I look forward to the day when we can say HTML5 is so much better (than Flash) for interactive/media content on the web, but sadly we still aren't there. I have hope that we will get there eventually. Until then, we will continue providing slightly dumbed-down games and content with the benefit of it working on mobile, tablet and desktop browsers.
That depends on the kind of media we're talking about about: HTML5 video was noticeably faster and higher quality on day 1 and Flash never caught up on performance, which is a big deal for laptop users. Even if you're plugged in, having the fans running constantly and still seeing dropped frames is a terrible experience.
I suspect the story is still different for WebGL but the only benchmarks I've seen are fairly old by now.
Flash video was never perceptibly slower than html per se. The only thing that really affects video performance is whether or not it's hardware accelerated, and in cases where flash used HW it performed the same as html. The reason it seemed slower is that AFAIK there's never been an HTML video implementation that falls back to software, whereas flash would do so if HW wasn't supported.
Big AS3 fan here, it is less true today. I accept the fact that, while AS3 and Flash IDEs were exciting technologies to work with ( I worked with cool artists, musicians, video producers on crazy futuristic projects...), The underlying tech was bad, for 2 reasons
- security. this one is obvious.
- closed source tech. Flash is now almost dead since Adobe basically pulled the plug on the IDE and there is nothing AS3 devs can do about it. Yes the compiler is open source, but the player is not.
I made me appreciate the how important open technologies are. They do not solve everything. But they are important.
Frankly, as someone said somewhere else in the thread, Adobe killed Flash, by not opening the plugin's source code, by not trying to make it unnecessary. A lot can be done now with WebGL, C++ compilation can be done with Emscripten , Web APIs now cover a lot of what Flash used to do, and where was Adobe on that ? Edge Animate ? what a joke.
With the fall of Flash there are opportunities though, so that's a good thing. I'm thinking hard about it.
Flash failed not just because it was a browser plug-in, but also because it was terrible - Adobe no longer knew how to tame the beast they'd created and the result was terrible performance and bad user-experience. I'm sad a more sane platform for game/video content didn't win. The browser doesn't need to do everything.
HTML5 for this kind of work is the ultimate square-peg-round-hole solution. HTML is still fundamentally a document platform, and Javascript was never designed for games or video.
We'll get there, but only by the most roundabout fashion possible.
What's an example of this? The HTML5 and WebGL games I've seen match anything I've seen in Flash. It's true that you need an up to date and capable browser, but that's true of any platform.
Where is the modern day Newgrounds? There isn't one. It doesn't exist. And that's a damn shame.
I remember trying Flashes Unreal demo and though it ran it was barely playable.
Most of the games I've played in Flash could definitely be done in HTML5 using the 2D Canvas.
I happen to hang out around these parts so I understand the reasons for it, but if I didn't it would probably make me mad. It would feel like websites were just trying to get around my flash blocker and shove their autoplaying media in my face. Just goes to show how different things can look from the developer side of things.
I would be interested to know of any extensions that do similar and work better.
*I'm not a tech guy so I may be using the wrong terminology here.
Others may tell you I'm wrong - it's about standards and open technologies and whatnot. But personally (and for people I work with that I can speak for) Flash failed because Abode failed Flash.
The internal team became obsessed with changing it to something more focused towards developers with AS3, Flex, Flash Builder, and Flash Catalyst. Instead of improving something successful, they tried to twist it into something it wasn't.
The final straw was Jobs, not because Flash was bad but because iOS was extremely locked down. There was no way he was going to share his new platform:
"We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform."
Without iOS, there was no future for Flash (Android was still in it's infancy) so Adobe pulled the plug. Just a few years later Apple will go on to hire Kevin Lynch, former CTO of Adobe, to be VP of Technology at Apple focusing on the Apple Watch.
At first I'd yell profanities out loud. Now I stop going to those sites.
I love HTML5 video, but there are still huge areas for improvement that show up frequently.
which browsers? Which platforms?
This sounds user-friendly.
> insight into video events
If "insight" means "tracking", this sounds very user-friendly.
