After the recent security kerfuffles with Flash, there's been a lot talk about killing Flash. Like, the head of facebook security saying we should kill flash. Or Mozilla having to release emergency patches just to block Flash from getting it's grimy hands on your computer. This is causing more people to start banging the drum to hunt down Flash like a vampire and burn its corpse at the stake (or do you put the stake through the vampire...does it need to be on fire?) and it's starting to seem like a lot of people couldn't be happier to see it gone.

So we kill Flash - is Html5 and WebGL in any state to replace it just yet? I've had a very tough time trying to get games to work cross-browser in Html5 (with it's limited feature set compared to Flash) and WebGL still seems to be in it's infancy (see Unity5).

What about all the historic content like Newgrounds, Kongregate, heck the majority of online games made for the last decade? If Flash is killed off, how much of internet history goes up in flames overnight? I can't imagine many people would (or even could) port their games away from Flash.

I don't know what the right answer is, but I feel like we have at least some responsibility to maintain the history of the internet. Blocking off a decades worth of content with no alternatives is a scary proposition.

HTML5 standard is no were near what Flash is able to deliver, though some browsers are able to 'speed up' JavaScript execution a lot.

The biggest 'thing' about Flash today is all the major web media players ( YouTube, Blip, e.t.c. ) use it, and it is still the best way to deliver an interactive / 'content heavy' web page.

Flash has been a dead end ever since the iPhone came out with zero flash support. The mobile web is so important now, that no new/big service relies on flash any more. Uninstall it and mostly old/historic content will break.

If desktop browsers disable it by default, but allow you to enable it per-site (like how we're asked if we'd like to allow pop-ups these days), it won't really be a big deal.

Modern browsers do deal with JS quite well. You can run UE4 or Unity games in a plug-in-less browser these days!
Plus moving forward, it looks like bytecode for the web might finally happen with WebAssembly, which finally solves the Java/Flash/Silverlight/etc problem.

For ongoing compatibility, Adobe should build a WebAssembly version of the Flash runtime, so old flash content can run safely in new browsers :lol:

Firefox now likes to block it by default... (I updated it because it started to pester, then it got blocked again by the next day, so I don't have much hope left for it by this point)

The biggest problem right now is video streaming, since doing it over HTML5 is kind of a crapshot, and many sites only have Flash players for video streaming. So, kill Flash and you'll kill most sites that stream video and aren't YouTube (and even YouTube won't show every video using the HTML5 player). You'd need to find a way around this. Everything else that matters is probably safe by now.

This is all kind of meaningless. You can run Flash scripts in HTML5 using things like Shumway (WIP). There are

The calls are to end the Adobe plugin, not the programming language or API. The latter are mighty okay. Things like WebAssembly will just make it even easier to compile SWF into fast code on the fly in the browser without going anywhere near Adobe's security-hole-ridden implementation.

This is the age where you can compile Unreal3 and run it in a freakin' browser.

HTML5 standard is no were near what Flash is able to deliver, though some browsers are able to 'speed up' JavaScript execution a lot.

The biggest 'thing' about Flash today is all the major web media players ( YouTube, Blip, e.t.c. ) use it, and it is still the best way to deliver an interactive / 'content heavy' web page.

But many of them also use HTML5 as an alternative (like youtube for example)

HTML5 + WebGL is fine on the PC where virtual memory is measured in gigabytes and you've got 8x4GHz cores. Less so if you've got a computer that is a few years old. It also runs great on browsers that update themselves continuously with new software, less so on anything other than the Big Three cores (Trident, Gecko, and Webkit).

HTML5 + WebGL is not so great on phones and tablets. The same sites that work great on a PC are often a slide show on devices, that is if it runs at all and doesn't crash the browser. Even those based on Webkit and Gecko still struggle to handle fancy pages, especially those with tons of expansive style sheets and extensive script-loaded content.

In spite of all its problems, flash can (and often is) compiled into something that can run native on desktop computers and on mobile devices. On iOS when you couldn't run flash inside a browser, you could build it into a standalone app for the platform.

Perhaps Flash has reached its maximum development lifecycle, that its developers are having more and more nightmares patching the behemoth. Just like Microsoft and its Windows, at some point Adobe has to rewrite/rebrand Flash.

I am obviously speculating this as I don't work at Adobe, nor do I know the state of Flash development. However, the patterns of a degrading behemoth program have starting to emanate -- too big with too many holes. Who knows how many developers have engraved their fingerprints on the Flash's source code.

But many of them also use HTML5 as an alternative (like youtube for example)

Yeah but not all, I'm still waiting for Nico Nico to support HTML5 for example =/

But many of them also use HTML5 as an alternative (like youtube for example)

Yeah but not all, I'm still waiting for Nico Nico to support HTML5 for example =/

Live streaming is probably the biggest thing keeping Flash alive at this point, because browser support for HLS is so spotty.