What about the game industry? What about the animation industry? HTML5 doesn't replace Flash for those arenas. It's blatant ignorance for individuals to even come out and claim Adobe should set and end of life date for the product. Sure Flash has had some issues, and they came at the expense of FutureWave Software, Macromedia, and Adobe moving faster than anyone in the web industry at the time, with different goals, that just happen to now be of interest to web developers at large.

The reality is that web tech has just eaten into and provided standardized variants of features that Flash/Shockwave has had for over TWO decades. Yeah, real progressive of the web community. _Slow clap._

In the gaming arena, you can look at http://html5games.com/ or http://www.kongregate.com/html5-games or http://www.html5games.net/ or even just Google "HTML5 Games". Based on all of those HTML5 games it's clear that HTML5 can replace Flash in the gaming arena. There's only 1 place where HTML5 games and Flash games are really that different - on mobile devices (Flash doesn't work well if at all, HTML5 works like a charm).

As for animations, doing some simple Googling will bring up results that also show HTML5 can replace Flash: https://www.freshdesignweb.com/examples-html5-animation/

HTML5 doesn't replace Flash. It's certainly an alternative, like my engine is an alternative to LÖVE, but it doesn't replace it. This is akin to saying SDL replaces lwjgl, or Unity replaces UE4.

HTML5 without WebGL doesn't match the functionality offered by flash, even for just 2D content.

HTML5 with WebGL runs fairly poorly on a lot of machines, and not at all on many as well.

I'm not really sad to see flash go (though I truly hope there is a way to preserve it's content, and would be very sad to see that go), but HTML5 is a ways off from providing the feature set and reliability of Flash.

That's Flash's domain predominantly, and that's what it does best out of its feature set.

But I see your point and expect HTML5 to improve, but it is along way from being what a lot people think it is.

That would be because Chrome on iOS is not Chrome, it's a wrapper around a UIWebView with all the performance pitfalls that entails. Go try it in Safari on iOS or Chrome on Android if you want a proper performance comparison.

The world has just changed around Flash. The performance and security problems, which were an annoyance 7 years ago, are today seemingly fatal--not least because Adobe has spent 7 years trying to fix them and failing.

At some point it seems like we should just throw up our hands and invoke the sunk cost fallacy.

Flash needs to go for the sake of our security, not to climb up to a bleeding edge. The security risks are way beyond unacceptable.

Perhaps you could argue that some similar functions in HTML5 have just as serious of threats but additionally lack an off switch??

As for accessing legacy content, treat Flash like Ebola and keep an old machine around for that? It would help if the old machine has no writable flash or drives (or at least includes a non-writable restore image if there's a drive).

If our machines have writable flash for the network adapter, video card, hard drive, bios, and a few other things, how secure can they be? Even our flash isn't safe from Flash.

But your main point is a very good one. There are way too many people in the industry right now complaining about those older technologies who think that the world somehow magically owes them updates to 10-20 years of past work, just because their bleeding edge browser-native tools have finally reached the point in the very recent past when they can do some of the same work to a useful degree.

There are also way too many people moaning about how these plug-ins are such horrendous security problems while ignoring the facts that (a) every major browser also has a less than stellar track record on security issues, with Firefox and Chrome patching numerous vulnerabilities in updates every few weeks, and (b) moving the more advanced, and often hardware-accelerated, functionality from plug-ins to native browser capabilities isn't really reducing the area of the attack surface, it's just reshaping it. Given these facts, there is little reason to assume that browsers will inherently be more secure just because plug-ins were forced out in favour of native technologies. As others have been pointing out today, the reverse might actually be true, because at least the plug-ins have a degree of isolation and click-to-play safeguards are now widespread, while the trend with browsers (again, particularly Firefox and Chrome) is to remove obvious settings that would allow users to turn off certain functions.

By adding HTML5 video and now its DRM-related infrastructure, WebGL, and other features that developers used to use Flash/Java for, you are also increasing the attack surface of the browser "package" as a whole. The comparison is a perfectly reasonable one.

