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Comment by HugoDaniel | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately in this case avoiding the problem won't make it go away.

Many old sites will stop working (my first site was done in flash) as well as many games that are still heavily played today by millions of people. Also flash IDE provides a good introduction to programming for self-taught kids these days: many of them still do their first code in flash after clicking on "that strange icon next to photoshop".

Overall this is a good example of prolonged trusting a binary blob. IMO we will always tend to do what is more comfortable and we should strive for openness and transparency in the tools that most people rely for everyday.

The problem persists as long as there are people installing the plugin or "enabling" it.

We need a real open-source alternative to flash player.

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> We need a real open-source alternative to flash player.

We quietly built the alternative to Flash over the last 10 years. It's called the web.

A standard document in the web browser can play audio, video, display vector graphics, utilise OpenGL, supports direct drawing via Canvas, and it is deeply scriptable with a mature, open programming language.

What else do you need?

Copy to clipboard, apparently.

(Github project pages have a flash application to handle this)

Good news, we're getting there. In Chrome 43 and (probably) Firefox it's supported: http://caniuse.com/#search=clipb (see note 3)

However the API is god awful.

Isn't this like a huge security risk?

Why? Copy FROM clipboard would be, sure. Copy TO clipboard... OK, I can come up with scenarios where it'd be a problem, but they're pretty far-fetched.

Run a timer overwriting your clipboard every 10ms. Prevent you from copying anything off a webpage and instead replacing it with a copyright notice. Etc., etc., etc.

There's a permission prompt for first use and I think Mozilla considers making it https only.

Flash has offered these same clipboard APIs for years and these clipboard "attacks" have never been a problem before. I don't see how replacing Flash clipboard APIs with HTML clipboard APIs will change web developers' behavior.

Well there are attacks in the vein of this: https://thejh.net/misc/website-terminal-copy-paste

> However the API is god awful.

To be fair, it's basically a proprietary IE5 API that's now been standardised (like quite a few others).

Is that why I keep getting notifications that github wants to use flash player? Good to know.

Sorry, i meant alternative to the closed source flash player, keeping the same spec and not breaking compatibility. As implied by the comment.

You might be interested in https://github.com/mozilla/shumway

I knew of gnash, but this is another story.

Amazing, thanks.

> What else do you need?

I need all of those things to look exactly the same in each and every browser, instead of corrupted icons or broken navigation because the developer tested it in Chrome for Windows but neglected, say, Iceweasel for Debian.

I have yet to find a non-flash game capable of doing that. And if the alternative is "we should discard this closed binary that works in every platform in favor of this free-but-browser-dependant stack", I find that odd.

Well then you don't want an open source Flash, because that will undoubtedly be different to the official one in the same way that browsers are different to each other.

> because the developer tested it in Chrome for Windows but neglected, say, Iceweasel for Debian.

Bad example, because Flash for Linux has been discontinued in all flavours except PPAPI so it wouldn't work in Iceweasel.

The age old test of any platform is the ability to run games, and HTML5 just isn't there when put next to Flash or native apps. And I'm not talking the bleeding edge stuff, but simple things like getting sound to work between browsers (a task that Flash did very well). Although to be fair the gatekeepers of browsers are Apple and Google who want you to pay the app store tax.

> We quietly built the alternative to Flash over the last 10 years. It's called the web.

The 'Web' can't play video or audio, the 'Web' needs plug-ins to do so. Plug-ins like H264 decoders and Flash.

That's like saying “The ‘Web’ can't display images, the ‘Web’ needs plug-ins to do so. Plug-ins like libjpeg or giflib”.

Right now, you can put a <video> or <audio> tag on a page and it will work in something like 95% of the browsers in use. That's already better than Flash and going up as IE8 users upgrade to newer versions of IE or install Chrome/Flash.

Sure, you can't rely on users not recompiling their browser to disable it but you also can't rely on 100% support for anything on the web – users disable image loading, plugins, stylesheets or JavaScript, install incredibly overzealous ad-blockers, use ISPs which tamper with page contents, etc.

Yup. Remember back when you actually needed helper applications to display certain image types?

https://www.as.cmu.edu/application/pref_1.gif

Or when GIF required a license to implement so people actually had to disable it until the Unisys patents expired. That was fun…

* Streaming of live video using a single protocol across all browsers. (Some browsers don't even support a live streaming protocol)

* Adaptive bit rate video streaming (recorded or live)

Nice to have but not required:

* Full H.264/AAC support across all browser.

Unfortunately Flash is the only viable solution for the above right now.

When i wanted to start programming one of the things I tried was flash. I absolutely couldn't figure out what the fuck was going on even with tutorials, it's garbage.

That's strange, I found Flash programming very accessible. There's a huge amount of good learning material out there, and plenty of shortcuts and components you can use to do quite complex things.

Flash components were really interesting, and made it easier for non-programmers, or designers to manipulate a user-friendly "API" of sorts within Flash. This was very powerful. Hugely underrated and conventionality forgotten by the Flash-haters.

In terms of accessibility, my first two "serious" coding projects in high school were an interactive library map and a Latin flashcard quiz game written in Flash and Perl, respectively. At the end of the projects, I decided to focus my efforts on the more intuitive of the two languages, Perl.

Granted, it's just an anecdote, but I wonder what I missed that made others find Flash so accessible.

In my experience at least, when I talk about "Flash programming" I'm not just referring to Actionscript, but the whole package, the whole Flash suite including manipulating the timeline and multimedia objects programmatically.

Sounds like you favour Perl over Actionscript. From what I know of both, they are not commonly compared! But as with many things in this business, it all depends on your needs, likes, and the project requirements.

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