Posted on 01/29/2015 8:07:56 AM PST by CedarDave
Adobe Systems' Flash software had a good long run as the technology of choice for bringing interactive splash to the Web, but Google is helping to give it the heave-ho by moving YouTube to Web-standard video instead.
"We're now defaulting to the HTML5 player on the Web," said YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider in a blog post Tuesday. It took four years for Google to make the HTML5 change, which is a major victory for Web standards fans who've strived to eject proprietary plug-ins from the Web.
If you watched a video online 10 years or so, ago, it was almost certainly delivered with Flash. That's because Flash gave people an easy way to publish and share video in a way everyone could access -- similar to what Adobe did with its PDF file format and Acrobat document creation tool. That was during a period of relatively slow change for the Web, when Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 dominated the market but remained static for years. Adobe acquired Flash's creator, Macromedia, for $3.4 billion in 2005.
Many of Flash's detractors, however, didn't want technology that's owned and controlled by a single company. Its most vocal opponent was Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who publicly castigated Flash. "We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers," he famously wrote in blog post in April 2010. But while Jobs was the technology's best-known detractor, he wasn't alone.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
For your TECH Ping list.
Thanks. For later.
Sweet. Flash is such an unstable pig. And each version is worse. Adobe is one of the worst software companies on the planet, their success is a tragedy.
This is a good thing.
Flash is a security problem and will always be so.
Slash the flash ping.
Will it be a drain on older CPU’s ?
Set your Flash plug-in to “Ask To Activate” on all your browsers. In addition to the security hazards, Flash uses cookies that are very hard to control, and uses up bandwidth downloading content you generally don’t want to see anyway.
One immediate problem, alas, with this move to HTML5 is that HTML5 videos download and play automatically, and I haven’t figured out an easy way to control that (in FireFox, it appears that a lot of about:config hacking is needed).
I have consistent failures with Adobe driven links. When they come up my computer malfunctions and I must reboot. When I do that I get an update notice from Adobe that stalls my computer while it runs and when it finally get done it gives me a message saying my password is already taken and.
Then, I reboot and start over and ignore all Adobe based programs once again.
From the client side there really are no alternatives. From the content provider side there are 2 significant alternatives: Silverlight and HTML5. And the sooner everybody moves to them (probably mostly to 5) the sooner we all can uninstall Flash.
I’m glad they are doing this.
Adobe’s software has been so full of security holes, it has to update CONSTANTLY is seems. Flash wasn’t nearly as bad for that when Macromedia was in charge of it, but that was ‘forever’ ago.
Anything from Adobe has about turned into Bloatware. Not as bad as it was, but not much better. Anyone remember that damn slow “FEAD Installer” that the Adobe PDF Reader used a few years ago? lol That thing was HORRIBLE!!!
If it was any slower, you’d want to start it up before going to bed at night!
I wouldn’t say they’re running it into the ground. They’re in pretty solid financial footing. But they have constantly skated by on being not as bad as the competition (or lack there of). Adobe Reader stinks and the PDF format is a pig, but neither are as bad as Word. Flash largely had no competition as the other ways to put that kind of content on the web were a nightmare. Finally there’s viable competition for Flash, but PDF is still going to fly under the “not as bad as Word” banner for a long time.
I find it silly for Apple and Microsoft to complain about monopolistic practices out of Adobe. We all know damn well if either of these companies had become the industry standard, they would have bundled the software and put little zingers in it to prevent you from copying or modifying the content.
I’m not thrilled with Flash either but this is like monopolies fighting over who gets to hold you hostage.
I work in the video streaming business. We make appliances in the back end that produce multi-stream, multi-bitrate output for various playback devices, e.g., TV, PC, tablets, smartphones. However, we have ZERO customers requesting support for Adobe Flash, even thought we support it.
From some quick scanning of HTML5 info, it seems the advantage is to use several video formats:
MP4
WebM
Ogg
3GP
FLV
It also seems that your browser determines which format is viewable. Old browsers will revert to Flash.
Newer browsers will load and play the HTML5 formats:
IE 9+
Firefox 4+
Crome 6+
Opera 10.60+
Safari 4+
iPhone 3+
iPad 1+
Android 2.1+
BlackBerry 6+
Windows Phone 7+
Not, it will be a Gate...............[Obscure Semiconductor double entendre joke]
I run several browsers, because videos seems to work on some but no on others. In addition to problems with Flash, Microsoft’s Silverlight seems to confict, too.
PDF’s have a similar problem, as there are several flavors: vm, pdf, etc. Some PDF readers cannot read them and some browsers cannot download the ‘real’ PDF.
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