10 ms·

Amazon joins in on killing Flash, stops accepting Flash ads

211 points by mukyu 11y ago

knocte 11y ago
ok, now we need spotify to make a move
AdmiralAsshat 11y ago
Cool. Now if only Amazon would eat its own dogfood. Their Prime Music/Cloud library music player still requires Flash in order to use.
- gcb0 11y ago
  do as i say, not as i do? the video reviews are flash still too.
- pki 11y ago
  Now if only the music licencing services backing Prime don't require flash and DRM ..
  - chaostheory 11y ago
    Does Netflix still require flash?
    - pki 11y ago
      Silverlight is required on browsers that do not support EME
      - ascagnel_ 11y ago
        Can EME be used in streaming music players, like Prime Music or Spotify?
- drewg123 11y ago
  Yes, I just discovered this when I moved to a FreeBSD desktop using Chromium, where there is no flash.
- jo909 11y ago
  Amazon is not doing this with the intention of "killing" flash. They do this because flash ads are now no longer seen by a large enough group of users which makes them bad advertising vehicles. Maybe at some point the Prime Music people will decide that a large enough group of users are no longer able to use their service, but that is a totally different decision with different motivations.
larsiusprime 11y ago
If we want to speed up the demise of flash, there are several roots that need to be whacked simultaneously: 1. Tons of existing flash content people want to access 2. Give current flash devs a reasonable alternative The first one is a thorny problem and is somewhat solved by things like Shumway but still needs more work. As for the second, things like Unity and HTML5 have not covered all of flash dev's use cases, so only some of them have switched over. I think OpenFL (a Haxe-based reimplementation of the Flash API -- not the flash PLAYER) is our best hope for that: http://www.openfl.org http://www.openfl.org http://www.haxe.org http://www.haxe.org Devs can keep their current flash workflows but export to non-flash targets, specifically native C++ (supports mac/win/linux, iOS/Android) and HTML5 (with canvas, DOM, or WebGL rendering). They can also use SWF-based vector animation assets, and even integrate with the Flash CC player. And it's all open source. Flash has been "dying" for years, but if we really want it to bite the dust, we need to give people a better way to make their content that doesn't depend on a plugin. EDIT: Video of OpenFL integrating with the Flash CC editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU
- dajobat 11y ago
  Agreed. I work for a business that provides fairly heavy RIAs, which we custom build based on customer needs on (typically) very short time frames. The applications are used by thousands of different users on massively varied combinations of OS and browser, and the flash+flex stack is the only way we can develop robust apps to the required deadlines. It's a shame but it's the way it is currently.
- marquis 11y ago
  Media players: browsers don't have native support for H.264 over HLS or RTMP, and MPEG-Dash seems native to Chrome only. If the browsers could accept these natively, this would certainly speed flash's demise. Until then, what are the alternatives?
  - samsonradu 11y ago
    Exactly. Much of the live streaming on the web defaults to flash, the alternatives (hls, rtsp, webrtc) are all underperforming.
sp332 11y ago
You know Flash is dead when Homestar Runner says it's dead! http://www.homestarrunner.com/flashisdead.html http://www.homestarrunner.com/flashisdead.html For those who don't know, this site was a legit phenomenon in the early 2000's, and it has always been 100% flash-based. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner
- madsohm 11y ago
  The "flashisdead" page requires Flash, but I guess that's the joke?
  - sp332 11y ago
    Definitely. Nothing on the site has been updated to non-flash (yet?).
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  How hard would it be to convert those Flash videos into mp4s for archival in the IA? EDIT: Looks like they've been uploaded to Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom
  - martin-adams 11y ago
    Not quite so straight forward, a lot of their videos were interactive for hidden gems. They will be lost when moving to a linear file format.
    - sp332 11y ago
      With access to the source, it should be possible to export them to HTML5 using Adobe's flash authoring tools. I've never tried it though, and I don't know how good the HTML5 versions would be. Edit: huh, it kinda runs with Mozilla's Flash-runtime replacement, Shumway. Another few rounds of bugfixes and we might not need any Adobe code to play these files just as they are.
xngzng 11y ago
We need Google to remove bundling Flash player in Chrome. Chrome for OS X has Flash built-in. Not sure about other build.
- thrillgore 11y ago
  My understanding is that Chrome for Flash uses Pepper (a NaCl extension) for its plugin support so its not a vector for attack. You can always turn it off from chrome:plugins.
  - wnevets 11y ago
    >plugin support so its not a vector for attack. I wanna say this is untrue, I vaguely recalling an exploit within the past month or so.
    - cpeterso 11y ago
      Hacking Team’s Flash 0-day: Potent enough to infect actual Chrome user http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/hacking-teams-flash-0day-potent-enough-to-infect-actual-chrome-user/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/hacking-teams-flash-...
e40 11y ago
