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Comment by BatFastard | Hacker News Reader

This seems to me to be an obvious power play by google. Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from. When the analytics are in flash, google has no insight, but when forced into js they have full visibility into everything a developer does.

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> Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from.

I doubt that very much - Google has been extracting data from and indexing Flash content for close to a decade[1]. If they wanted to reverse-engineer the behaviour of flash code, they could run it as blackbox code in a Flash sandbox

1. http://searchengineland.com/google-now-crawling-and-indexing...

> Does no one else see how this is not against flash, but in favor of code which google can analyse and extract data from. When the analytics are in flash, google has no insight, but when forced into js they have full visibility into everything a developer does.

The bytecode format and semantics of both AVM1 and AVM2 (the VMs used in Flash) are common knowledge.

Not only that. I believe the main purpose of the whole war agains flash is to kill the online games ecosystem, from which neither Apple nor Google make profit, and move gamers to appstores.

That seems unlikely. It's true that Flash is overwhelmingly popular among browser game devs, but there's been efforts to encourage them to move to HTML5 for years, because Flash is terrible for users.

google analytics is supported inside Flash

since 2008 gaforflash [1]

since 2014 as3-universal-analytics [2] (measurement protocol)

[1]: https://code.google.com/archive/p/gaforflash/

[2]: https://github.com/zwetan/as3-universal-analytics

Why would Google themselves care about what developers are reporting back? It's not as if they don't have insight into the types of analytics people care about: Google Analytics is very large.

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