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Adobe to Pull Plug on Flash


Monroe

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On 20.9.2017 at 3:31 PM, Tripredacus said:

That is the wrong term. Planned Obsolescence is when a product is created with the plan baked in from the get-go that it will become unusable at some point. So this can't really be applicable to Adobe since it was not them who even made Flash in the first place.

Maybe HTML5 turns out to be planned obsolescence.

Then when browsers and mobile devices require HTML6 or something else.We just know Flash support will be dead like Silver Light and Quick Time also are.

We dont know if Silverlight really gives up forever and Adobe Flash. And if Oracle with Java want to be the next plugin-victim. 

Maybe they try to make an alliance for an alternative. But I dont think so at the moment.

Atleast Adobe has the great PDF format. I hope it never gets replaced.

Edited by winxpi
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On 28.9.2017 at 3:43 PM, Tripredacus said:

I still prefer XPS over PDF but that is likely more to do with the software itself and not the file format.

Oh ok I must admit I never tried the XPS format.

Why is it that Flash and HTML5 are so "controversely"-discussed technologies anyway?

I understand that Apple and all their followers have a grudge on Flash (since Jobs declared the war on Flash single-handedly).

But besides all the pros and cons that both technologies had/have, is there any reason why some users (and Im really not lying) have the experience that Flash performs better for youtube/video streaming than html5 and other people say that html5 performs better than flash?

Has this to do with the used software (operating system/browser ...), the hardware or is it a subjective point of view.

I do understand that for example an Intel CPU and AMD act different, or a NVIDIA card and AMD GPU/graphics card too. And also that cores(single, dual..)and clock frequency (Mhz/Ghz) are not the only thing such devices can offer (dont forget about the implented technologies like e.g. Vt-x ,Hyperthreading  or  on the other hand Shader/OpenGL) and also that the hard disk speed and even type and maybe even other stuff may play a role.

Is there any reason why one person says: Flash is great. And others say : HTML5 is great , besides the "technology politics" (I would call it like that but you can call it to be like in sport also team html5 vs team flash)?

Edited by winxpi
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Most of the comparisons that people know are in their own limited testing. Whereas the person would use 1 thing, and have to switch to the other for some reason or another. For example, there was some issue with Flash a few years ago where a specific version did not allow you to watch videos on Youtube in Chrome and the most used "solution" was to enable the HTML5 player. I think that people really do not have a good understanding about which is actually better than the other. The only comparison testing I had done (in 2015 already) was a temperature testing using 4K Video at fullscreen.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/0-*/?do=findComment&comment=1099455

But even that is not a real world test, one where I could say one was better than the other. What we know for sure is this hard facts:

1. Flash was designed to create movies. It became used for many things such as games and even software applications, but the original purpose was for video animation.

2. HTML5 is an updated version of the HTML specification. It is not a fair comparison to Flash.

The problem always seemed to be the openess of the particular platform. HTML5 being a web standard would end up being supported in everything. Flash being a proprietary platform requires a plug-in. It is just the most recent in the long chain of things that eventually bowed out that were fine for websites but required a third-party plugin. Think also SVG and Java. But you can say "what SVG works in all browser" and yes it does as an image format. SVG was much bigger and could have been a Flash competitor had it been developed properly. For many years, SVG only worked in IE with a plug-in and did not work in Firefox for many years. Even Firefox did not support XSLT properly for many years. So SVG was an example of something that ran purely on text files (XML) using the XML spec but was only supported on IE until maybe 5-7 years ago.

Another reason why people often have a bad taste for these plug-in based technologies is having to interact with the software itself and the differences in how the popular browsers handle it. I can't speak for Macs or Safari or Opera because I do not use those. We know the "best" or easiest browser to use with Flash is Chrome because you never see anything about it. It is because Chrome will update the plugin and extensions on its own by default.

This is not the case with Firefox or IE. For those browsers, a scheduled task is created to check for Flash updates. Which then opens a program to click a button saying you need to update Flash. Then you click it, and it will open to the Adobe website to download the new .exe, which sometimes might install some crap-ware (like McAfee or Chrome or a toolbar or whatever) if you forget to uncheck a box. Then you have to run that .exe, which then tells you to close "your browser" and re-open again. This process is annoying in itself, because you could think if Chrome can update Flash without you knowing, why not other things?