I tried to uninstall Flash, but my bank (Citi) uses it for their one-time credit card # applet. And, I miss a lot of videos on the internets, but I can live without those. The bank thing, I cannot. (Yeah, I complained and was told moving away is "in the works.")
- Shengbo 11y ago
  Same thing here, my bank updated their entire website, except for internet banking which still uses flash.
- cpncrunch 11y ago
  I just have it disabled, and then enable it temporarily if I need it for a particular site.
- Tloewald 11y ago
  Trust banks to use the worst possible implementation of the worst possible technology at any given time.
edpichler 11y ago
The only thing I will miss on flash is the Copy to clippboard feature (e.g http://zeroclipboard.org/ http://zeroclipboard.org/). Is there other way to do the same when flash will be extinct?
- dao- 11y ago
  see document.execCommand("copy"), document.execCommand("cut"): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/execCommand https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ex...
  - exodust 11y ago
    So in other words... NO.
- cpeterso 11y ago
  Detecting and preferring HTML clipboard API is on ZeroClipboard's roadmap: https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/580 https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/580 https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/171 https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/171
zeveb 11y ago
I'm actually a bit conflicted about this. The nice thing about Flash-based media is that one can disable JavaScript (thus increasing one's privacy) and then enable Flash only to view a particular video (e.g. on Amazon Play); with JavaScript and HTML5, one generally has to enable JavaScript for the entire domain rather than a single video on a single page. Why would one want to disable JavaScript in the first place? Privacy & security: why enable a site to execute random code on one's own machine when all one wants to do is read some content?
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Why would one want to disable JavaScript in the first place? Privacy & security: why enable a site to execute random code on one's own machine when all one wants to do is read some content? There are many reasons. Another is this: on most webpages (i.e. places you go to read text and maybe images and some videos; as opposed to web applications), JavaScript is an unnecessary waste of processing power, that only makes it harder for you to read in peace. It doesn't add value for user, so there's no reason to have it running in your browser.
- deelowe 11y ago
  Flash has had vulerabilities and executes arbitrary code as well... What's the difference? At least with javascript, there's only one attack vector (the browser itself). Flash requires a plugin to work properly.
  - zeveb 11y ago
    > Flash has had vulerabilities and executes arbitrary code as well... What's the difference? It sure has! But it's nice to expose oneself to vulnerabilities only when absolutely necessary (e.g. to view a single video), rather than for every page currently loaded for a site.
eosrei 11y ago
Amazon is switching to JavaScript animated ads to support all devices. This isn't anything against Flash, this is a business decision to reach more eyeballs. Flash is fast. JavaScript/HTML5/WebGL/etc are just recently getting close to the performance we had in Flash 10+ years ago. Flash is perceived to be slow because it was used to make obtrusive advertising, like JavaScript is used now. The evil dictator has been replaced, with much fanfare, by a new evil dictator! An example from 2010 of Flash running in-browser 3D with millions of polygons and lighting effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szaXvTsoeVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szaXvTsoeVs
- Tloewald 11y ago
  Flash's speed on desktops is not the main strike against it, although it was actually quite bad for many things (the 3d stuff worked better for it because it bypassed its aging 2d rendering engine which no-one left at Adobe understood or could fix). Flash's speed on mobile was abysmal and Adobe tried and failed to fix it for years (after Steve Jobs' famously pointed all this stuff out). The fact that Flash would store user information separately from the browser in such a way as to circumvent security and privacy models, and did so for years after Macromedia (i.e. pre-Adobe-merger) knew about it, and that Flash had and has as many vulnerabilities as any two operating systems is simply icing on the cake. Here's a discussion -- also from 2010 -- of Flash's abysmal 2d performance (which entailed fixing an example created explicitly to show how awesome Flash was): http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3362 http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3362 Bear in mind, this is Flash's nearly 20-year-old/mature rendering engine optimized to only do minimal screen updates against a five minute hack using a canvas. And, finally, you need Javascript anyway. Flash actually needs Javascript to even load properly (thanks to the stupid Eolas lawsuit), so it's a case of giving up one evil dictator while keeping a not-nearly-so-evil-and-much-more-useful dictator.
  - mitchty 11y ago
    The hatred for flash from me is simple. On osx, almost ALL of my browser crashes had flash on the stack at the time things went belly up. That, plus flashes uncanny ability to peg a process at 100% for seemingly just moving images about made me not a huge fan. This doesn't mean javascript isn't getting as bad or worse now that things are moving to there, but at least the javascript engines aren't as horrible as the flash runtime was. But if these javascript ads start burning cpu and draining energy from my laptop battery there will be a whole lot more sites getting added to my local firewall rules.
