Other runtimes and plugins going through what Flash suffered a few years ago

Other runtimes and plugins going through what Flash suffered a few years ago

by Matt Bury -
Number of replies: 4
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Remember "click to activate"? And then SWFObject was born to circumvent it. It looks like the same thing is happening again to other runtimes and plugins:

Firefox to block content based on Java, Reader, and Silverlight: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/firefox-to-block-content-based-on-java-reader-and-silverlight/

Just to put things into perspective, Symantec's security threat lists generally come out with Javascript at the top, with Apple's Quicktime not far behind. Nobody seems to be screaming that the sky's falling in about those.

Oracle have already issued some comprehensive updates for JRE. Let's hope they're as successful at dealing with the "drive by attacks" as Flash Player has been.

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In reply to Matt Bury

Re: Other runtimes and plugins going through what Flash suffered a few years ago

by Alexandro Colorado -

I think Java applets are not recomended in General, I would preffer browser technology like Javascript, because it's faster to load. Java has become even sloweer with their Java Security checkout. Just try our very own Equation plugin and you can be sure to wait much more time than necesary to write a simple root square.

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In reply to Alexandro Colorado

Re: Other runtimes and plugins going through what Flash suffered a few years ago

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers

Good point, we should be going with open web standards wherever possible. However, I'm not aware of any Javascript or HTML5 technologies that can effectively replace the audio/video recording, streaming, web conferencing, etc. functions in Moodle yet (browser developers can't even agree on CODECs). We have to work with what we have.

The NanoGong and Audio Recorder plugins are particularly popular and useful.

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In reply to Matt Bury

Re: Other runtimes and plugins going through what Flash suffered a few years ago

by Samantha Wheeler -

agreed... thought maybe flash would end up being a viable platform for a while there... but head to head with steve jobs at his final hour proved to be untenable... mixed

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In reply to Samantha Wheeler

Re: Other runtimes and plugins going through what Flash suffered a few years ago

by Matt Bury -
Picture of Plugin developers

It ain't over yet. Adobe are pushing hard into the higher end online browser based gaming market for PCs and Macs as well as pushing the same graphics and gaming capabilities for mobile devices through AIR and cross compiling (one code base - many platforms). The speed and agility with which developers can prototype games in Flash and the sheer number of skilled, experienced developers and a healthy vibrant community still makes it an ideal platform. In fact, some of the most popular and successful games on iOS are developed in Flash: http://gaming.adobe.com/showcase/ and distributed via iTunes instead of browsers.

Additionally, many of the popular graphics and physics engines and libraries for JS are being ported from AS 3.0, e.g. CreateJS and Box2D. HTML5+JS+CSS game development and mobile game development would be a lot slower without the support of Flash. Any Flash developer with experience of AS 2.0 will find coding in JS using the popular open source libraries ported from AS 3.0 to JS pretty easy. Flash is still enormously influential.

It's not that Apple don't want Flash, it's that they don't want competitors for iTunes. That's where they make a large share of their money. They're also doing their best to kill off second hand device markets by making batteries irreplaceable and parts unserviceable... which also makes them unrecycleable.

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