Flash In The Pan

Ben Elder · Post by **Ben Elder** » 20 Sep 2016 1:27 pm

I'm sick of the nearly hourly need to update out-of-date Flash Player. (No question, just venting.) Steve Jobs' disdain of it seems well-founded. Is Adobe a division of Takata? (Not a question, just a release of pent-up snark.)

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 20 Sep 2016 7:21 pm

Just uninstall Flash and pretend you have a Mac instead of a Windows machine. Eventually, rather very soon, webmasters in all walks of life will come to realize that fewer and fewer visitors are downloading Flash content (it shows up in the access logs). A lot of commenters also post comments to the effect that they cannot view a video because they haven't got Flash Player.

If any of you reading this are using Flash applets on your web pages, the time is now to begin converting them into .OGG, .WebM, or .MP4 format. You can then convert your pages into the modern standard HTML 5.0 and use HTML 5 Video tags.

Hint: You can use VLC Player to convert Adobe Flash .FLV files into new formats needed for HTML 5. As for MP4, it has certain licensing issues if you have a commercial website that actually sells video content.

Ben Elder · Post by **Ben Elder** » 20 Sep 2016 7:48 pm

Don't have to pretend: I am a Mac person. But I've used Windows, etc. on the job for 18 years and they've presented no compelling case for defecting. (Damned if ya do, damned if ya don't.)

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 21 Sep 2016 7:17 am

Well, as much of a PITA it is keeping Flash Player updated, it is a much bigger pain trying to recover from a ransomware infection that occurred via a Flash exploit that was recently patched by Adobe.

BTW: Adobe updates are aligned with Windows Updates. They normally happen on Patch Tuesday, which is always the second Tuesday of the month. However, Adobe has been known to push out of band Flash updates to patch zero day exploits being used in the wild. The Windows version of Flash has an automatic update notification option. I don't know if the Mac version has that or not.