cableshaft 11y ago
I've been wanting to update my existing Flash games (I've released 7 games) to something more modern, like HTML5+JS or (maybe) Unity, but I don't want to spend a ton of time learning a new stack and getting things working, as I really don't have the free time I used to. A few of the games have heavy use of graphics and animation also, that I don't really want to have to recreate manually. I've worked on games made with Unity and Cocos2d(ios) since then, but I'm really hoping there's some shortcut I'm not aware of. There's a ton of JS frameworks out there and it's hard to evaluate which would be worth the time and effort. Plus I really don't want to have to do this again in the future, so hopefully this can be something I do once and I'm good for the forseeable future (which is why I'm leaning towards HTML5 + JS). Some cross-platform capabilities would be nice too. Example of the heavy art/animation: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it.
- larsiusprime 11y ago
  OpenFL! http://www.openfl.org/learn/tutorials/using-swf-assets/ http://www.openfl.org/learn/tutorials/using-swf-assets/ http://community.openfl.org/t/using-swf-assets-tutorial-feedback-wanted/1450 http://community.openfl.org/t/using-swf-assets-tutorial-feed... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU That's as close as you get to keeping your existing workflow and maintaining your assets. It's really close IMHO and works well. Also there's some scripts that can translate As3->Haxe and take care of 95% of the work of porting the code, and then OpenFL has the same API as flash does so your API calls are all the same. Alternatively FLUMP can be used if you just want to export assets and use a totally different framework: http://threerings.github.io/flump/ http://threerings.github.io/flump/
shawkinaw 11y ago
I'm actually torn on this, because the fact is that Flash can do things that you realistically can't do any other way. In my case, I've written a couple of video conferencing apps that need web-web and web-Android connectivity, and Flash/AIR is still definitely the easiest way to do that sort of thing. WebRTC has promise, but it requires a reasonably recent browser (and not Safari), and until very recently it didn't work in WebViews on the Android side.
exodust 11y ago
I have Flash enabled all the time. No probs here. Smooth and efficient. I have no agenda or need to kill it. So much viral hate. Plugins have a right to exist. You gonna declare war on all plugins or just Flash? HTML doesn't necessarily run its full suite of tricks on all browsers and platforms. And my iPad3 often slows to a crawl because of bloated well-known websites. Browser memory maxes out and I can't even switch tabs without full page reloading. Inefficiency follows poor technical design no matter what technology is used. Is javascript next because of those trendy promo pops where they think you're leaving? Kill everything that sux, or whatever technology it comes from. Kill it all and dance on its grave like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll retreat to our native apps with virtual coins and account validation. We'll share our contact lists without knowing that we did, and we won't be blocking ads because we can't. Tried the Youtube HTML player once. That was one hell of a rough and buggy experience. Switched back to Flash. Clicked a link to youtube in iOS Safari more than once, and got auto-switched to the youtube app rather than the video play in Safari. I don't know what or who to hate about that, I'm just tired.
- brandonwamboldt 11y ago
  Flash is a closed source binary plugin with a long history of security vulnerabilities that Adobe was slow to patch. For the most part, JavaScript engines are open source, don't have a history of security vulnerabilities (to the same severity), and are typically patched quickly.
  - x0x0 11y ago
    (linking to myself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9875333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9875333 It's been more than a year since there's been a month without multiple CVE severity 10 bugs.
  - koonsolo 11y ago
    Here is a 2014 vulnerability report of Secunia: https://secunia.com/resources/vulnerability-review/update-all/ https://secunia.com/resources/vulnerability-review/update-al... Google Chrome is at the top with most vulnerabilities, IE a bit below it, Avant browser, Firefox. Same with the 2015 edition. Flash didn't even make it in the top 20. And yes, they also evaluated it.
pluma 11y ago
Great! Now I'll no longer see these "Click to Play" placeholders instead of the intrusive animated ads. I'll finally be able to experience the intrusive animated ads the way they were meant to be seen. ... Yay?
dsfyu404ed 11y ago
I'm sure this decision made them a fair number of enemies in the far east...
b_a_c_o_n 11y ago
I'm a flash dev in my 30s, never made as much money as I am making now. Flash is not dead, it's changing, it moved to embedded devices and has blazing performance results. As usual, a decade ahead of where the web is at. http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air.html http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air.html Haters gotta hate! (-__-)
- sn0v 11y ago
  Curious here, what do you use it for on embedded devices?
  - b_a_c_o_n 11y ago
    Sorry sir, meant 'mobile' devices

