Flash menus (please wait until this uber cool animation finishes to render before you can click on that link) Flash menus (please install that macromedia plugin before you can actually use this website) By providing a minimal set of supported codecs it was setting a defacto standard for video streaming. youtube, etc.: Flash was overcoming the codec problem we had in the past. So you next question is probably: What could have been such a bad experience? Probably not a just one. So somehow, they must have made so bad experiences with flash, that they do not want to get it for free or even someone else to get it. I think 90% of those who are against it, are against it, because they want to forget flash and never see it again. Why should people be against open-sourcing it? It would be great to be able to break out of that, by having a kind of "C foreign function" interface for the web. But vendors have always been steering what you can and cannot do based on business and other interests. And if someone invents free-floating holograms, you can't add them to your page. You can't make the browser window partially-transparent or use native looking widgets. You can't make a friend-to-friend file sharing tool, without a central server, that uses your Facebook and Google contacts to find peers (I've tried). There is a large category of apps that you cannot make in HTML, for example anything truly P2P (not WebRTC, but based on real sockets). If you need some native feature, browser vendors can force you to use a native app and thus go through their app store (think Safari on iOS). You could also argue in the opposite direction: Without a plugin architecture, you are at the mercy of the browser developers to implement a certain functionality. The issue here is the one Stallman has been harping on since the dawn of time - closed source is unmaintainable in an extremely profound way. The closed source drivers (essentially plugins) tethered the linux community to the technically obsolete X server and would have crippled the kernel in a similar way if the kernel devs had accepted closed source plugins.Īpple did wonders driving open standards on the web with the explicit acknowledgement that popular closed source plugins were too dangerous for their platform to implement. A very interesting case study was graphics drivers circa 2005. The linux kernel is an example how an open-source-only plugin system works technical wonders. Often for legal reasons and not technical, or because a proprietary vendor is fighting back (eg video patents the first case, Skype protocol the second). Typically they don't have a feature I want. Open source plugins cause a lot less grief. In the interim, the big grief-causers are usually closed source plugins that crash the host. Speaking as a clueless user closed source plugins, sooner or later, go away. That they are relatively secure is only due to the massive amounts of human-years that went into polishing and bug fixing in the recent decade.) Current browser are horrible monolithic giants, that only mega-corporations (and Mozilla -)) can maintain. But at least in theory, it seems to me that the best architecture would be a minimal browser (just a layout engine), and everything as a plugin. Because the Flash implementation was so bad, we were led to believe that plugins are bad per se. (I can't help but wonder if we are making a huge historical mistake here by the way. An open source flash player will most likely be used standalone, and not in a browser. All mayor browsers are dropping support for plugins anyway. I don't know if Adobe/Macromedia could have done better, or if the backwards compatibility requirements make it impossible to maintain, but I'd like to see for myself.Īnyway, you have no reason to be afraid. Do you think Flash is insecure in principle, or in implementation? I think it is very much a problem of the implementation.
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