Another thing is that Flash went through at least two noticable periods of system requirement change. One for client, one for developer sides. Flash had become "slow and bloated" when the web was in the "2.0" phase and got bad press in the same way Vista had. In this period of time, it became obvious that for some websites (especially multimedia ones like youtube, or websites with 3D such as the original Quake 3 that id made to run in your browser) that your minimum system requirements was a two "core" CPU (Hyperthreading, dual core, core  2, etc) and 4GB RAM. Existing computers did not have this and the internet became slow for a lot of people. Vista launched and was being sold with single core CPUs and 1-2GB RAM and ran like crap.

The developer requirement changed happened around this time also but with some different specs. For a Flash developer, the new software came from Adobe and a 32bit OS didn't cut it anymore. You needed a 64-bit OS and at least 6GB RAM in order to author in Flash CS2 without running into slowdowns or soft-locks during processing.

The only other thing I can think of is that Flash never really became "Easy" to use. After Adobe purchased Macromedia's products, they never changed anything. You'd think that since Flash had shifted away from its Shockwave roots of being a movie creation tool, to being more popular with web animations, menus and games, that perhaps a different UI would have been made specifically for those types of applications. But it didn't happen. In fact, Adobe's programs were largely unchanged from when they were Macromedia branded. I can cite the example of Fireworks in CS4 (or CS5) which is basically no different than Fireworks 2 or MX 2004. The only change seemed to be the ability to use Bridge.

Well that was more typing than I expected. :)

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On 4.10.2017 at 4:31 PM, Tripredacus said:

Most of the comparisons that people know are in their own limited testing. Whereas the person would use 1 thing, and have to switch to the other for some reason or another. For example, there was some issue with Flash a few years ago where a specific version did not allow you to watch videos on Youtube in Chrome and the most used "solution" was to enable the HTML5 player. I think that people really do not have a good understanding about which is actually better than the other. The only comparison testing I had done (in 2015 already) was a temperature testing using 4K Video at fullscreen.

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/0-*/?do=findComment&comment=1099455

But even that is not a real world test, one where I could say one was better than the other. What we know for sure is this hard facts:

Im not sure if it was the flash or html5 version but years ago my system would crash when I visited youtube with firefox I think version 28. Back then I updated the firmware for the GPU the issue was gone. Another time when i reinstalled windows the same issue occured.

I do think it had to do with Flash, but I never really tried to open videos on Firefox anymore, I mainly used Internet Explorer 11 or Opera versions 40 and upwards.

Atleast somebody had time to compare the two formats. I only did when it came clear that html5 would be the main format some video screenshot to compare " a few framed" but I wouldn see much of a difference. Rather what did bother me was that html5 videos seemed to load more slowly.  Recently I couldnt really compare this, but I can however assure that the theory of "watching videos drains the battery is correct" not only for smartphones but ofcourse notebooks.

However I didnt make comparisions if Flash or HTML5 or any other possible format made a difference regarding this.

4K images are well pretty much out my league, the best think I tried out at home was watching blu-rays but ofcourse thats not part of the topic now. And sure if I tried videos with 2k quality on youtube the CPU fan would make more noise than with lower video resolutions. 

On 4.10.2017 at 4:31 PM, Tripredacus said:

1. Flash was designed to create movies. It became used for many things such as games and even software applications, but the original purpose was for video animation.

2. HTML5 is an updated version of the HTML specification. It is not a fair comparison to Flash.

The problem always seemed to be the openess of the particular platform. HTML5 being a web standard would end up being supported in everything. Flash being a proprietary platform requires a plug-in. It is just the most recent in the long chain of things that eventually bowed out that were fine for websites but required a third-party plugin. Think also SVG and Java. But you can say "what SVG works in all browser" and yes it does as an image format. SVG was much bigger and could have been a Flash competitor had it been developed properly. For many years, SVG only worked in IE with a plug-in and did not work in Firefox for many years. Even Firefox did not support XSLT properly for many years. So SVG was an example of something that ran purely on text files (XML) using the XML spec but was only supported on IE until maybe 5-7 years ago.

 

Exactly I think thats also the edge that Flash has over HTML5 in some cases. If somebody would ask me for what flash is needed today I would simply answer: Webcam sessions in the browser, I did read flash has also the abbilities for 3D  modelling but never tried that out (for people that want to know how Flash could be used for games or so) Im sure it requires a lot of extra work.... Its another think if you want to use 2D graphics only.

Oh the famous SVG format that I only know from wikipedia and I think its available as a format choice in IrfanViewer. I do remember that you couldnt really open it in windows and it would always need you to open a browser xD (and thats on Windows 7).