211 points by mukyu 11y ago

ok, now we need spotify to make a move

Cool. Now if only Amazon would eat its own dogfood. Their Prime Music/Cloud library music player still requires Flash in order to use.

gcb0 11y ago
do as i say, not as i do? the video reviews are flash still too.
pki 11y ago
Now if only the music licencing services backing Prime don't require flash and DRM ..
- chaostheory 11y ago
  Does Netflix still require flash?
  - pki 11y ago
    Silverlight is required on browsers that do not support EME
    - ascagnel_ 11y ago
      Can EME be used in streaming music players, like Prime Music or Spotify?
drewg123 11y ago
Yes, I just discovered this when I moved to a FreeBSD desktop using Chromium, where there is no flash.
jo909 11y ago
Amazon is not doing this with the intention of "killing" flash. They do this because flash ads are now no longer seen by a large enough group of users which makes them bad advertising vehicles. Maybe at some point the Prime Music people will decide that a large enough group of users are no longer able to use their service, but that is a totally different decision with different motivations.

larsiusprime 11y ago

If we want to speed up the demise of flash, there are several roots that need to be whacked simultaneously: 1. Tons of existing flash content people want to access 2. Give current flash devs a reasonable alternative The first one is a thorny problem and is somewhat solved by things like Shumway but still needs more work. As for the second, things like Unity and HTML5 have not covered all of flash dev's use cases, so only some of them have switched over. I think OpenFL (a Haxe-based reimplementation of the Flash API -- not the flash PLAYER) is our best hope for that: http://www.openfl.org http://www.openfl.org http://www.haxe.org http://www.haxe.org Devs can keep their current flash workflows but export to non-flash targets, specifically native C++ (supports mac/win/linux, iOS/Android) and HTML5 (with canvas, DOM, or WebGL rendering). They can also use SWF-based vector animation assets, and even integrate with the Flash CC player. And it's all open source. Flash has been "dying" for years, but if we really want it to bite the dust, we need to give people a better way to make their content that doesn't depend on a plugin. EDIT: Video of OpenFL integrating with the Flash CC editor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU

