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Only 4.9 percent of today's websites utilize Flash code, a number that has plummeted from a 28.5 percent market share recorded at the start of 2011.
The number, courtesy of web technology survey site W3Techs, confirms Flash's decline, and a reason why Adobe has decided to retire the technology at the end of 2020.
[...] On the client side, browser makers are expected to remove Flash support from their products altogether by the end of 2020 —Flash's end-of-life date.
2020 can't come soon enough.
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Flash Used on 5% of All Websites, Down From 28.5% Seven Years Ago
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being
that a belch is more satisfying.
-- Ingmar Bergman
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Arik on Saturday April 21 2018, @04:40AM (4 children)
That's also a horrible example, exactly because your script does nothing.
But you can add all the scripting you want and as long as the browser is sane and your html is correct, you're just wasting bandwidth.
But no one does that. They use javascript for useful things, like embedding a calculator, or for things they mistakenly think are useful (like implementing a search field in jscript, which just results in sane browsers skipping it,) or for things that no one with half a clue would think was in any way useful (like encoding the entire document in script, so that there isn't even any <body> text for the sane browser to render.
None of these things are directly malicious, but each of them creates more reasons for the PC user to abandon sane browsing and throw open the scripting door.
And once that step is taken it only takes a click on a malicious link.
The whole idea with the web, the whole genius of it, was that you didn't have to be careful what you clicked. By design, every link was safe. The worst that could happen was the goatse.cx guy. You might see something that you didn't want to see, but it could be guaranteed to be an inert document, not some sort of malware.
Now, you have to enable the malware creators favorite infrastructure just to access supposedly "public" documents.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday April 22 2018, @05:20PM (3 children)
"Using a sane web browser? Download our native application instead!"
And the native application turns out to be either A. exclusive to an operating system other than the one you regularly use (good luck compiling Swift+Cocoa source code on and for a non-Mac), or B. written in Electron, which bundles a separate tens-of-megabytes copy of Chromium with each application you install.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday April 22 2018, @05:46PM (2 children)
You have to have a clear distinction between downloading a program and simply viewing a page before it makes sense to argue about what sorts of programs one will or will not accept to download. Right now the typical web user simply downloads and runs whatever any random server it sees a reference to feels like sending it.
Right now, there isn't even any incentive for the "web developer" to even try to avoid it, because the end user doesn't see it, isn't even aware of it, and has no opportunity to reject it.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday April 22 2018, @06:12PM (1 child)
Let's say there were a Firefox extension that lets the user turn script execution on or off for a particular domain. How many layers would such an extension [mozilla.org] solve?
Or let's say there were a Firefox extension to block execution of any script without a machine-readable free software license. How many layers would such an extension [gnu.org] solve?
(Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday April 22 2018, @06:29PM
With wide adoption, it would be a big help, not a solution necessarily, but a big move in the right direction at the web layer. Because web devs would be forced to again think about scripting rather than simply piling it on by default whether it serves any purpose or not.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?