4.9% of Websites Use Flash, Down From 28.5% in 2011 (bleepingcomputer.com) 129
Web makers continue to ditch the infamous Flash for other safer, improved technologies. In 2011, more than 28.5 percent of websites used Flash in their code, a figure technology survey site W3Techs estimates to have dropped to 4.9 percent today. BleepingComputer: The number confirms Flash's decline, and a reason why Adobe has decided to retire the technology at the end of 2020. A decline from 28.5 percent to 4.9 percent doesn't look that bad, but we're talking about all Internet sites, not just a small portion of Top 10,000 or Top 1 Million sites. Taking into account the sheer number of abandoned sites on today's Internet, the decline is quite considerable, and W3Techs' findings confirm similar statistics put out by a Google security engineer in February.
Is this just because they can't give up (Score:3)
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Doesn't the current version of Adobe Flash directly export to HTML5 now?
Re:Is this just because they can't give up (Score:5, Informative)
Newgrounds, Kongregate, Albino Blacksheep, Dagobah, Animutation Portal, and the like still use Flash to present vector animations and games whose authors either can't be located or lack the time=money to remake them from scratch using HTML5.
A WebM or MPEG-4 video is not a close substitute for a vector animation because a video's file size is roughly an order of magnitude larger, eating into the viewer's cap. (Though most devices with a built-in cellular radio can't play Flash in the first place, home wireless ISPs impose a monthly Internet data transfer quota even on desktop devices.) It's an even worse substitute for a game, unless it's a narrative-driven game that can be fully experienced in a playthrough video [thatdragoncancer.com].
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Indeed, and that goes for everything made with closed source proprietary format.
If you want to be able to read you own content in the future, be careful what you use to create it.
If one puts enough effort into it there are usually means to transcode just about anything, but it is a bit ironic that this happens because no effort was made to avoid flash in the first place.
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Come on and slam and welcome to the jam (Score:2)
HTML is an open format, but you can't display websites from the 1990s anymore can you?
The website promoting the Warner Bros. film Space Jam [warnerbros.com] is still viewable in Chrome 64. Many others are on Wayback Machine even if their hosts have dropped off the Internet.
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Websites from the 90s display just fine in modern browsers, you can find many such examples on web.archive.org.
Here you can see yahoo.com from 1996:
https://web.archive.org/web/19... [archive.org]
And a version of netscape.com from 1996:
https://web.archive.org/web/19... [archive.org]
Websites designed specifically for IE may not display specifically because they violated the open HTML specs and did their own proprietary crap, which is exactly the problem the previous poster was complaining about.
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Yeah, someone should tell Tidal their web version should be upgraded from Flash.
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Flash was only hijacked for its scripting capabilities because the W3C dragged their feet on adding the media playback and scripting capabilities that web developers were clamoring for. HTML versions 1-4 [wikipedia.org] were released in quick succession from 1993-1999. Th
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Newgrounds, Kongregate, Albino Blacksheep, Dagobah, Animutation Portal, and the like still use Flash to present vector animations and games whose authors either can't be located or lack the time=money to remake them from scratch using HTML5.
But Adobe will release a WebAssembly build of Flash player to support old content, won't they? I mean, the proprietor cares about their proprietary platform, right?
Right?
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Homestarrunner Abandoned flash and put their content on Youtube as videos (sadly you lose a lot of in interactivity).
Never fear. You can burninate without Flash [homestarrunner.com].
Thanks Steve! (Score:2, Informative)
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Taking a long to die though.
Too long... and the company I work for just "upgraded" their timekeeping software to one that requires flash. I question the logic, but don't make enough money to influence the decision.
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Technologies always take a long time to die when they're still useful, and were killed for political reasons, not technical.
I'm an artist and regularly hang out on gallery web sites. There are still tons of people creating new Flash animations every day because there is still simply NO web-standard replacement for what Flash can do.
It is hard to kill a technology. (Score:4, Insightful)
Once technology breaks the 1% market share. It will take a lot of effort to actually kill such technology.
They are still people making programs and hardware for the Commodore 64 and other vintage systems such as Apple ][.
