Posted in: General

Seven Days without Flash

Can I disable flash on my machine and still be able to gain the full web experience?

Some of you might be asking, why would I want to do such a thing to begin with? my machine has Flash installed on it and it works fine, and the next mobile phone I’m planning to have will run an Android system and that will support flash no problem.

So, why am I so keen to do away with Flash?

Well, to begin with, Flash is not open source and as such can not be integrated into a browser – this means that I am required to install it as an Add-On to my system and although some systems come with Flash pre-installed this is still an external bit of kit.

This has many implications on the performance of Flash, since no one can create a standard native implementation we all have to use the “off the shelf” Adobe solution and that sometimes can slow down ones system – I believe this is one of the reasons why Apple are banning Flash from their mobile devices.

Further more, as a Web Developer, if I wanted to develop Flash content for the Web I would have been required to use Adobe. As far as I am aware the only development tool for Flash is Adobe Flash and this is not Free (Yes, it is very expensive)…

And I don’t see why I should pay for something that I don’t really need… Because, Flash was developed as a multimedia platform to add Animation and Interactivity to Websites, but that was nearly a decade ago, and ever since, loads of new alternatives have been introduced – and they are all FREE!

Free? Really? What alternatives?

JavaScript Frameworks are fantastic free tool kits specifically designed to introduce Animation and Interactivity to websites, they are light weight (usually a few Kilobytes once compressed), Compatible (even with Apple products) and are extremely easy to learn and master.

My favourite is jQuery, however there are plenty other alternatives out there, like MooTools, Prototype, etc…

But JavaScript, although an industry standard in Web Browsers, has its limitations; it relies on the HTML to do most of the heavy lifting (like displaying the Video, or playing the Audio track) – and here is where the problem begins – HTML does not support Audio or Video – which means to play Video on a Website you need to have a plugin like Apple QuickTime, Windows Media Player, or Flash.

Even Worst, Browsers usually restrict JavaScript (for security reasons which I fully understand and support) preventing it from accessing local resources on your machine, like your Webcam or your Files.
Being that Flash is a plugin it can acquire these rights bypassing the browser restrictions, which is also a bit of a security issue.

Over the years these issues, which are more attributed to HTML than JavaScript, have been discussed and a new standard was being formed that would rectify these inequities – this is HTML5.

Come again? HTML5?

Yes, HTML5 is basically an extension on the regular HTML language offering elements that can play videos, display complex animations and do so much more… along side with CSS3 (another suggested standard to control styling) it was hoped that companies can use these standards to create browsers that would give users a better web experience.

Google Chrome, FireFox, Safari and even Internet Explorer have been trying to implement those standards (HTML5 and CSS3) with some success and at this point I figured; “It’s about time to put these to the test…”

What does this mean? what test?

Well it is obvious, If the browsers are now able to play Videos and Animations by themselves with no Flash support – the best test would be to disable Flash and see how good the browsers do and how ready is the Internet for all this.

To test my browsers I viewed this page http://html5test.com/ on each one of them, this is a page that kinda tests how “HTML5 ready” is your browser, my scores were:

Google Chrome	- 340
FireFox 6	- 298
Internet Explorer 9	- 141

Lucky my favourite browser was the winner… which meant now I just needed to disable flash on my Google Chrome and browse the Web for a week.

So How did it go?

Well, to be honest… not so good!

It was easy enough to view videos using HTML5 on YouTube and Vimeo; on YouTube you could just go to: http://www.youtube.com/html5/ and click on the “Join the HTML5 Trial” link which will activate HTML5 videos on your YouTube account and deliver them as HTML5. On Vimeo it automatically detected I had no Flash and delivered the HTML5 equivalent.

The cool HTML5 Videos on YouTube even offer you the ability to change the play speed (a nice gimmick that the Flash Video cannot do) but when trying to view videos from YouTube embedded on websites (with the old Flash code embed not the new Iframe embed) this obviously did not work.

This also applied to Videos shared on Facebook (which annoyingly are embedded using the old Flash code).

Google Analytics was my next disappointment, as all the graphs and pie charts are generated in Flash, even the calendar widget to select the Analytics range is done in Flash (Shame on you Google) and obviously no replacement was provided in case you did not have Flash installed.

Of course there is an iPhone Analytics App that provides the Graphs without Flash, however for a PC Google decided to go without…

But the straw that broke the camel’s back was the multiple file uploads… For those of you who do not know what I’m talking about, this is the little widget that allows you to select more than one file on your machine when you are trying to upload a gallery of images to Facebook or WordPress or any other Content Managed System.

See, HTML supports an element that can only do one file upload at a time, this has been a huge issue in Web Apps for years and the only good solution so far was using a Flash widget (because Flash allowed multiple selection of files) – however with the introduction of HTML5 that plain old file element had been given an option to allow multiple files. Problem is – no one is using it.

Facebook use Flash to upload multiple files and WordPress does the same – and if you disable Flash – you can only upload one file at a time… Which makes uploading my holiday images (50 of them) near impossible and extremely annoying.

To sum this up…

We are nearly there, we have the tools (JavaScript, HTML5, CSS3), we have the motivation, we just need that shift, that initial push to make that change.

Change is always good and if enough of us (Web Developers) drop the old technologies and push for the new ones, the crowds will follow (they have no other option)

Unfortunately as I write these lines, I have my Flash enabled and am planing to keep it  that way for a while longer, just until WordPress gets that multiple file upload issue resolved and Google+ picks up and I don’t need Facebook anymore.

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