R.I.P. Flash?

[MMC]

Hey guys, I heard eventually flash won't be a thing anymore. Can someone explain why this is? What's it being replaced with? Don't a lot of people still use flash? What will happen to old flash games and videos?

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[KingBran]

Anytime a software sunsets people will keep it alive with freeware wrappers and such.

 

[RandV]

Hey guys, I heard eventually flash won't be a thing anymore. Can someone explain why this is? What's it being replaced with? Don't a lot of people still use flash? What will happen to old flash games and videos?

There's a lot of technical details involved here, I'm not an expert but let me see if I can give a simple explanation. HTML 4.0 is the standard language the internet runs on, but it was introduced in 1997. That was about the time the internet really started blowing up so no one wanted to mess with it, but being developed in 1997 there were a lot of features missing needed for an evolving internet.

So Flash is nothing more than a propietery program that happened to become the unofficial standard and only exists because it does a lot of things HTML 4.0 can't do, like play music or video's. Flash isn't a perfect solution though and it comes with a lot of it's own problems.

So when people are saying Flash won't be a thing anymore, it's because after 2 decades on HTML 4 the internet is finally moving towards a new standard HTML 5. And HTML 5 has built in support to do everything that Flash used to do for you, so it's going to start getting phased out.

It's still going to take a good while before Flash is really dead though. HTML 5 took such a long time coming out because it requires the internet browser people are using to be able to run it, and this problem is pretty much solved now. But all the existing content built in HTML 4 and using Flash isn't just going to update itself, so to browse that content the user will still need Flash installed. So as long as this old stuff exists and people are still using it Flash will remain relevent.

 

[John Price]

Browsers have been trying to kill flash (looking at you Google Chrome) for some time now but just too many media applications depend on it to stream video

 

[aleshemsky83]

Browsers have been trying to kill flash (looking at you Google Chrome) for some time now but just too many media applications depend on it to stream video

Google chrome has built in flash.

 

[MMC]

There's a lot of technical details involved here, I'm not an expert but let me see if I can give a simple explanation. HTML 4.0 is the standard language the internet runs on, but it was introduced in 1997. That was about the time the internet really started blowing up so no one wanted to mess with it, but being developed in 1997 there were a lot of features missing needed for an evolving internet.

So Flash is nothing more than a propietery program that happened to become the unofficial standard and only exists because it does a lot of things HTML 4.0 can't do, like play music or video's. Flash isn't a perfect solution though and it comes with a lot of it's own problems.

So when people are saying Flash won't be a thing anymore, it's because after 2 decades on HTML 4 the internet is finally moving towards a new standard HTML 5. And HTML 5 has built in support to do everything that Flash used to do for you, so it's going to start getting phased out.

It's still going to take a good while before Flash is really dead though. HTML 5 took such a long time coming out because it requires the internet browser people are using to be able to run it, and this problem is pretty much solved now. But all the existing content built in HTML 4 and using Flash isn't just going to update itself, so to browse that content the user will still need Flash installed. So as long as this old stuff exists and people are still using it Flash will remain relevent.

This was very informative, thank you.

Browsers have been trying to kill flash (looking at you Google Chrome) for some time now but just too many media applications depend on it to stream video

But why?

 

[Lost Horizons]

This was very informative, thank you.


But why?

security is a main reason it's going away. Hackers exploit it all thhe time that why it has to be updated virtually weekly.
Adobe Plans to Kill the Flash Media Player

 

[John Price]

Google chrome has built in flash.

It disables it by default.

 

[aleshemsky83]

It disables it by default.

Dont think thats right. Ive never messed with that setting and even when it did stop flash players from playing, there would always be a prompt to enable it. I dont think it even does that anymore, tsn.cas video player which I believe is flash based just plays automatically, and checking my settings now, it says its set to ask first, which I'm pretty sure I never messed with.

I just installed chrome two days ago but am logged into my account so maybe it switched that setting due to my account.