It is nearly five years since Steve Jobs published his “Thoughts on Flash” letter and streaming video giant YouTube yesterday announced it is making the HTML5 video player the default to users accessing the site via Chrome, Safari 8, Internet Explorer 11 and Firefox.
Calling the move a "critical step forward," YouTube engineering manager Richard Leider detailed the company's reasoning in a post to the official YouTube Engineering blog. It represents the culmination of four years of work, and was enabled by several recent additions to the HTML5 video specification.
While living nicely without flash on iOS for about 6 years, and using the excellent ClickToFlash Safari extension which would block all flash content, and only load it on demand has made surfing the web flash-free almost a reality. YouTube remained as one of the last hurdles to hitting the Uninstall button.
Adobe’s Flash player has been plagued by a series of security issues and was one of the few real attack vectors that has even been exploited on OS X for bringing malware to some user systems. Most recently, the company acknowledged a critical vulnerability in the Flash player that could allow an attacker to take over users' computers simply by directing them to a website. It has also been a CPU hog – another good reason to let it go, and even more so if you are on a laptop running off the batteries.
Mac users wanting to uninstall it should go to
/Applications/Utilities/Adobe Flash Player Install Manager.app
and click the Uninstall button.
Does Flash have a place in OpenSim?
In our view, none whatsoever.
Many of the viewers will let you use flash based content such as games in-world but we find it pointless, and it only adds more complexity, memory and processing overhead to the viewers. Every developer that lets it go from their viewer should be applauded.
The same with marketing and support sites for grids; it is time to uninstall it from your websites for good.