The main rule of thumb, if you are making a new site, don't use flash, if you expect the general public to use your existing site, replace flash. However if your site, wasn't flash users, who has flash on Virtual Machines, or legacy systems. Then they will keep it.
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if you are making a new site, don't use flash
Say I want to make an animutation [wikipedia.org] that plays back using a vector animation technology other than Flash Player. Which software would you recommend for this?
replace flash
Easier said than done. I'd be interested to hear how you'd answer these questions:
How would the operator of Flash portal like Newgrounds go about tracking down the author of each submission in order to get the submission converted to HTML5?
How would someone who has submitted a work to such a portal convert a Flash animation to an HTML5 vector animation,*
Re:It is hard to kill a technology. (Score:5, Insightful)
Say I want to make an animutation [wikipedia.org] that plays back using a vector animation technology other than Flash Player. Which software would you recommend for this?
I would recommend using your time to do something else.
How would someone who has submitted a work to such a portal convert a Flash animation to an HTML5 vector animation,* or a Flash game to an HTML5 game?
That's easy: don't. It's a stupid waste of time, and ultimately not very important in the grand scheme of things.
Never let it be said that I can't answer a rhetorical question.
In all seriousness, your line of questioning is roughly akin to "What kind of wood sealer should I use on the deck chairs of this sinking ship?" You think you're being insightful, but you're really just protesting the inevitable death of flash with petty, meaningless points. Move on. Get over it. Do something useful.
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Or perhaps the poster wasn't asking what they could do to keep flash alive, they were asking what they needed to do to adapt their workflow to newer technologies to achieve specific ends. Your comments read as if those ends (animated vector diagrams) are neither possible nor desired with modern technologies.
Of course, I'm sure that it's a whole lot easier to effectively insult a person by suggesting that their question is irrelevant than it is to try and actually answer it.
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Your comments read as if those ends (animated vector diagrams) are neither possible nor desired with modern technologies.
I'll be more specific, then: if one finds the available technologies lacking, there are two reasonable options: invent the necessary technology, or do something else.
Of course, I'm sure that it's a whole lot easier to effectively insult a person by suggesting that their question is irrelevant than it is to try and actually answer it.
You are mistaken. The OP wasn't actually asking questions. The OP was wielding the Socratic Method in a sophomoric manner. Tepples wasn't interested in the answers, he/she was interested in making what I'm sure he/she thought was a stinging manner about the unavailability of better options.
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Obviously... but are you then asserting that the technology of vector animation *IS* actually lacking in post flash modern web technology?
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Obviously... but are you then asserting that the technology of vector animation *IS* actually lacking in post flash modern web technology?
DDT kills pests like bed bugs. It also had major negative impacts on birds so DDT was banned. We are now lacking an effective and efficient means of killing bed bugs. Yet no one intelligent says we should bring back DDT although we bemoan the return of bed bugs.
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You know, when you repeatedly never actually answer direct questions, and insist on making analogies, it leaves one to guess at what you are actually trying to say. It's a pretty lazy way to try and communicate, if you ask me.
So again, are you suggesting that vector animatiion *IS* actually lacking inn post flash modern technology, and if so, are you further suggesting that it is something that the web is better off without?
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No worries on that count and thanks for acknowledging it.
I was actually drawing a metaphor DDT -> birds, Flash -> security. So even if there are benefits to using the agent/technology, the disadvantages are overwhelmingly against it.
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You know, when you repeatedly never actually answer direct questions, and insist on making analogies, it leaves one to guess at what you are actually trying to say. It's a pretty lazy way to try and communicate, if you ask me.
So is twisting other people's statements into affirmative support for their position when they in fact said nothing to support your position.
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I wasn't twisting anything, I was asking what the fuck you were actually trying to say, because I was not seeing it, and giving you the benefit of the doubt that you were attempting to communicate something that may have been worth knowing.
Of course, the fact that you are (by your own admission) uninterested in the topic suggests to me that this entire exercise was just you being a dick all along.
