LWN: Comments on "No more Flash support in Firefox"

No more Flash support in Firefox

dfsmith — Tue, 01 Dec 2020 01:42:03 +0000

I disabled Flash years ago. Then I discovered that the kids need it for their school-at-home classes. Sigh.

No more Flash support in Firefox

flussence — Fri, 27 Nov 2020 14:27:36 +0000

Adobe won't open source it for the same reason Opera won't open source their sunken flagship. It's in use across tens of millions of embedded devices that aren't going to get updates, and the code is probably a total embarrassment security-wise from all the years of living in a cave - just look at how the flash plugin's still getting a constant trickle of patches right up to its EOL.

3rd party flash players

HelloWorld — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 00:10:04 +0000

There have been several attempts at reimplementing Flash. Gnash is one, but there were also swfdec, lightspark and shumway. As far as I'm aware, all of these had major gaps in their flash compatibility. Let's see how ruffle does.

No more Flash support in Firefox

smurf — Tue, 24 Nov 2020 18:38:29 +0000

I have no idea how complete the Internet Archive's Flash emulator is, but it exists.

https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_flash

No more Flash support in Firefox

nix — Sun, 22 Nov 2020 12:10:56 +0000

It's nice to see archive.org is archiving old cognitive weapons in time for the intellecsurrection.

No more Flash support in Firefox

ceplm — Sun, 22 Nov 2020 10:19:27 +0000

Don’t worry archive.org is on the case! See https://archive.org/details/flash_badger

No more Flash support in Firefox

alex19EP — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 17:54:26 +0000

uh huh. bumped into this in one of the stores. worse is that I have not had time to tell the company about it. and now i have the same problem but in two stores.

No more Flash support in Firefox

ras — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 07:19:06 +0000

Oh, if only that was the worst of it. Some Hikvision cameras eg, the DS2CD2142FW which is still sold today, reply on installing an ActiveX component that doesn't even work in IE10. The hardware is nice, the camera does the job well enough to be used in banks, but sheesh.

No more Flash support in Firefox

ewen — Sat, 21 Nov 2020 06:53:40 +0000

In modern versions there’s a third VMware UI that is actually HTML5, and seems to work okay in a modern Firefox which has never had Flash installed for instance.

The challenge is that historically VMware has supported different sets of functionality in each of their clients (Windows thick client, Flash, HTML5). So sometimes you need to use more than one of them. Presumably they’ll finish migrating from the Flash client before it can’t be run at all on an Enterprise Desktop. But the HTML5 web client works fine for almost all day to day tasks already.

Ewen

No more Flash support in Firefox

cpitrat — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 12:35:43 +0000

15 years ago I remember I was using a GNU alternative to the flash plugin. It wasn't working on some game but was supporting most of the stuff I was encountering at the time. A search on the web gives me Gnash so I think that was it.

The decent thing for Adobe to do would be to open source their code and let open source projects like Gnash benefit from it (although I'm not sure whether there are still some will to develop it ...)

No more Flash support in Firefox

pabs — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 03:42:13 +0000

The Internet Archive will be preserving a lot of Flash stuff, using WebAssembly:

https://blog.archive.org/2020/11/19/flash-animations-live...

No more Flash support in Firefox

scientes — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 18:24:37 +0000

The way that it implements flash is already so slow as to be unusable for flash games (on Linux x86_64 at least), so if I want to play flash games I load up pale moon (Firefox fork), which still supports the NPAPI plugin interface to flash.

No more Flash support in Firefox

NYKevin — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 17:13:23 +0000

There are at least two standards-compliant options (which are supported by most modern browsers, see inline links):

* SVG/SMIL (https://caniuse.com/svg-smil)
* CSS (https://caniuse.com/css-animation)

In 2015, Chrome announced they were going to deprecate SMIL, but subsequently changed their minds, and it still works today.

No more Flash support in Firefox

keis — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 16:04:28 +0000

Saw the ruffle.rs project linked earlier today that is implementing a flashplayer in rust. The github page (https://github.com/ruffle-rs/ruffle) lists newgrounds as sponsor and I can imagine them being keen on keeping their library of thousands of flash games and other important cultural artefacts like the strongbad emails alive.

No more Flash support in Firefox

ehiggs — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 11:20:08 +0000

Ikea's PAX wardrobe planner still uses Flash:

https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/planner/pax-planner/

It's really surprising since so much of their software and hardware is quite good[1,2]

[1] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/47803.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRe9w5PKmsE

No more Flash support in Firefox

alecs1 — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 11:15:18 +0000

Do we have anything better (or maybe comparable) for animating vectors? I remember some 5+ years ago that doing something with Flash was a breeze, while anything else seemed to require enough learning to make me not even want to start.

I think it's a shame we're not keeping the nice parts (transitions, animations and other visual stuff), and instead we're throwing it away entirely because it was doing too much (DRM, poor video playing, camera access etc.)

No more Flash support in Firefox

josh — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 08:36:04 +0000

People have talked for years about supporting Flash via a Flash player written in WebAssembly, with the main blocker being that it's incredibly challenging to reimplement a Flash player with 100% compatibility with old content, and for archival purposes you want all that compatibility.

It may turn out to be easier to run an emulator in WebAssembly capable of running the original Flash player binary and provide it with interfaces sufficient to think it's running in a browser. Or, potentially, port an old browser to WebAssembly, which avoids having to reimplement the interaction between Flash and JavaScript (which some old content relies on). Both of those might be substantially easier than reimplementing the Flash player itself.

