Working towards a Flash free web
I think it's safe to say that a lot of us are dreaming of the day when Adobe Flash becomes a footnote in the history of the web, but we're not there yet. However, the anti-Flash movement is certainly gaining steam. It's already dead on mobile, and earlier this month, Mozilla began blocking Flash in its Firefox browser by default due to "publicly known vulnerabilities." Now Twitch is talking about leaving Flash in the rear view mirror.
Twitch as talked the talk before, though in a post to Reddit, a staff member for the live streaming video platform insists that the company is walking the walk, albeit slowly. Twitch's destination? HTML5, of course.
According to the staff member, the underlying HTML5 video playback has been undergoing internal testing for the past few months and works famously at this point. However, the challenge for Twitch in leaving Flash behind is it's used for "EVERYTHING" in the moment, in all-caps even. That means having to port every feature one-by-one into HTML/JS.
The other holdup is that browser support for MediaSource Extensions (MSE) isn't fully available for Firefox and older Internet Explorer and Safari builds.
"So, we decided to split the HTML5 player into two releases: 1) move the UI into HTML/JS and 2) move the video into HTML/JS," the staff member explained. "The new player UI is pretty swanky and we'll start rolling it out to users in a few weeks. You'll notice the new HTML interface immediately but the underlying video player will still be Flash."
Once Twitch gets to that point, it will more aggressively pursue moving to HTML5 entirely, starting with an alpha release.
While the waiting part sucks, at least there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's pretty promising. According to the staff member, the unoptimized HTML5 video player uses a third of the CPU of Adobe's Flash Player and a "fraction of the memory." And of course there are security benefits to moving away from Flash.
If you're rooting for Flash to fall -- and who isn't these days? -- this is a big deal. As time goes on, Flash continues to lose ground. In addition to what Mozilla did, Google killed Flash as the default player for YouTube back in January, while more recently Facebook's Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos took to Twitter to encourage Adobe "to announce the end-of-life date for Flash."
The more recent outcries are both the result of pent up anger over Flash Player's history of insecurity, as well as frustration over critical security vulnerabilities that came to light when a 400GB cache of files were stolen from Hacking Team, an Italian firm that sells surveillance and exploit software to different governments.
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From maximumpc
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