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I wasn't twisting anything, I was asking what the fuck you were actually trying to say, because I was not seeing it, and giving you the benefit of the doubt that you were attempting to communicate something that may have been worth knowing.
I'll post the exchange here, just to keep all the pertinent points in a single post:
Obviously... but are you then asserting that the technology of vector animation *IS* actually lacking in post flash modern web technology?
I made a general statement about what to do when sufficient technology wasn't available, and you attempted to twist that into me supporting the idea that vector animation is lacking. This is so intellectually dishonest that I'm actually a little bit surprised you haven't quietly crawled away yet. You know very well that's not what I was saying.
And now there's a permanent record of your utter lack of honesty.
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but are you then asserting that the technology of vector animation *IS* actually lacking in post flash modern web technology?
Nice try.
No, that's not what I'm saying. I was making a very general statement. Whether vector animation is useful or necessary is a subject I'm not actually interested in. That said, if it were useful or necessary, there would probably be something more viable than Flash to support it.
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"Nice try"??? What are you suggesting that I was trying to do
You were attempting to distort my statement. It was pretty transparent, and says much about your intent here. Protest all you want, you were attempting something rather ugly.
which you assume was rhetorical, but in fact could be taken as sincere
I think we both know it wasn't sincere. That you're still pretending it might have been is more evidence that you're just interested in having an argument on terms that I'm simply not interested in.
Tepples might have expressed some skepticism that alternatve technologies exist that can do what was done with flash, but rather than actually answer the question, you appear to criticise the very fact that anyone would *WANT* to do anything that happened to be only previously possible with with flash.
Not particularly interested in debating this point.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that nobody else is interested in it.
Then why aren't there any alternatives?
(You can answer that last one if you want, but act
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No, I was not.... because you didn't actually directly answer it with respect to what I was originally asking, and I had to guess what you were actually saying. I asked because I wanted to be sure about it, not because I was making any sort of deliberate attempt to try and pigeonhole your opinions into some preconceived set of standards that I have.
And you claim you aren't interested, but rather than not answer the original question, you instead decide to take
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No, I was not.
Yeah yeah. Keep telling yourself that. You might even eventually believe it. But I won't.
I asked because I wanted to be sure about it, not because I was making any sort of deliberate attempt to try and pigeonhole your opinions into some preconceived set of standards that I have.
Bullshit. You are being intellectually dishonest. Give up, already.
you instead decide to take up the position that if a person is unable to find alternative software to accomplish an end, then there are not sufficient people interested in those ends for it to be a desirable goal.
Look, it's really simple: if the technology doesn't exist, you're either really early, or it isn't as interesting as you think it is to a sufficiently large audience. Flash is ancient at this point, so it's probably the latter and not the former. At this point, you can invent it yourself, or move on. This is true of a wide variety of topics. And while it
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I wasn't attempting to argue with anyone.... I was trying to figure out what the fuck you were actually attempting to say. Which is, apparently, nothing remotely useful to anyone. I had been initially trying to give you benefit of the doubt that you had some sort of point to make, but when you finally admitted that you weren't even interested in the topic, it was apparent to me that you were only trying to be an asshole... because, I don't know.... maybe you had nothing better to do than respond to a que
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Hardly, those animations provide easy practive at animating, drawing, storyboarding and lining up something to music. While they are dumb, crude and simple there's something valuable there. Are you going to say that other art is "a stupid waste of time and isn't important"?
No, I'm saying that the cost (imposing Flash on everyone else) isn't worth the value of the curious anachronism. If there's a need for vector animation tools, someone will invent a better solution. If there's not, then so be it.
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If there's a need for vector animation tools, someone will invent a better solution.
Hence my question about what solutions if any had been invented in the past few years.
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Hence my question about what solutions if any had been invented in the past few years.
A) It wasn't actually a question. As noted above, you were attempting an amateurish Socratic Method.
B) You dropped both the beginning and end of my my statement (leaving only the gooey center) in order to make your point, which was rather dishonest of you. The full statement was:
Clearly, if you're not finding the tools, it may very well be because there isn't a strong enough need for it. Henc
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>> I would recommend using your time to do something else.
