Guest post by Unless you’ve been under a rock, you’re probably familiar with the fact that Flash doesn’t run on any mobile Apple device. Moreover, it looks like Apple is never going to let Flash onto the iPhone/iPod/iPad empire. Rather than just whinge about the fact, the ad network company RevShock decided to do something about it by creating Smokescreen, an open source product that converts Flash to HTML5 & Javascript. While mainly designed for ads, and still very much in the testing stages, the demos certainly look very promising, and it ticks all the boxes for those who want everything to be open and free.
This is great or better it’s amazing.
What I really want is some dancing polar bear to step around when ever I read news. Amazing is that there won’t be anyway to block this thanks to amazing canvas tag.
Suddenly Lynx looks like greatest browser, no it’s fucking amazing.
-1 inaccurate. Stop with this crap, it’s easy to block. It’s just JavaScript. Guess what, NoScript and AdBlock can block this just as easy as Flash. The content itself is HTML, SVG and CSS. Entirely blockable using nothing more sophisticated than CSS itself.
I’m not knowledgeable with noscript and adblock since i dont use firefox, but even though its in an html canvas element, I don’t think that the plugins would indescriminatly remove all canvas elements. The only thing I can see is it sniffing the javascript and not letting it run if it finds a url to a known ad server.
Someone please enlighten me as i am not a web developer.
Both adblocker + element hider can be configured to block any element or category of element. You can block any divs from cnn.com that have the class that begins with “ad”. They are very configurable and flexible. If you don’t understand Html, css, or javascript very well, just consider them to be a magician’s tools: they do amazing things in the right hands.
It doesn’t “convert” it, it just runs Flash-generated .swf files… Pretty impressive piece of technology.
Take that Apple. Lesson learned yet ?
That’s what you get for going against a good current, you bozos. This type of individualism is plain silly.
They have learned the lesson a long time ago, and they replied by crippling the SVG spec, sadly.
You can say “take that” when you see it running on an iPad / iPhone. Me thinks it is a little bulky and resource heavy. Hell, just plain HTML5 SVG animations are bulky and slow… how do you think an interpreted swf binary will perform?
Actually the banner ad they demo runs quite happily at normal speed even on my ageing iPhone 3G, so for the intended content it will work fine. It doesn’t work on IE8, and never will, because it uses HTML5 and IE8 … well … doesn’t, but they promise it will work (but doesn’t yet) on IE9. Speed is an obvious issue, but really even the new generation of phones are getting much more powerful processors, and with JIT compilers for Javascript becoming the norm I think that issue will eventually be put to bed too. It has a way to go before it’s useful for anything more than ads though.
Not quite sure what you mean by that? If anything this supports Apple’s stance that Flash isn’t mandatory for the ‘net, while at the same time giving those who want to use Flash to create their ads a way of doing just that and still having their content viewable on devices that can’t, or don’t want to install a plug-in. This has the potential to really be an all around win if you think about it. Even Adobe win with this, it means that people can keep buying CS (Flash) to do their development even if the target platform doesn’t support it. And as has been pointed out, it’s just as easy to block this content as it is to block Flash.
Better yet, Adobe should just hire the guy, and build this thing into Flash.
So that Flash can directly output HTML5 for new devices, and fallback to the plugin for older browsers.
Indeed, good points you have there.
The ‘Take That’ was for purposely limiting the options end users have with their apple devices and a criticism of their paternalistic (to say the very least) approach.
I mean I like playing “Desktop Tower Defense”, I wouldn’t want to miss all the games on kongrate.com 🙂 Would you?
Cheers!
I can literally count the frames when trying to play it on Firefox. Chromium/Chrome it is just like watching a flash movie. Wouldn’t play at all in IE.
Interesting, but I like the idea of websites without flash at all.
I don’t like this. If ads and thing like that start to use standard HTML code and ECMAscript, they’ll be getting harder and harder to block, even if they’re highly invasive or eat up immense performance.
In fact, knowing the performance of current implementations of web standards, if things don’t improve, we’ll get something much worse than flash : even more bloated content that’s not easily blockable…
As time passes, I’m more and more of a Flash advocate… Funny how much this thing kills my everyday browsing experience, while improving it at the same time…
Edited 2010-06-03 15:13 UTC
People keep bringing this up, and as Kroc points out, it’s not true. Flash is like a black box. All you can do is let it run completely, or block it completely. Other than that, you have no control. On the other hand, HTML5 gives you complete control. You could block most ads with CSS. You could also selectively disable certain things. You can inspect it, and figure out how it works. You could create something like ClickToFlash, hiding canvases by default, but showing them when clicked on. Basically, you can do whatever you want with HTML5.
This is my worry. Right now, it seems to me that Flash has a certain performance hit, but as you make it do more things, it scales up relatively well. HTML5 will use no resources doing nothing, but as you make it more complex, it is going to get slower faster than Flash. It’s a simple fact that an ideal Flash implementation would be faster than an ideal HTML5 implementation. Whether Adobe can actually fix Flash, that is another issue…
Flash is not a mandatory component of the web. You can use FlashBlock and surf on whatever website you want, only enabling it when it’s mandatory. All websites (except the flash-based ones, like GrooveShark and YouTube, which you must whitelist) will work fine.
On the other hand, you just can’t block HTML and ECMAscript code. Yes, I know about NoScript-like extensions. But those languages are *everywhere* on the web. If you use such an extension, you must specify which script to block on a per-script basis because otherwise you effectively cripple most of today’s websites.
The difference is here : Flash can be blocked by default with non-blocked being the exception, you don’t lose much and you get a clean and lean web. When you encounter poorly done HTML and ECMAscript, on the other hand, you are forced to display it first in order to know that it’s an overtaxed useless script, and *then* block it. So the web is effectively heavy unless you tweak it all by yourself.
Sure, things like EasyList for AdBlock may be ported to HTML/JS/CSS ads. But again, it’s harder to block CSS-based popups than to just block all random EMBEDs with a swf inside.
Flash is easy to block *because* it’s a black box. And because most people making bloated websites elements currently use it, you can easily keep the web clean by disabling it. But if in the future all flash bloat gets ported to web standards… We’ll get a bloated web that’s effectively less easy to block. Because all websites will be bloated, in all their components. Not only the flash ones.
That’s why I’m becoming a Flash advocate. I would like the bloated and poorly coded part of the web to remain optional, and in proprietary black boxes that are easy to block for the knowledgeable user. This way everyone is happy : those who want websites to work on all hardware without lag disable flash. Those who want all the cool multimedia features enable it. Simple.
(I don’t know if I made my point clear enough. I had some English issues when writing this post ^^’)
Edited 2010-06-04 08:11 UTC
Splitting hairs…
Is it static text ads, or resource hungry animated annoyances that most people want removed by Flash-blocking? Wouldn’t the next logical step be browsers detecting and asking: “This canvas element requires intensive CPU operation (for animations, sound, etc). Allow Y/N?”
Adobe calls Flash an “open standard”, so supposedly anyone can fix it. That hasn’t happened cross-platform very well, so this is yet another try at that open standard.
It’s likely to show performance bugs as its use increases, but I see no reason for ActionScript to be faster than ECMAScript. If anything, this encourages Javascript speedups and the world is great at doing that.
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
Let’s not forget the previous attempt, Gordon ( http://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon/ ). Still it’s impressive.