isolation -- in the modern model, it's all about the _service_. Providing services costs time and resources on an ongoing basis, and that funding has to come from somewhere no matter if the code is "open source" or not. Today, the primary source of that funding comes from selling data on users to advertisers.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 14:18 UTC (Wed)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link] (14 responses)
I would rather have replaced every other aspect of Flash, left DRM part of a non-standard second-class extension, and let it die with Flash as the proponents of DRM desperately tried to find a way to keep it alive and failed.
Making DRM part of a standard legitimizes it. DRM doesn't deserve that. Let it be non-standard, second-class, and associated with the ambient awfulness that is the plugin ecosystem.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 14:54 UTC (Wed)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (13 responses)
In other words, you're advocating indefinitely perpetuating the plugin ecosystem, with all the awfulness that entails, because you're trying to fight a non-technical problem using technical means.
DRM needs to be fought in the legal/political arena.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 17:08 UTC (Wed)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link] (10 responses)
Posted Jul 26, 2017 17:56 UTC (Wed)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (1 responses)
Ah, I see, when it comes to standards you're a prescriptivist, not a descriptivist.
Even before the W3C "standardized" DRM as part of "the web", every browser maker (other than Mozilla) already included DRM capabilities. Those features were already heavily used well before the W3C's DRM mess.
This battle was lost five years ago.
The "web" which you describe hasn't really existed for about a decade, and it's been even longer since the W3C was relevant. The browser makers (which means Microsoft, Apple, Google, with Mozilla still barely holding on) are running things now, and hardly coincidentally, the first three also control a very large swath of what said browsers connect to, as well as freely give away the middleware layers that everyone else builds on top of.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 17:59 UTC (Wed)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link]
No, not at all. I also think browser vendors should have said "no, go away" to EME, but that's a separate problem from standards.
I also believe there's value in not blessing certain things with the banner of "open web standard", especially when they're entirely *not* open. But that's separate.
> Even before the W3C "standardized" DRM as part of "the web", every browser maker (other than Mozilla) already included DRM capabilities.
I'm well aware of that history. The ideal scenario I was describing would also have required cooperation from browser vendors. This was a prisoner's dilemma, and "defect" won.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 18:47 UTC (Wed)
by excors (subscriber, #95769)
[Link] (6 responses)
It's being jettisoned now because people have spent over a decade intentionally trying to make Flash redundant by replicating its functionality into HTML5 and related standards (<canvas>, <video>, web fonts, WebSockets, WebRTC, WebGL, EME, etc), and have now succeeded.
If YouTube or Netflix or Hulu still required Flash, nobody could make a serious web browser without Flash support (regardless of how much they hated it because the browser got blamed for crashes that were actually caused by Flash, or because the ancient plugin API prevented them changing their software architecture to improve security or performance), and Adobe would keep getting enough money from sneaking McAfee onto users' computers to justify continued maintenance of Flash forever. But all those sites have moved to HTML5 video, because there are no longer any blocker issues for them (like lack of DRM) and there are other benefits to switching, and Adobe has recognised that Flash has no future because of that, hence this announcement. The ordering and causality of those events is important, and it's the only realistic way to have killed Flash.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 19:03 UTC (Wed)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Jul 26, 2017 23:40 UTC (Wed)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link] (2 responses)
I highly doubt it's the only such example of DRM-by-convenience.
Posted Jul 27, 2017 2:13 UTC (Thu)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 27, 2017 3:47 UTC (Thu)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
Posted Jul 26, 2017 23:45 UTC (Wed)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
It's simple economics -- After all, why pay a license fee to utilize a DRM solution when there's no need?
Posted Jul 29, 2017 1:45 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Is this a joke? What you said is absolutely true but it's true for browsers as well: Mosiac and Arachne, Lynx and Links, all these Eww and Vimb browsers have hever supported DRM. In fact only three browsers ever did: Chrome, MS IE, and Safari have ever supported DRM and Firefox recently joined so what's the big hoopla is all about?
Ah, right: few web browsers support DRM but these are browsers the majority of users are using... and situation with video-sites is similar: at some point Netflix supplied more than all other video-traffic in US and even now the wast majority of actual video-content is delivered via DRM-protected channels... even if most web-sites don't use DRM...