> Suppose I don't heed your advice.
Then don't come back whining how your site doesn't work in "modern" browsers.
The hand-writing is on the wall. Ignore it at your own peril.
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I'm not sure why someone hasn't made a free animation format similar enough to flash yet.
I suspect that if you ruminate on this point for a sufficient amount of time, you will probably (maybe) conclude that such a thing wasn't actually as useful or necessary as you had imagined.
If you go deeper, you might even eventually conclude that such a standard format would be abused in much the same way that Flash was (i.e. entire websites written in Flash instead of HTML) and that it's probably for the best that Flash is dead and nothing is there to take its place.
Ship analogy (Score:2)
In all seriousness, your line of questioning is roughly akin to "What kind of wood sealer should I use on the deck chairs of this sinking ship?"
Better analogy: "This ship has been recalled. I want something to move people and cargo across water, but I cannot trust a ship to do so safely if it has been recalled. With what craft should I instead move a similar load without using several times more fuel?"
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I would recommend using your time to do something else.
This got voted insightful? Really? I guess there's not many artists on Slashdot.
It's a stupid waste of time, and ultimately not very important in the grand scheme of things.
So is almost everything in life, including posting on the Internet. If Earth were to blow up tomorrow, the universe wouldn't give a toss. Loosen up and live a little.
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This got voted insightful? Really? I guess there's not many artists on Slashdot.
There probably aren't, but I fail to see what that has to do with Flash. Yeah yeah, I know... you're going to try to tell me it's an art form. I don't really care.
Loosen up and live a little.
Says the guy complaining about moderation. You first, buck-o.
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Paper books are clearly inferior to electronic ones; we shouldn't be wasting time scanning old books. Many of them contain outdated ideas, and there are plenty of new, superior electronic books available, so we may as well just throw all the old ones on a fire for warmth.
Nice try. But no, books (or ideas) are not the same thing. It's not even close.
(And no, I won't explain it to you, for the same reason that I won't wrestle with a pig).
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> How would someone who has submitted a work to such a portal convert a Flash animation to an HTML5 vector animation,* or a Flash game to an HTML5 game?
You're doing it wrong.
Use WebGL which uses the GPU instead of Flash which still uses the CPU for rendering [adobe.com]
The magic search phrase is: webgl vector graphics [youtube.com]
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What tool converts an SWF file to a format that a WebGL-based animation playback script can read?
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You'll have to find someone who knows how to parse the proprietary Shockwave file format -- I'm not doing your job for you.
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What tool converts an SWF file to a format that a WebGL-based animation playback script can read?
FFS, you are a whiny bitch.
A word of thanks (Score:1)
However if your site, wasn't flash users, who has flash on Virtual Machines, or legacy systems. Then they will keep it.
In a world full of bad english, I just wanted to applaud somebody for taking the time to fully master the language. You, sir, are that person.
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An important difference: people making programs and hardware for the C64/Apple][ or even the Commodore PET are not doing it because they have to.
It is similar to people working on old cars. There is certainly no point or intent to kill those; it is for preservation and fun.
it's the apps / 3rd party stuff that locks it to (Score:2)
it's the apps / 3rd party stuff that locks it to IE6
Re: It is hard to kill a technology. (Score:1)
You double birthplace tyranny chaser. Read the rest of my post.
I don't think you actually want creamer gone. You want creamer to medically mutate into a 30 year old c64 fangirl and marry him
Re:what's insane is still more dev (Score:5, Funny)
I don't gripe so much when I come across a "legacy" usage, something that's obviously been around for years. I recognize how it can be difficult to get the bosses to spend money to "fix what ain't broke" in their eyes.
But recently I went for the first time to try out Comcast's site where you can remote control your DVR. That is a pretty new site, definitely just the last few years, and of course it's all built on Flash. For a huge corp with lots of resources to make such a decision just baffles me.
Comcast has a reputation to uphold. They can't just start doing things which are secure or customer friendly; people will start to think they're a reputable company.
