Firefox now likes to block it by default...

So does Chrome. Also a lot of people on corporate networks with draconian security policies have had Flash blocked for years.

The biggest 'thing' about Flash today is all the major web media players ( YouTube, Blip, e.t.c. ) use it

But they don't default to it. If you want to view Flash in Youtube now you have to deliberately change to it in your settings. They started supporting a HTML5 option back around when iPhone launched and then just started defaulting to it about 6 years ago.

HTML5 + WebGL is not so great on phones and tablets.

But then neither was Flash. Even when Google was praising the Android because it supported it and the iPhone didn't, it was still very hit and miss.

On iOS when you couldn't run flash inside a browser, you could build it into a standalone app for the platform.

You could but at the time you reached the threshold bundle size that was permitted OTA (A do nothing Air to iOS program is 12MB). I think machinarium just managed to squeeze onto the iPhone.

Flash is still useful as a toolset and API. Adobe just need to drop the runtime and make it so all flash content just compiles to minified javascript.

The problem we have is that Flash has been hated on for at least the last 15 years to various degrees but currently nothing which would replace it is in a fit state to do so.

JavaScript remains a power hungry box of crazy.
WebGL is a mess.
The day all web browsers agree on what a standard is I suspect a portal to a hell dimension will open so the devil can appear to complain about it freezing over.

The web remains an utter clusterfuck of a mess of broken standards which are showing no signs of being fixed because everyone is too busy running onwards to the next circlejerk of a cool thing to use...

Honestly, the fact anything 'works' on a day to day basis is a continued source of a amusement and surprise for me.

I uninstalled Flash for the last time 6 months ago when it managed to bluescreen my PC for the first time in years. There have been a few videos that wouldn't play.. but it's rare..

Putting the vulnerability aside, I still like flash for it's "stability" with heavy contents. It crashes when it gets that heavy, but compared to html5 benchmarks I've ran on video streaming sites it's still less buggy, I hope html5 will soon come to a term where it's as stable as flash once was with heavy loads.

Another thing is that people who learned flash and perfected their skills would find themselves jobless/useless. Historical flash game websites will have to do a complete makeover as well.

Flash died years ago. That some people have their head in the sand and haven't noticed... that is kind of worrying.

Flash-only content has never been available on iOS. The flash player for Android was deprecated years ago. All of the major streaming services (i.e. Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video) use Silverlight in favour of flash. Corporate networks/policies have blocked the flash player on and off for about as long as I can remember. And so on...

Could Adobe salvage the situation? Maybe. Open-sourcing the flash plugin would be a good start. It would have been a better start 5 years ago. That way flash could be vetted for security holes by a trusted 3rd party, and each platform could employ their own release cycle. Will they do that? Probably not.

Honestly it seems a bit pointless to target JUST flash, when there are so many other problem programs out there. I agree that flash needs to go, but flash needs to be the first of many rejected technologies if the intention is to build secure systems. Been arguing for years with people that even things like memory mapped IO device drivers need to go, and any program deployed as binary needs to go, and "secure" programs need to all be formally validated vs code contracts, and '"unsecure" programs need to be sand-boxed to the hilt, and and and.

Burning adobe to the ground is a good first effort, but it shouldn't be the last effort.

Flash needs to be killed yesterday.

Thank god people are getting serious about this. Also, can we please eradicate adobe acrobat, and embedded Microsoft office plugins/extensions?

The real problem is that out of all of the technologies used on the web, Flash is the LEAST shitty. Everything else is worse.

The real problem is that out of all of the technologies used on the web, Flash is the LEAST shitty. Everything else is worse.

Apparently except when it comes to governments and high-paid hackers installing spyware onto your PC. The recent disclosure of a large cache of previously unknown flash-based exploits (plus flash's long history of security holes) means that browser vendors really don't have an option but to disable it right now.