No more Flash support in Firefox

roc — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 07:50:53 +0000

Also the DRM blob is only needed for ... DRM. Most applications never touch it and work fine if you disable DRM completely.

No more Flash support in Firefox

magfr — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 05:51:38 +0000

I fear that it might be the other way around.

No more Flash support in Firefox

ncm — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 04:38:58 +0000

In other news, Flash is still supported in Firefox. Who knew?

No more Flash support in Firefox

xanni — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 04:13:53 +0000

This is of course quite a significant problem for historians and archivists. I believe their plan is to retain an old Flash-capable browser along with the Flash artefacts, and potentially in the future also an old OS image capable of running the old browser...

No more Flash support in Firefox

felixfix — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 02:40:14 +0000

I had to use a vendor's portal a few years ago and was dumbfounded to find it was flash. Supposedly they are working on an HTML5 replacement, but I haven't checked in the last year. It seriously caught me off guard -- I spent at least a minute or two trying to figure out what I had done wrong. When I finally got woke and realized it truly was a flash web site, and installed flash to use it, all those bad memories came flooding back -- no bookmarks, sucky scroll bars, terrible fonts, shaky cursor, so many stupid little upsets and failures. I could not remember the last time I had used a flash web site, what it had been, anything, but I knew I had from all the bad memories.

No more Flash support in Firefox

roc — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 01:31:46 +0000

The DRM blob is *far* less complex. Also, the browser puts the DRM blob in a very tight sandbox, at least in Firefox: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Sandbox/Architecture#GM...

No more Flash support in Firefox

pabs — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:48:22 +0000

The Flash blob was just replaced with a DRM blob, admittedly it is probably less complex though.

No more Flash support in Firefox

pabs — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:47:03 +0000

Perhaps its a test related technical debt. Either you reject putting in an inordinate amount of effort into taking on and perpetuating technical debt, or you are not fit for that job :)

No more Flash support in Firefox

flussence — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 00:31:02 +0000

Yes to all that - the bulk of Flash content wasn't replaced by HTML5. It was replaced by youtube-dl and uBlock Origin.

Losing the remainder though is, for a lot of people, going to be like finding out old backup tapes have become unreadable.

No more Flash support in Firefox

bferrell — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 23:35:40 +0000

"Die flash die!"...

And take with it you VMware web UI?

I recently was startled to find out it was required.

Oops!

No more Flash support in Firefox

atai — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 23:33:12 +0000

all these investments in Flash web games...

No more Flash support in Firefox

teknohog — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 23:26:11 +0000

For animating vector graphics (games etc.), Flash was interesting. But a lot of the use of Flash was simply showing video files. I remember a time when we would send links of funny videos to each other; these pointed straight to .avi files and they could be passed to fast native players for nice fullscreen viewing.

Then came Youtube and I wondered why anyone would want to watch videos in a tiny box within a webpage. With the slower CPUs then, the binary Flash blob would often struggle with fullscreen resolutions anyway.

Flash is gone, but this strange idea of putting videos on web pages hasn't gone anywhere. It's a little better now with standards and fully open source software, but native players continue to be much nicer, and I still don't want to watch a video while reading an article.

No more Flash support in Firefox

shashin — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 22:44:24 +0000

It is a shame that Flash cannot be sandboxed in some way, the era of Flash on the web was incredibly open, creative and fun, and it has not been replaced by HTML5 or App Stores. I hope Lightspark succeeds in their mission, and we can preserve much of the web's history.

No more Flash support in Firefox

roc — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 22:35:34 +0000

There are also multiple high-quality implementations of those "piles of code", and there are pretty good specifications covering most of the API surface.

The complexity sucks, but the problem space is inherently complicated: features and performance that users and developers demand, security that users and developers need, and backward compatibility.

No more Flash support in Firefox

epithumia — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 21:09:57 +0000

I understand the sentiment and in general I'd agree, but in this specific case an extremely complex closed source blob is being replaced with an extremely complex open source pile of code which already exists for other reasons. I don't think we're actually losing anything of importance here.

No more Flash support in Firefox

amarao — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 21:03:25 +0000

On one hand we don't like flash. On another it's really sad to see where we are moving. Every next iteration is bumping complexity even higher, every next version is pushing more policy onto users, with less and less control over processes in OS called 'browser' due to some historical reasons.

No more Flash support in Firefox

amarao — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 20:58:52 +0000

It's not a cognitive test, it's a cleverness test. Either you can run flash in 2020, or you are not fit for that job. /joke.

No more Flash support in Firefox

gspr — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 20:08:22 +0000

I was interviewing for jobs last year. Many of them required cognitive tests. One required one available through Flash only. In 2019. The person responsible for interviewing me apologized profusely when I said I'd have no way to take the test. What the hell were they thinking? How many candidates did they lose this way? And more importantly, what impression did they leave with the remaining candidates?

No more Flash support in Firefox

alspnost — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 19:20:55 +0000

I will have to have more stern words with the provider of our security camera software, used on our remote sites (and unfortunately specified by the contractor, not us). On accessing their web platform the other week, I was dismayed to see lots of blank boxes saying "Flash player not detected"! I cannot believe that, in 2020, a company is still shipping its flagship product and basing it on a long-deprecated technology from the 90s.

Die, Flash, and die forever. Not a moment too soon!

No more Flash support in Firefox

smammy — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 16:33:17 +0000

Perhaps not coincidentally, A short history of Flash & the forgotten Flash Website movement (when websites were “the new emerging artform”) was recently published by game designer Nathalie Lawhead. At least one person will be missing Flash.