On 4.10.2017 at 4:31 PM, Tripredacus said:

Another reason why people often have a bad taste for these plug-in based technologies is having to interact with the software itself and the differences in how the popular browsers handle it. I can't speak for Macs or Safari or Opera because I do not use those. We know the "best" or easiest browser to use with Flash is Chrome because you never see anything about it. It is because Chrome will update the plugin and extensions on its own by default.

This is not the case with Firefox or IE. For those browsers, a scheduled task is created to check for Flash updates. Which then opens a program to click a button saying you need to update Flash. Then you click it, and it will open to the Adobe website to download the new .exe, which sometimes might install some crap-ware (like McAfee or Chrome or a toolbar or whatever) if you forget to uncheck a box. Then you have to run that .exe, which then tells you to close "your browser" and re-open again. This process is annoying in itself, because you could think if Chrome can update Flash without you knowing, why not other things?

You have that fun also with Opera, atleast if you deactivate automatic-updates for flash-player. I download them myselfe and then have to close all Opera instances.

If you really want to hear a major disadvantage flash does have it is that you need different versions for different browser (engines). The NPAPI for Firefox(gecko), the PPAPI for Chromium (Opera/Google Chrome) and the ActiveX for IE if I havent  forgotten any.

 

On 4.10.2017 at 4:31 PM, Tripredacus said:

Another thing is that Flash went through at least two noticable periods of system requirement change. One for client, one for developer sides. Flash had become "slow and bloated" when the web was in the "2.0" phase and got bad press in the same way Vista had. In this period of time, it became obvious that for some websites (especially multimedia ones like youtube, or websites with 3D such as the original Quake 3 that id made to run in your browser) that your minimum system requirements was a two "core" CPU (Hyperthreading, dual core, core  2, etc) and 4GB RAM. Existing computers did not have this and the internet became slow for a lot of people. Vista launched and was being sold with single core CPUs and 1-2GB RAM and ran like crap.

The developer requirement changed happened around this time also but with some different specs. For a Flash developer, the new software came from Adobe and a 32bit OS didn't cut it anymore. You needed a 64-bit OS and at least 6GB RAM in order to author in Flash CS2 without running into slowdowns or soft-locks during processing.

The only other thing I can think of is that Flash never really became "Easy" to use. After Adobe purchased Macromedia's products, they never changed anything. You'd think that since Flash had shifted away from its Shockwave roots of being a movie creation tool, to being more popular with web animations, menus and games, that perhaps a different UI would have been made specifically for those types of applications. But it didn't happen. In fact, Adobe's programs were largely unchanged from when they were Macromedia branded. I can cite the example of Fireworks in CS4 (or CS5) which is basically no different than Fireworks 2 or MX 2004. The only change seemed to be the ability to use Bridge.

Well that was more typing than I expected. :)

Im not really sure how flash does play all these videos at all, since they are recorded in some random format like mp4, avi and so own before they get uploaded to youtube. But back then when Flash MX 2004 existed maybe it was a newer version also we did insert youtube urls of videos inside Flash MX to embedd them.
I do remember they did loose some quality (sure they were stored locally through this). 

So much RAM neccessary back in the Vista years? I recently had upgraded one notebook from about 512 MB ram to more than 2 GB Ram, but its strange that you required 6 GB already at that time. I remember some years ago maybe 2015 notebooks with 4 GB ram or 8 GB RAM were sold very often.

Cant really imagine that  many people had 6 GB Ram back in 2006-2009 already.

Btw Flash MX 2004 also ran on Windows 98SE. Just that one can see how much the system requirements for the programmer perspective also rose time over time.

I wonder what happened to Fireworks? We learned it once for special ways of homepage design (menus) but never ever heard about it anymore.

Edited by winxpi
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Fireworks is still around, it is in the Creative Suite from Adobe. I think Fireworks was the first program that had the slice tool to make full imagemapped menus for websites. It wasn't Macromedia's regular image editor, that was instead Freehand, but I never got into it. I know version 2 Macromedia products work on Win98, as I have them installed on mine (still) such as Fireworks 2. I wasn't using Win98 as a main in 2004 to know.

Flash allowed video embedding using ActionScript. It really was our saviour from "Codec Hell" and the competing video players. The server had to have the codec to play the video, not the client. If Flash was super popular, it was either because of video embedding or the games that were made with it.

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