dajobat 11y ago
Agreed. I work for a business that provides fairly heavy RIAs, which we custom build based on customer needs on (typically) very short time frames. The applications are used by thousands of different users on massively varied combinations of OS and browser, and the flash+flex stack is the only way we can develop robust apps to the required deadlines. It's a shame but it's the way it is currently.
marquis 11y ago
Media players: browsers don't have native support for H.264 over HLS or RTMP, and MPEG-Dash seems native to Chrome only. If the browsers could accept these natively, this would certainly speed flash's demise. Until then, what are the alternatives?
- samsonradu 11y ago
  Exactly. Much of the live streaming on the web defaults to flash, the alternatives (hls, rtsp, webrtc) are all underperforming.

sp332 11y ago

You know Flash is dead when Homestar Runner says it's dead! http://www.homestarrunner.com/flashisdead.html http://www.homestarrunner.com/flashisdead.html For those who don't know, this site was a legit phenomenon in the early 2000's, and it has always been 100% flash-based. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestar_Runner

madsohm 11y ago
The "flashisdead" page requires Flash, but I guess that's the joke?
- sp332 11y ago
  Definitely. Nothing on the site has been updated to non-flash (yet?).
toomuchtodo 11y ago
How hard would it be to convert those Flash videos into mp4s for archival in the IA? EDIT: Looks like they've been uploaded to Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom https://www.youtube.com/user/homestarrunnerdotcom
- martin-adams 11y ago
  Not quite so straight forward, a lot of their videos were interactive for hidden gems. They will be lost when moving to a linear file format.
  - sp332 11y ago
    With access to the source, it should be possible to export them to HTML5 using Adobe's flash authoring tools. I've never tried it though, and I don't know how good the HTML5 versions would be. Edit: huh, it kinda runs with Mozilla's Flash-runtime replacement, Shumway. Another few rounds of bugfixes and we might not need any Adobe code to play these files just as they are.

xngzng 11y ago

We need Google to remove bundling Flash player in Chrome. Chrome for OS X has Flash built-in. Not sure about other build.

thrillgore 11y ago
My understanding is that Chrome for Flash uses Pepper (a NaCl extension) for its plugin support so its not a vector for attack. You can always turn it off from chrome:plugins.
- wnevets 11y ago
  >plugin support so its not a vector for attack. I wanna say this is untrue, I vaguely recalling an exploit within the past month or so.
  - cpeterso 11y ago
    Hacking Team’s Flash 0-day: Potent enough to infect actual Chrome user http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/hacking-teams-flash-0day-potent-enough-to-infect-actual-chrome-user/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/07/hacking-teams-flash-...

e40 11y ago

I tried to uninstall Flash, but my bank (Citi) uses it for their one-time credit card # applet. And, I miss a lot of videos on the internets, but I can live without those. The bank thing, I cannot. (Yeah, I complained and was told moving away is "in the works.")

Shengbo 11y ago
Same thing here, my bank updated their entire website, except for internet banking which still uses flash.
cpncrunch 11y ago
I just have it disabled, and then enable it temporarily if I need it for a particular site.
Tloewald 11y ago
Trust banks to use the worst possible implementation of the worst possible technology at any given time.

edpichler 11y ago

The only thing I will miss on flash is the Copy to clippboard feature (e.g http://zeroclipboard.org/ http://zeroclipboard.org/). Is there other way to do the same when flash will be extinct?

dao- 11y ago
see document.execCommand("copy"), document.execCommand("cut"): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/execCommand https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/ex...
- exodust 11y ago
  So in other words... NO.
cpeterso 11y ago
Detecting and preferring HTML clipboard API is on ZeroClipboard's roadmap: https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/580 https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/580 https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/171 https://github.com/zeroclipboard/zeroclipboard/issues/171

zeveb 11y ago

I'm actually a bit conflicted about this. The nice thing about Flash-based media is that one can disable JavaScript (thus increasing one's privacy) and then enable Flash only to view a particular video (e.g. on Amazon Play); with JavaScript and HTML5, one generally has to enable JavaScript for the entire domain rather than a single video on a single page. Why would one want to disable JavaScript in the first place? Privacy & security: why enable a site to execute random code on one's own machine when all one wants to do is read some content?

