Earlier this week, news got out that Apple was shipping an outdated version of Adobe's Flash Player with Snow Leopard; if you updated to a more recent version before the upgrade to Snow Leopard, you would receive a downgrade. This older version had security holes in it, so Adobe advised everyone to upgrade. The Mozilla team has now announced that Firefox 3.5.3 and 3.0.14 will include a Flash version checker.
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Member since:2007-09-06
As other's have posted, Mozilla isn't pushing the install of a plugin, they are simply providing a work around to notify the user about existing installs which are out of date. That's not corruption, that's providing a beneficial service to the end user where the original developer (adobe) hasn't.
Try to think outside the Church of OSSentology for a minute. Your making the rest of us Foss loving folk look bad.
Member since:2005-07-24
Hey! That's my line! :-)
Seriously, though, I worry about Mozilla Corp. All those many 10's of millions of Google dollars they've come to depend upon do leave the door open to distorted thinking. Not necessarily in this case. But just in general.
BrendaEM just got a +1 from me for being vigilant. I make no assertion regarding the right or wrong of it.
Member since:2009-02-11
I never got all the hostility against flash.
I agree that full flash sites are a nightmare and of course I would love to see an open equivalent, but when a customer wants pretty moving stuff on his site, he wants it cheap and he wants it accessible from anywhere there really isn't another option.
Member since:2005-11-10
"accessible from anywhere" is not what it used to be.
Plugins have to be implemented by the one vendor where they choose and whilst they can provide a strong feature-set they cannot compete with open standards that anybody can implement on any device, anywhere.
You can never target everybody with Flash now that so many mobile platforms are available, and even those with Flash support a subset and the performance is abysmal compared to alternatives (e.g. HTML5 video).
Member since:2005-11-13
I agree that full flash sites are a nightmare and of course I would love to see an open equivalent, but when a customer wants pretty moving stuff on his site, he wants it cheap and he wants it accessible from anywhere there really isn't another option.
I think you just spelled it out; Flash makes it too easy to inject 'pretty moving stuff' on to web pages, even when it's not needed 98% of the time. Not to mention that it hijacks the right mouse menu.
Flash is Web 2.0's version of the blink tag, but only 100x worse. I wouldn't miss it if it went away tomorrow. At the very least, I think any web developer who uses Flash should be forced to sit through 10 dialogs of "Are you absolutely SURE that this f**king lame animation is needed at this time?" At least then, maybe people would think twice about using it (or OVERusing it I should say).
Edited 2009-09-05 23:37 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
I agree that full flash sites are a nightmare and of course I would love to see an open equivalent, but when a customer wants pretty moving stuff on his site, he wants it cheap and he wants it accessible from anywhere there really isn't another option.
Nothing to do with the ascetic beauty or there lack of (as with the case of the blinking tag) - it is the fact that within 5 minutes you find that your CPU cycles are chewed up by a solitary plugin and your battery power nose dives because of its bloat.
If Flash plugin was open sourced tomorrow and the issues were addressed - I don't see a person here oppose its use. Someone said that Flash is like the blink tag - I disagree. Flash is like the jackass who uses a Java applet that brings the whole browser to a screeching halt - I remember sitting in front of my Windows 95 (many years ago) machine running Netscape Communicator praying that the Java applet wouldn't bring down the whole browser (which funny enough I'd have either a download going in the background or working on an email). I still have the same sudden rush of fear run through my system even to this day when I see a Java applet or Flash plugin loading.
I wish Apple would stop being a PITA and get behind Theora or at least try to convince Google to open up their recently acquired treasure chest of IP to get HTML5 moving forward so that Flash, Silverlight and Java can be purged from my machine. If there is a hell, I hope there is a special place designated for website developers, owners and the developers of those technologies.
Edited 2009-09-06 02:34 UTC
Member since:
2005-11-23
See, how easy that was?