Posted Jul 30, 2017 16:47 UTC (Sun)
by HelloWorld (guest, #56129)
[Link]
Posted Jul 30, 2017 9:57 UTC (Sun)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link] (1 responses)
By standardising the DRM interface, and by separating the openn/closedness issue of the DRM from the rest of the platform, and hence allowing nice, user-friendly open platforms around the closed DRM, that disincentive to the content providers is diminished, even gone.
Once some closed DRM module is available on enough of the big proprietary platforms, that will slowly but surely mean the end of our ability to watch that content on 100% open-source platforms.
That would be a big step backward for me.
Posted Jul 30, 2017 12:51 UTC (Sun)
by pizza (subscriber, #46)
[Link]
By failing to ratify what was essentially a widely-deployed done-deal, the W3C would have demonstrated that they no longer serve any useful purpose -- namely a forum for everyone to come together and agree on the best way to accomplish things. the lion's share of this work was already done outside the auspices of the W3C, and it's hardly a stretch for ThePowersThatBe(tm) to stop funding the W3C and set up a new industry organization that provides a more neutral (yes, neutral!) forum.
The only "major" browser vendor left that still attempts to care is Mozilla, and they're barely hanging onto a double-digit market share that will only decrease further due to the other vendors' massive native platform advantage (and not being objectively better enough to entice switching)
Meanwhile, while you may have the luxury of being able to ignore patents, commercial concerns operating in patent-friendly jurisdictions (which is to say, nearly all of them) do not, especially when said patent holders have demonstrated themselves to be very litigious. The choices these concerns make revolve entirely around finances; For example if using H.264 is overall cheaper than VP9 (eg the licensing fees are less than the bandwidth savings for comparable quality) they'll use just that.
The same for DRM; if their content requires use of some sort of DRM, then no amount of arguing about platform freedom will ever change that. Consequently, the platforms that leave DRM out will find themselves at a _massive_ disadvantage in the market, rendering that platform irrelevant because the users will go to one that (from their perspective) sucks much less.
Firefox didn't take off because it was Free Software, it took off because it demonstrably sucked far, far less than MSIE for average users. The same can be said about Chrome today with it's >60% market share. Heck, according to my anectdotal web stats, I see more Linux users using Chrome (not Chromium!) today than Firefox! What was that about voting with one's feet?
Posted Jul 25, 2017 18:53 UTC (Tue)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link] (3 responses)
Why do I say this?
Because the appropriate solution isn't to simply disappear the proprietary flash plugin, but rather open it and release it as free software.
I am not saying that to encourage its continued use and am happy to see it die for new material. Rather, freeing flash is primarily necessary to help data archivists a decade or a century from now who will have no good way to understand content archived now for whatever cultural or scientific studies may wish a look at our age, of which significant content, for better or worse, is on flash and will not be migrated.
A generation of net users became caught by the "flash trap", and it will be a pity to have a black hole in the archives of our culture because of the past predaceousness and continued contempt of one company.
Posted Jul 25, 2017 20:36 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 25, 2017 21:06 UTC (Tue)
by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452)
[Link] (1 responses)
QWOP! Which probably is the most major cultural artifact made in this century!
Posted Jul 25, 2017 21:28 UTC (Tue)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link]
So does zombocom, and so do several other interesting historical Flash animations.
Posted Jul 25, 2017 20:20 UTC (Tue)
by fratti (guest, #105722)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Jul 25, 2017 20:30 UTC (Tue)
by josh (subscriber, #17465)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Jul 25, 2017 20:56 UTC (Tue)
by fratti (guest, #105722)
[Link] (8 responses)
And let's not forget WebUSB, which for some reason is a thing.
And while we're at it, WebRTC leaking IPs from behind a VPN isn't nice either.
Posted Jul 25, 2017 21:23 UTC (Tue)
by zlynx (guest, #2285)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Jul 25, 2017 21:26 UTC (Tue)
by fratti (guest, #105722)
[Link] (1 responses)
Not to forget JS could create canvas elements at will, so you really need to intercept it at some other level than the DOM, unless you want to slow down every page that ever touches the DOM in any way.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 12:00 UTC (Wed)
by oldtomas (guest, #72579)
[Link]
Yes, the components are free software (or more and more "open source", since free software, since the latter is too much about individual freedom and what corporations want is... corporate freedom), but if you manage to Rube-Goldberg all interfaces and protocols, then nobody's capable to follow along (or *has* to use your libs). Look up "decommoditizing protocols".