What about a slideshow which has a video of the speaker, and changes the slides for particular timestamps.
At the moment you'll have to detect the playback event and just hope that the video is playing back at the "correct" speed, and change the slides based on a JavaScript clock.
While that works most of the time, it isn't what I'd describe as reliable.
Alternatives exist, like making the slides part of the video too, but now text cannot be copied out, links cannot be clicked, and so on...
I personally would like advertisers and content producers to know at which point it is that users tend to bail on watching their video, or will click through to the content. That might allow business users to receive useful feedback and actually optimize their funnel, instead of wasting my time with a shotgun, best guess approach.
Sure, if you just want to play your free videos from a site where each page is basically just a wrapper around the video element, and you don’t need any configuration for quality settings and the like, then custom control and events might not be particularly interesting. However, HTML5 media elements should let us do much more than that.
Are you going to tell me view counters are evil too?
In case of hls.js used by the NYT, you actually need to transmux the mpeg-ts content used in HLS into fMP4 to make it playable by the Media Source Extensions API used by the browsers.
Gee thanks.
Maybe this way?
There are surely many examples of closed technology that isn't phoning home. The problem is that you don't get many garanties.
The only problem with Javascript adoption was the availability of Javascript based ads and support for this VPAID style tracking.
[1] http://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/VPAID_2_0_Fina... - VPAID 2.0 spec, section 8.1.3: "The VPAID ad unit is rendered within a friendly IFRAME (FIF) and can access the DOM of the page in which the player is rendered."
I can't quite figure out why.. but I would vote for incompetence. Can't see any business motivation for doing that.
The irony is that I'm pretty sure the reasoning has security in there somewhere.
I'll never understand why HN is so desperate to believe something that clearly isn't true.
YouTube recently relegated Flash to the bottom of its list of preferred video formats. Firefox users on XP who used to get hardware-accelerated 1080p video using Flash now get VP9. Many older XP machines can't keep up decoding VP9 in software. I recommend Firefox users on XP install the "YouTube Flash Video Player" add-on, which will force YouTube to use Flash again:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-flash...
Are NYT videos DRM enabled or use a codec that FF doesn't support on Android? FF should be just using the platform provided codecs and if it works in Chrome it should work in FF - but I just get a Video/Mime Type unsupported error on FF when browsing NYT.
Firefox Android doesn't have Media source Extensions, that allow HLS support in HTML5 : http://www.jwplayer.com/html5/mediasource/
This situation breaks everything from basic cookie mechanics to possibilities for caching short videos for offline use, which should have been letting us do all kinds of interesting and useful things now that the videos are supposed to be part of the normal content on a page.
Flash on mobile was terrible, Steve Jobs may have been the messenger for that but he wasn't the decision maker.
Secure the damn web.
Does anyone know, who at this point still continues to use Flash?
For Spotify, there's a years old request on the forums [0] their support keeps linking people to, but it doesn't seem like they're doing anything about it.
Deezer uses Flash for "security reasons" [1] and they don't plan to use HTML5.
Someone mentioned Google Play might work, but I haven't tried that yet.
0: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Integrate-HTML5-...
The most infuriating one is NDR, because they allow you to switch between Flash and HTML5 video. However, if you don't have Flash installed, it doesn't give you that option or falls back to HTML5 (which would be reasonable) but instead throws an error telling you to get Flash. Yup, you need to install Flash so you can disable Flash.
Firefox used to have an option that overwrites the list of plugins reported to JavaScript. Sadly it was disabled a few versions back.
Edit: The player is Projekktor [0], the FF setting was plugins.enumerable_names [1]. There's a new option coming that hides plugins when set to click-to-play [2]
0: https://github.com/frankyghost/projekktor
I hope this is going to be a thing.
1: http://forums.beam.pro/topic/168/where-we-re-at-with-html5-v...
Two steps forward, then three steps backwards. Great.
Fuck auto-play websites, made possible by HTML5. Even LOADING content unless the user explicity consented is horrible behavior.
Not everyone has an unlimited tethering plan or WiFi, fuck you very much.