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> Why would one want to disable JavaScript in the first place? Privacy & security: why enable a site to execute random code on one's own machine when all one wants to do is read some content? There are many reasons. Another is this: on most webpages (i.e. places you go to read text and maybe images and some videos; as opposed to web applications), JavaScript is an unnecessary waste of processing power, that only makes it harder for you to read in peace. It doesn't add value for user, so there's no reason to have it running in your browser.
deelowe 11y ago
Flash has had vulerabilities and executes arbitrary code as well... What's the difference? At least with javascript, there's only one attack vector (the browser itself). Flash requires a plugin to work properly.
- zeveb 11y ago
  > Flash has had vulerabilities and executes arbitrary code as well... What's the difference? It sure has! But it's nice to expose oneself to vulnerabilities only when absolutely necessary (e.g. to view a single video), rather than for every page currently loaded for a site.

eosrei 11y ago

Amazon is switching to JavaScript animated ads to support all devices. This isn't anything against Flash, this is a business decision to reach more eyeballs. Flash is fast. JavaScript/HTML5/WebGL/etc are just recently getting close to the performance we had in Flash 10+ years ago. Flash is perceived to be slow because it was used to make obtrusive advertising, like JavaScript is used now. The evil dictator has been replaced, with much fanfare, by a new evil dictator! An example from 2010 of Flash running in-browser 3D with millions of polygons and lighting effects: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szaXvTsoeVs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szaXvTsoeVs

Tloewald 11y ago
Flash's speed on desktops is not the main strike against it, although it was actually quite bad for many things (the 3d stuff worked better for it because it bypassed its aging 2d rendering engine which no-one left at Adobe understood or could fix). Flash's speed on mobile was abysmal and Adobe tried and failed to fix it for years (after Steve Jobs' famously pointed all this stuff out). The fact that Flash would store user information separately from the browser in such a way as to circumvent security and privacy models, and did so for years after Macromedia (i.e. pre-Adobe-merger) knew about it, and that Flash had and has as many vulnerabilities as any two operating systems is simply icing on the cake. Here's a discussion -- also from 2010 -- of Flash's abysmal 2d performance (which entailed fixing an example created explicitly to show how awesome Flash was): http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3362 http://loewald.com/blog/?p=3362 Bear in mind, this is Flash's nearly 20-year-old/mature rendering engine optimized to only do minimal screen updates against a five minute hack using a canvas. And, finally, you need Javascript anyway. Flash actually needs Javascript to even load properly (thanks to the stupid Eolas lawsuit), so it's a case of giving up one evil dictator while keeping a not-nearly-so-evil-and-much-more-useful dictator.
- mitchty 11y ago
  The hatred for flash from me is simple. On osx, almost ALL of my browser crashes had flash on the stack at the time things went belly up. That, plus flashes uncanny ability to peg a process at 100% for seemingly just moving images about made me not a huge fan. This doesn't mean javascript isn't getting as bad or worse now that things are moving to there, but at least the javascript engines aren't as horrible as the flash runtime was. But if these javascript ads start burning cpu and draining energy from my laptop battery there will be a whole lot more sites getting added to my local firewall rules.

cableshaft 11y ago

I've been wanting to update my existing Flash games (I've released 7 games) to something more modern, like HTML5+JS or (maybe) Unity, but I don't want to spend a ton of time learning a new stack and getting things working, as I really don't have the free time I used to. A few of the games have heavy use of graphics and animation also, that I don't really want to have to recreate manually. I've worked on games made with Unity and Cocos2d(ios) since then, but I'm really hoping there's some shortcut I'm not aware of. There's a ton of JS frameworks out there and it's hard to evaluate which would be worth the time and effort. Plus I really don't want to have to do this again in the future, so hopefully this can be something I do once and I'm good for the forseeable future (which is why I'm leaning towards HTML5 + JS). Some cross-platform capabilities would be nice too. Example of the heavy art/animation: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/187047 If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate it.

