Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
Bug Security Software Technology

Six Months Without Adobe Flash, and I Feel Fine 393

Reader hessian six months ago de-installed the Adobe Flash player on all of his browsers, probably a prudent move in light of various recent vulnerabilities. "This provoked some shock and incredulity from others. After all, Flash has been an essential content interpreter for over a decade. It filled the gap between an underdeveloped JavaScript and the need for media content like animation, video and so on." But it turns out that life sans Flash can still be worth living. Are there things you rely on that make Flash hard to give up?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Six Months Without Adobe Flash, and I Feel Fine

Comments Filter:
  • zero punctuation (Score:3, Informative)

    by AvitarX ( 172628 ) <me&brandywinehundred,org> on Sunday February 10, 2013 @12:37PM (#42850499) Journal

    Cannot live without

  • by burni2 ( 1643061 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @12:39PM (#42850525)

    .. fine, because now I use SumatraPDF, small fast no nagware no nagdates .. I feel great!

  • Re:HTML5 on YouTube? (Score:4, Informative)

    by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @12:40PM (#42850533)

    Yes, this is the case. It took me a while to realize that Apple no longer ships Flash with Macs, and so I was using YouTube sans Flash for about a month. It works on some videos, but not on others.

  • Re:Flashblock (Score:5, Informative)

    by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @12:42PM (#42850553) Journal

    Just run the Flash you trust and need for normal functionality. Done and done.

    The mere presence of Flash on the system allows it to be craftily run in more areas than you might expect(as with the 'flash exploit embedded in an Office document' story seen here just recently, along with PDFs in Acrobat and a bunch of other abominations). Even if you can find the correct toggles to shut that off, Flash's updater can't really be trusted not to merrily reinstall things whenever the next update comes out; but running a version of Flash that isn't the newest is just asking for trouble...

    If it were only confined to a browser(and a browser that didn't trust it in the slightest), it wouldn't be so bad.

  • Hulu, etc. (Score:5, Informative)

    by IANAAC ( 692242 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @12:45PM (#42850579)
    Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your view of cable/sat companies), I rely on Hulu for most of my entertainment, since I don't have cable - and actually can't get, due to remoteness. No way around the site without flash.

    But also: MSNBC (TRMS, occasionally Morning Joe). Pretty much any decent video site still uses flash.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @12:47PM (#42850589)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Streetview (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel ( 80510 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @12:54PM (#42850645)

    Streetview on Google Maps needs flash. I would miss that quite a bit.

  • by Ceriel Nosforit ( 682174 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @01:00PM (#42850695)

    I noticed that Gnash wasn't cutting it though for the few things I was trying to use it for (basically Youtube and the occasional stupid game).

    That WAS ages ago... as you said. I see Gnash is a little CPU-hungry, but playback has been smooth for me. I don't miss Adobe Flash one bit.

    There's experimental GPU acceleration in the works too.

    youtube-dl [github.com]

    is nice too, if you don't mind the lack of streaming. I'm not actually sure why playback doesn't work on partially downloaded files.

  • Re:HTML5 on YouTube? (Score:3, Informative)

    by macs4all ( 973270 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @01:05PM (#42850737)

    Yes, this is the case. It took me a while to realize that Apple no longer ships Flash with Macs, and so I was using YouTube sans Flash for about a month. It works on some videos, but not on others.

    Yeah, in my experience, the ratio of "works" to "doesn't work" is about 10,000:1. I figure that Google probably doesn't constantly churn through their entire collection from A-Z, searching for, and converting, all of their old videos to HTML 5; but has some algorithm for deciding what priority to put on converting old videos (new ones are ALWAYS available in HTML 5), and so that accounts for the occasional "doesn't work". Nothing else explains inconsistency, considering that ALL they deliver are videos.

  • Re:Hulu, etc. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jader3rd ( 2222716 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @01:05PM (#42850741)

    But also: MSNBC

    For MSNBC change your user agent string to the IPad's user agent string and they'll server up Flash free video.

  • Re:Streetview (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10, 2013 @01:13PM (#42850795)

    If you enable WebGL on Google Maps, I'm almost certain that the streetview is WebGL too, not flash.

  • Re:HTML5 on YouTube? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 10, 2013 @01:13PM (#42850797)

    All videos, however, can be downloaded from youtube as a .mp4, a .flv, whatever, then played in a normal movie player anyway. I haven't used flash in three years, and I've never run across anything on youtube I couldn't watch, unless it was "blocked in my region due to copyright concerns" or something. For a while at the beginning the tools were subpar, and you had to keep an array of them around, but these days something like Minitube will just work and leave your CPU unpegged.

  • Re:Flashblock (Score:5, Informative)

    by tibit ( 1762298 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @01:16PM (#42850827)

    On Windows, it's quite easy, actually. The non-IE browser plugin and the ActiveX controls are separate installs. Without the latter, you don't have issues outside the browser. The browser plugin flash is invisible to anything but the browsers. I don't recall if recent IE uses the browser plugin or ActiveX variant, I recall that older ones needed the ActiveX version.

  • Re:HTML5 on YouTube? (Score:5, Informative)

    by tepples ( 727027 ) <tepples AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday February 10, 2013 @02:08PM (#42851203) Homepage Journal

    Google is still firmly on WebM, while Opera and Firefox is all over Theora/Vorbis and Ogg

    Opera and Firefox support WebM (VP8+Vorbis in a subset of the Matroska container).

    IE 9+ still natively supports MP4 only in H.264, I think. And Safari does QuickTime too.

    IE 9 supports WebM through a plug-in [webmproject.org].

    and still provide a Flash fallback for older/incompatible browsers

    For IE 8 users, what benefit is there to using the Adobe Flash Player plug-in over the Google Chrome Frame plug-in?

  • Re:Kids (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheMMaster ( 527904 ) <hpNO@SPAMtmm.cx> on Sunday February 10, 2013 @02:30PM (#42851367)

    They already have, you can enable an experimental webgl version of streetview that seems to work just fine for me.

    I've been flash-less for the better part of 5 years now :) Never regret!

  • Re:Kids (Score:5, Informative)

    by robot5x ( 1035276 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @03:13PM (#42851699)
    1. Social security? If you live in a country where your retirement is entirely paid for by government, please let me know where it is - I'd like to move there.

    2. Believe it or not, 'social security' is not a magical rainbow fairy whirlpool where money just appears. It needs ... money. Money which is usually generated through general taxation or some kind of contribution scheme. Where does this money come from? People who work.

    Even in your utopia, the ability of your government to support you and your 'social security' in retirement is directly correlated with the number of people working in the economy and paying taxes. When you're old, those people will be - guess what? - other people's children.

    Please make sure you thank them for indulging in their emotional/psychological need so you can retire in comfort.

  • In other places (Score:5, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Sunday February 10, 2013 @03:14PM (#42851713)

    An Amazon Instant Video...flash only currently.

    You can use that on AppleTV, the PS3 and all iOS devices - all without flash.

What the world *really* needs is a good Automatic Bicycle Sharpener.

Working...