The next step (we're there, or nearly) will be when the web front-end and back-end (including the protocol between both) are the result of an optimizing compiler working off some high level domain-specific language. Then the protocol can shift around at will, shaking off those pesky youtube-dl'ers and ilk.
User: use the software as *we* meant you to use it. Look at it as *we* want you to see it. You are just a component of *our* system.
The Matrix was kind of right.
(No, I don't find that dystopia right. No, I haven't given up just yet.)
Posted Jul 26, 2017 11:56 UTC (Wed)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (3 responses)
It used to be the case that web pages had to ask permission to raise your electricity bill substantially. Browsers have chosen to make it the default and now I have to beg *them* permission to install addons to bring things back to a manageable level.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 16:50 UTC (Wed)
by mbunkus (subscriber, #87248)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Jul 27, 2017 6:06 UTC (Thu)
by gutschke (subscriber, #27910)
[Link]
Posted Jul 28, 2017 17:08 UTC (Fri)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link]
Posted Jul 26, 2017 1:52 UTC (Wed)
by fmarier (subscriber, #19894)
[Link]
Posted Jul 26, 2017 3:26 UTC (Wed)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link] (1 responses)
Javascript in browsers is a disaster, your typical major site these days is loading up and running two dozen scripts from 18 different IP addresses with typically only one or two of them controlled by the company you are actually visiting. And over half those scripts are profiling and tracking scripts that offer no functionality to the user. This is often the reason you have to have a separate mobile site because trying to execute that many scripts on a smartphone will destroy the battery and take 30 seconds to load. So they create a mobile site with a bit fewer graphics and fewer scripts loading up to try to speed it up.
Yay Flash going away.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 14:39 UTC (Wed)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
Posted Jul 26, 2017 11:43 UTC (Wed)
by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Jul 29, 2017 1:51 UTC (Sat)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link]
Posted Jul 26, 2017 13:19 UTC (Wed)
by felixfix (subscriber, #242)
[Link] (2 responses)
Flash! By gum, that surprised me, and brought back lots of bad memories. Scroll bars suck. Can't bookmark anything. Can't look at the source. Terrible terrible website.
I wonder what they are going to do. It was probably written years and years ago by someone who no longer works there. They will have to write the complete replacement web site from scratch. That will be interesting.
Posted Jul 26, 2017 16:47 UTC (Wed)
by marduk (subscriber, #3831)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 17, 2017 0:17 UTC (Thu)
by dirtyepic (guest, #30178)
[Link]
Also newer flash versions break the site so our IT has locked us into an older insecure version despite my protests.
Posted Jul 27, 2017 17:47 UTC (Thu)
by jensend (guest, #1385)
[Link]
It's too bad plugins weren't always click-to-play and that they didn't have a better api/abi; it's also too bad Adobe shoehorned a full "rich media platform" into Flash and people used it for all sorts of things it wasn't well suited for. It was very well suited for things like AtomFilms and Homestar Runner.
SVG/CSS animation is a wreck. SMIL support is problematic. Various JS libraries manage to work for some purposes for now but they don't serve purposes people need from a swf replacement format.
Posted Jul 27, 2017 18:33 UTC (Thu)
by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
For example, Flash uses an ingenious internal model for vector graphics. It represents the scene as a number of connected areas. This allows it to do neat tricks like smooth deformations with little CPU power needed and with great-looking results.
Most of "Flash replacements" simply represent the scene as a number of unconnected polygons and were vulnerable to numeric instabilities because of that.
It's a pity that Adobe has ruined it all later after they acquired Macromedia.
The end of Flash
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But will they manage the adaptation before Flash is finally buried?
Nope. If you'll look on crbug.com and track the number of "I need my Java back" bugs then you'll see that majority of them are in the end of 2015 - when NPAPI was completely disabled and Java become unavailable without any workarounds.
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We need a real swf replacement format
The end of Flash