Unless more than one browser uses, say, the same video codecs, or the same third-party DRM-related module, or the same system services for doing hardware-accelerated 3D rendering.

There may be some marginal advantage to having different implementations in different browsers, but marginal is probably all it is. Realistically, as things we used to do in the likes of Flash or Java move into browser-native implementations, there is still no reason to assume that the people writing those implementations will magically produce completely secure implementations where no-one ever has before.

Stick it in our history books as an example of what happens when you tie yourself to a proprietary platform?

I'll miss some of the content to be sure, but ultimately the security of hundreds of millions of users trumps nostalgia and old Flash games from the 90s.

If there's a good way to preserve the content in some way, I'm all for it, but justifying the continued use of Flash purely on the grounds of historical content is IMO pretty weak.

Side note: a lot of the old Flash animations have been "ported" to YouTube, the non-interactive stuff at least. Heck, the YouTube versions show up before the real Flash versions sometimes...

Ultimately it comes down to this: keeping a notoriously insecure runtime around in active use, by hundreds of millions of people, is a non-starter. Unlike, say, Java applets, the frequency and severity of security holes found in Flash is just ridiculous. After years of allegedly focusing on cleaning up Flash, serious exploits are still being discovered regularly.

The strongest argument in favor of keeping Flash around is IMO the fact that there is important functionality provided by Flash that has not been effectively (or at all) replicated by HTML. The weakest argument is IMO any centered around historical preservation.

Personally, even considering the strongest argument, keeping an insecure runtime running on hundreds of millions of machines vs. better in-browser games... The choice seems pretty clear.

But right now we're not moving towards deprecation, Flash is not officially stated by Adobe (nor anyone else of any authority) to be a deprecated technology, and new work is being created for it still (with the encouragement of Adobe, even).

Deprecation at the community level will also require us to define replacements and expand the current limitations of HTML5 so that functionality lost with Flash can at least in some way be recovered.

That being said, my ideal solution here is a bit harsher than yours. Like you, I hope all browsers immediately stop executing Flash code without explicit user permission on a per-SWF basis, and I want them to unbundle Flash. The only people who should be running Flash are the ones who have chosen explicitly to put it on their machine.

In any case, my original post was in response to the notion that Flash should be kept alive because of all the old games/animations that have already been created for it - that is IMO a pretty bogus argument for keeping around something so infamously insecure. Flash needs to be deprecated.

Not to mention from a preservation of history perspective deprecation of Flash is not harmful. You can run an old copy of Windows in a VM with an old copy of a browser with an old copy of Flash (and not have any back compat issues, sweet). I do not believe it should be a priority to preserve everyone's ability to view old Flash content without any prior setup at the drop of a hat. If you want to rewind to the mid-00s it's easy enough to get something like this set up - certainly easier than buying your own 35mm projector or microfilm machine like other archival formats.

Actually, the really annoying stuff isn't Flash, it's Shockwave. The format's not been reverse-engineered, and it's hard-to-impossible to find a working plugin for it that seems to play some of those old Shockwave games.

If Apple kills iOS in a decade what happens to all those apps? They're not sentimental.

This isn't about emotional blackmail. And heck, I'm not the person who made any of those things. I'm just the person who remembers them fondly and still wants to have them around. The difficulty of preserving digital works is bad enough without callous disregard for the task.

Also, consider that the next couple billion people to come online will be mobile only. Why create content that they can't use?

In multiple posts, I've said deprecate it. No new Flash content. No reason to create more content that is encumbered by Flash's legacy status. (Although others here have pointed out that HTML5 is not quite as capable of replacing Flash as some think.) But why the huge rush to completely abolish the Flash content that already exists?

Removing flash entirely has the added benefit of forcing the best content onto modern mediums. Depreciating it doesn't fix the security problems associated with it, it just extends them indefinitely.

Just like Commodore 64, Apple IIe, the original PlayStation, NES, XBox, and a slew of other platforms made obsolete by something called "progress".

I'm pretty comfortable calling these things irrelevant.

It's time for flash to die.