Six Months Without Adobe Flash, and I Feel Fine 393
Posted
by
timothy
from the alternatives-emerge-in-a-wait-no dept.
from the alternatives-emerge-in-a-wait-no dept.
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?
zero punctuation (Score:3, Informative)
Cannot live without
Two Month without adobe pdf and I feel .. (Score:5, Informative)
.. fine, because now I use SumatraPDF, small fast no nagware no nagdates .. I feel great!
Re:HTML5 on YouTube? (Score:4, Informative)
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)
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)
But also: MSNBC (TRMS, occasionally Morning Joe). Pretty much any decent video site still uses flash.
Not Flash, but Silverlight (Score:5, Informative)
Netflix uses Silverlight, something that sucks quite a bit. They do offer a dedicated app if you use Windows 8, but the app is surprisingly poorly designed, plus I don't really want Windows 8 on my desktop.
Streetview (Score:4, Informative)
Streetview on Google Maps needs flash. I would miss that quite a bit.
Re:So did I, about four months ago. (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
An Amazon Instant Video...flash only currently.
You can use that on AppleTV, the PS3 and all iOS devices - all without flash.