'Occupy Flash' Aims to End the Tyranny of Adobe's Plug-In
The name is crass, but the sentiment is appreciated
Where once it bestrode the Internet like a Colossus, Adobe's ubiquitous Flash plug-in has finally begun to fall on hard times. Shortly after Adobe announced its decision to halt development on the mobile version of Flash, a group calling itself 'Occupy Flash' - ignore for now the fact that the same trivializes a rather urgent societal economic problem - has piled in on them in aggressive terms normally reserved for political screeds.
"Flash Player is dead," Occupy Flash's manifesto reads. "Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates."
Occupy Flash's take on Adobe ranges from technical to personal. "It's a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Websites that rely on Flash present a completely inconsistent (and often unusable) experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don't use a desktop browser."
Also singling out security flaws, they're in the same camp with the late Steve Jobs, who started his own spat with Adobe in 2010, calling Adobe 'lazy' and later, publishing a lengthy post on Apple.com, further articulating his beef with the Flash plug-in.
Occupy Flash acknowledges that Adobe, by abandoning mobile Flash to focus on HTML 5 in future mobile development, would appear to have become irrelevant. However, their goal, cheekily focused on encouraging Internet users to deactivate the Flash plug-in in their desktop browsers, is larger than any one company. Simply put, they aim to force a completely open standard on the web by encouraging users to 'invalidate' technologies that don't meet such standards. Will it work? It's a worthy goal likely to be slow-going, at least while so much of the non-mobile web runs on Flash, admittedly render many websites, like Google Analytics, less usable. (Full disclosure - I won't be deactivating Flash, at least not now). But as the intent isn't to kneecap Adobe as an entity, only to speed up the transition to an HTML 5 future, a 'movement', if you can call it that, like Occupy Flash might put pressure on developers to do just that.
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This is totally ridiculous:
1) Flash has less security vulnerabilities than HTML/Javascript (at least on Windows - check the Microsoft security report for details)
2) You get regular updates to FIX issues. Welcome them.
3) Millions of web pages use flash; do they honestly believe that they will all be rewritten in something else?
4) Cross browser compatibility is a nightmare. It's not a concern with Flash. Doesn't matter what HTML version you're using the fact of the matter is you'll have n companies implementing standards slightly differently. HTML 5 may have more features but it will not solve this issue.
5) Most importantly, people just don't give a damn if it's open or not. Most users don't even know that they are using Flash on a web page. All they want is the page to display. The tech users who do care are in the small percentage. Businesses nor people will be motivated to update site content for a small amount of people.
It's good that people care for open standards but some perspective would be good. There are far more pressing things to protest about.