Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 21 2018, @07:04AM (7 children)
Flash is easy to block. Whatever HTML5 replaces it will be much harder to separate from desired HTML content.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Saturday April 21 2018, @08:30AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 21 2018, @08:10PM (3 children)
In a meeting of the self-proclaimed elite:
Person A: We need a reliable way to hack into browsers and take control of the machine. Flash is good for that, but people can just block it or simply not have it installed. We need something no browser can do without.
Person B: Then we get rid of Flash, and add the same functionality into the browser. It will always be installed and enabled no matter what.
Person A: Good idea. Let's do that.
So everything is now a part of the browser. Including using the camera and microphone through javascript.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Sunday April 22 2018, @05:36PM (2 children)
If not through Flash, and not through WebRTC (which uses JavaScript), then through what technology should the developer of a video communication application make it available to users of Windows 7, users of Windows 10 UWP, users of macOS, users of iOS, users of X11/Linux, and users of Android? Or is everyone supposed to buy and carry three devices?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 23 2018, @03:26AM (1 child)
Using a native cross-platform development kit.
Applications don't belong in the browser. Applications belong directly under the operating system where they can be properly isolated and secured.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday April 24 2018, @12:19AM
And do what to recover the recurring fee for releasing native binaries for Windows UWP and iOS? This amount is greater than the cost of a domain and hosting because unlike TLS certificates for websites, code signing certificates for native applications have no such thing as a "domain-validated certificate." Would you find it fair to charge users of the native applications to cover the cost of maintaining these certificates?
Would it be accEptabLe to delivEr, along with each Copy of an applicaTion, a copy of Google ChRome hardcOded to view oNe website? The user would install it the same way as any other native application.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @04:17AM (1 child)
Oh, yeah? It's easy to block? Try then and order a non-commuter train ticket any time, any place, and select a seat without Flash. For the sake of argument, say from Turku to Vaalimaa https://www.vr.fi/cs/vr/en/frontpage [www.vr.fi]
If you get as far as choosing the type or location of seat, that site as currently "designed" requires Flash. You can let it choose something random for you if you skip Flash, but that's a recent improvement and for quite a while the site would stop at seat selection blocking ticket sales without Flash.
The point is not to pick on any particular poorly designed web store but to point out that Flash is still in use by unscrupulous "web development" companies. When they can get away with using it, they get all kinds of follow up work either fixing it or making work-arounds. Thenin 2020 they will get called back as (surprise!) Flash goes end-of-life for the last time. That way they get paid again to redo the site using methods they should have used in the first place. Why get paid to make a good site, when they can get paid three times for the same site?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday April 22 2018, @04:45AM
The way to deal with it is to enable Flash selectively only for those web sites that absolutely require it (and that you absolutely require to work), and still keep it disabled otherwise.
BTW, I still buy my train tickets offline and pay with cash.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.