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Comcast back end is an big mess but when you made up of lots of mergers and acquisitions over the years with different stuff in each area you have really old stuff still in place Like DTC2000's running i-guide in at least 2016-2017 or later.
How many of them are hentai porn? (Score:5, Funny)
Too bad (Score:3, Interesting)
I realize many want flash to disappear as soon as possible, and i won't make myself popular when i say 'too bad it'll go, it has it's uses'.
For video we (finally) have some workable alternatives. But for a lot of online games, and some educational or engineering tools, flash still rocks. HTML5, webasm or your favorite game engine exported to html5/webasm usually have big performance issues and 'weird bugs'. Flash just-works and has its uses.
Yes, some websites abused flash, up to the point of making dozens of navigation buttons as flash content, giving it a bad reputation. And of course, it's been haunted by security issues.
Don't get me wrong. I'm happy html5 is here. I do hate installing/updating flash plugins. But i also do think it has some valid use cases, not in the last place legacy support.
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Flash also has big performance issues. It only ever worked well on Windows systems.
As for HTML5 having performance issues, I've played 3D games that run fine on my now-8-years-old Mac mini (Core 2 Duo, nVidia 320m) so you must have a really weak computer.
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Flash also has big performance issues. It only ever worked well on Windows systems.
"Works" well, present tense. It's still in use. I begin to suspect who's behind the frequent "flash is dead" articles, now.
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I never encounter websites that use Flash anymore, haven't for years. So it's in the past for me.
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I realize many want flash to disappear as soon as possible, and i won't make myself popular when i say 'too bad it'll go, it has it's uses'.
Sure, it makes somethings easier, but what % of security compromises on home computers were from non-up-to-date flash exploitations on people's machines? I don't remember the %, but I remember it was shockingly high.
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I don't know ...
http://8bitworkshop.com/v2.1.0/?platform=vcs&file=local%2Fnewfile.a
This is an Atari 2600 emulator and integrated development environment.
Changes to code are assembled via a Emscriptem-compiled DASM Javascript "binary."
It works really well.
Flash is done.
Of course this wouldn't run on anything less than a dual-core multi-GHz modern system, but maybe webasm will fix that.
Good riddance (Score:2)
Flash just-works and has its uses.
Of course it has its uses. That's not a valid excuse to keep such a buggy, proprietary, piece of crap security hole around.
Yes, some websites abused flash, up to the point of making dozens of navigation buttons as flash content, giving it a bad reputation. And of course, it's been haunted by security issues.
"SOME"? Talk about understatement. It was very widely abused and remains so to this day. And its security issues are clearly irreparable which alone should be enough to condemn it to the trash heap of yesterday.
But i also do think it has some valid use cases, not in the last place legacy support.
Fuck legacy support. Not worth it even a little bit.
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It's not just the use cases that gets to me, it's the fact that it was killed for all the wrong reasons.
People whine about security in Flash, yet never point out that browsers and OSes have a lot of trouble sandboxing their own resources, let alone plugins. Ad blockers are a thing because advertisers insist on their 3rd-party code running on web sites and tracking the hell out of everyone. Why did anyone think that running code right off the Internet was a good idea? HTML5 did nothing to keep CPU usage a
HTML5 -vs- Flash (Score:2)
HTML5 *almost* replaced Flash while having only a subset of the capabilities. Flash was used mostly for video playback. At this point, HTML5 video playback is easier than Flash playback. But Flash is still really nice for animations and video games, and I bet that is the majority of what is left.
Flash had a concept of frames and sprites. It let you make vector drawings on a frame and do automatic "tweening" between them. You could even make a game with almost no coding. Can someone tell me: What toolk
Rental only (Score:3)
I am disappointed [...] that Adobe didn't adapt their Flash tools to export to JS+HTML5.
When Adobe Flash became Adobe Animate [wikipedia.org], it gained an HTML5 exporter. But you can't buy a license to keep; you can only rent it.
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why does this not make "forward porting" a lot of flash content not just a matter of loading it in a newer version of Adobe's software and exporting it to HTML5?