larsiusprime 11y ago
OpenFL! http://www.openfl.org/learn/tutorials/using-swf-assets/ http://www.openfl.org/learn/tutorials/using-swf-assets/ http://community.openfl.org/t/using-swf-assets-tutorial-feedback-wanted/1450 http://community.openfl.org/t/using-swf-assets-tutorial-feed... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhE07Y9TUJU That's as close as you get to keeping your existing workflow and maintaining your assets. It's really close IMHO and works well. Also there's some scripts that can translate As3->Haxe and take care of 95% of the work of porting the code, and then OpenFL has the same API as flash does so your API calls are all the same. Alternatively FLUMP can be used if you just want to export assets and use a totally different framework: http://threerings.github.io/flump/ http://threerings.github.io/flump/

shawkinaw 11y ago

I'm actually torn on this, because the fact is that Flash can do things that you realistically can't do any other way. In my case, I've written a couple of video conferencing apps that need web-web and web-Android connectivity, and Flash/AIR is still definitely the easiest way to do that sort of thing. WebRTC has promise, but it requires a reasonably recent browser (and not Safari), and until very recently it didn't work in WebViews on the Android side.

exodust 11y ago

I have Flash enabled all the time. No probs here. Smooth and efficient. I have no agenda or need to kill it. So much viral hate. Plugins have a right to exist. You gonna declare war on all plugins or just Flash? HTML doesn't necessarily run its full suite of tricks on all browsers and platforms. And my iPad3 often slows to a crawl because of bloated well-known websites. Browser memory maxes out and I can't even switch tabs without full page reloading. Inefficiency follows poor technical design no matter what technology is used. Is javascript next because of those trendy promo pops where they think you're leaving? Kill everything that sux, or whatever technology it comes from. Kill it all and dance on its grave like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll retreat to our native apps with virtual coins and account validation. We'll share our contact lists without knowing that we did, and we won't be blocking ads because we can't. Tried the Youtube HTML player once. That was one hell of a rough and buggy experience. Switched back to Flash. Clicked a link to youtube in iOS Safari more than once, and got auto-switched to the youtube app rather than the video play in Safari. I don't know what or who to hate about that, I'm just tired.

brandonwamboldt 11y ago
Flash is a closed source binary plugin with a long history of security vulnerabilities that Adobe was slow to patch. For the most part, JavaScript engines are open source, don't have a history of security vulnerabilities (to the same severity), and are typically patched quickly.
- x0x0 11y ago
  (linking to myself) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9875333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9875333 It's been more than a year since there's been a month without multiple CVE severity 10 bugs.
- koonsolo 11y ago
  Here is a 2014 vulnerability report of Secunia: https://secunia.com/resources/vulnerability-review/update-all/ https://secunia.com/resources/vulnerability-review/update-al... Google Chrome is at the top with most vulnerabilities, IE a bit below it, Avant browser, Firefox. Same with the 2015 edition. Flash didn't even make it in the top 20. And yes, they also evaluated it.

pluma 11y ago

Great! Now I'll no longer see these "Click to Play" placeholders instead of the intrusive animated ads. I'll finally be able to experience the intrusive animated ads the way they were meant to be seen. ... Yay?

dsfyu404ed 11y ago

I'm sure this decision made them a fair number of enemies in the far east...

b_a_c_o_n 11y ago

I'm a flash dev in my 30s, never made as much money as I am making now. Flash is not dead, it's changing, it moved to embedded devices and has blazing performance results. As usual, a decade ahead of where the web is at. http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air.html http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air.html Haters gotta hate! (-__-)

sn0v 11y ago
Curious here, what do you use it for on embedded devices?
- b_a_c_o_n 11y ago
  Sorry sir, meant 'mobile' devices