1. The author or his estate has to be contactable.
2. The author has to currently be renting "a newer version of Adobe's software".
3. The author has to still have the source FLA file.
Is the resulting HTML5 also covered by some rental-only license?
Not to my knowledge, but the Adobe software to produce it is.
education software uses flash and other plug ins (Score:2)
education software uses flash and other plug ins
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Actually scratch.mit.edu [mit.edu] uses flash still.
Try Scratch 3 Preview. [github.io]
Not complete, but the core is there and works really well.
Sheep Jumper Games 4EVAR (Score:2)
You poor fools who have loaded in all the 'new' browser tech and locked yourselves out of HOME SHEEP HOME [coolmath-games.com] have no one to blame but yourselves.
You thought that dislike for Flash was trendy. "HTML5 is better!" you said,
even when HTML5 couldn't wipe its own arse at a decent frame rate.
When others proposed rewriting Flash properly, that wasn't enough for you.
You wanted it Flash GONE. Unsupported. Erased.
You probably supported PNG over GIF because you were a Hipster who didn't like animation.
"If I don't like
still no replacement (Score:2)
we still don't have anything that comes close to replacing it.
html has SVG for resolution-independent vector graphics, canvas for bitmapped graphics, video for .. video, webgl for 3d, etc... but making all these things work together seamlessly is next to impossible.
using SVG natively from javascript is a nightmare, CSS and SVG don't mix well, mixing SVG & canvas is ill-advised, multi-device/dynamic-quality audio/video playback is DIY (at best), webgl is completely separate from everything, there's no ov
Good (Score:2)
we still don't have anything that comes close to replacing it.
Thank $diety. Some things should not be replaced. Flash is one of them. There is absolutely nothing Flash did that I miss.
flash wasn't perfect - it certainly had it's fair share of issues.
That's like saying Napoleon's invasion of Russia didn't go perfectly. It was a terrible, awful product that has caused FAR more problems than it ever solved.
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let me guess? you have no clue what your're talking about? ok.
Flash was abused by marketing - Good Riddance (Score:2)
I hated it even more when marketing figured out they could make the Flash animated ads hover over the content I was trying to read.
Then we got bombarded with them as more and more websites adopted Flash to deliver ads.
The web browsing experience became so awful that I removed the Flash app from my browser.
I really REALLY hated it when a website was Flash only and would nag me to install Flash. When I saw t
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Get With it DoD (Score:2)
VMWare (Score:2)
Vsphere web client *still* (As of 6.5) doesn't have all functionalities in HTML 5 version, so at least for us flash is going to stick around for a while longer.
I have no idea who in their right mind decided that replacing the (a bit bloaty, but fast) fat client with the flash approach was a good idea.
Flash is also around in certain other places (e.g. older Cisco server management modules).
So no, flash isn't going away just yet.
One thing that I miss are part of the early memes. Yes, they are not really all t
No (Score:2)
we're talking about all Internet sites, not just a small portion of Top 10,000 or Top 1 Million sites
No. Wrong. W3Techs doesn't work that way. From W3Tech's technology overview: "We include only the top 10 million websites (top 1 million before June 2013) in the statistics in order to limit the impact of domain spammers. We use website popularity rankings provided by Alexa (an Amazon.com company) using a 3 months average ranking. Alexa rankings are sometimes considered inaccurate for measuring website traffic, but we find that they serve our purpose of providing a representative sample of established site
Shockwave arcade (Score:2)
There are lot's of flash and Shockwave games out there? adobe any planes for an offline player so they can be saved?
Good Riddence (Score:2)
Flash in the pan (Score:1)
Told ya so, Jobs, tech blogs (Score:2)
It was what... close to a decade ago now? When Steve Jobs made that post about Flash not being on i devices.
Back then, him and a whole bunch of fanboy tech blogs said that it was the end of Flash, that it was not worth keeping it, etc etc.
Back then I also made a prediction that Flash would be going nowhere anytime soon, and that despite it's flaws, until HTML 5 came around and even then, Flash would still be around just because of how ubiquitous it had become, how some of it's functionalities cannot be full