"Occupy Flash" has got it all wrong / Daniel Eden

Early this morning, a website starting making the rounds on twitter. Occupy Flash was given a leg-up from Smashing Magazine, and made it’s way onto my computer monitor. Before I even read the copy, I knew this was a mistake. The idea behind Occupy Flash is to encourage web users and the tech-savvy to banish the Adobe Flash player plugin from their computers, and from the computers of their loved ones, coworkers and offices. This mission is both insane and impossible.

Adobe’s statistics show very high usage figures for Flash player

In July 2011, 99.0% of Internet-enabled computers had Adobe Flash player installed. Can you imagine the outrage if web developers from accross the globe burst in through these people’s doors and uninstalled it? Imagine the hundreds of thousands of people issuing letters of disgust to Occupy Flash’s doorstep because they can no longer play Farmville or watch the video their grandson put on YouTube.

Now, I’m well aware of the fact that organisations such as Youtube and Vimeo — the movers and shakers of the online video world — are embracing new technology. They both have HTML5 versions of their popular video streaming services, which is great. But adoption of this new technology is slow. They don’t advertise the new video players, which I think is a mistake. They could quite easily detect support for the new technology and advise users to test it out. But that’s a different story.

The main reason that Occupy Flash will fail is because the dismissal of Flash player is not the responsibility of the web developer, or the tech-savvy; it’s the responsibility of the Flash developers. Turning around to them and telling them their platform is failing is not an easy thing to do, and they need to see it on their own. The team building Farmville and other such popular games need to be embracing new technology themselves — it’s them who have the largest impact on the Flash community. As soon as you tell 80 million users that there’s a better, faster and more stable Farmville just around the corner if they upgrade (notice I didn’t say when they upgrade) their browser, adoption rate for new browsers such as IE9, Chrome and Firefox would skyrocket. Internet Explorer 6 would have been dead for years by now if Flash Player didn’t run on it.

By encouraging people to burst into their Grandparent’s houses and uninstall Flash player, you’re discouraging Flash users from enjoying the new web. Well over 50% of the websites they frequent will cease to work — Youtube and Facebook are amongst the top most visited websites. Like I mentioned earlier, Youtube doesn’t advertise their HTML5 player at all, and nearly every single Facebook game relies on Flash player.

Rather than telling Flash users to change, Occupy Flash should be telling Flash developers to adapt. It’s really that simple. Stop blaming the user. It’s not their fault.

http://twitter.com/heinrichdsf Heinrich Ferreira

I think I have to agree with you Dan. Taking such a bullish approach will just annoy users. I also couldn’t agree more with you on the point that it’s not a web developers job to tell users to stop using flash, it’s the flash developers.

Let’s see what happens. I just wish the big names like Youtube would promote their html5 player more.
http://twitter.com/michaelw90 Michael Wright

This isn’t possible where I work, nor will it be in a few years. Unfortunately, we have to continue to do all our work using Flash. We target educational institutes who, in most cases, don’t have the ability to upgrade their browser.

Flash isn’t going anywhere, any time soon. The sooner that the radicals (or whatever-they-are) realise this, the internet world will be happier. Instead, if you *are* able to embrace the new technologies and have the capacity to deliver them without compromising your business, then you should.

I’d like you to tell the teams at Zynga to go and learn a new development method, instead of the rapid deployment that they have built up with Flash. Sure, they should probably look to develop using HTML5 and things, but realistically, why would they? They’d be cutting off a major portion of their target market.

The thing to do is get people to upgrade their browsers, that is the user’s fault. Educate them about which to use, and then when the older non-HTML5 supporting browsers are declining, we can turn to the flash developers and shoot them.

Just my thoughts.
Dustin Sparks

Not to mention that HTML 5 is not even a finished standard yet. It’s growing, yes, but the web has not seen something like this in a very long time. Who knows what road HTML 5 will go down right now? Nobody does, not even the HTML 5 working group. We’ve been kind of lucky with some of our browsers supporting HTML 5, but again they are implementing an incomplete standard, which can and will change quickly. The same goes for CSS 3, which is essential in this new HTML 5/canvas era.
- Nolan Dubeau
  
  I think all the haters behind the Occupy Flash site need to take a step back and realize that many of the concepts of HTML5 and behind newer browser features were adopted based on Flash proving them out. And HTML5 is extremely immature compared to Flash, not to mention you need to figure out how to use the various JS libraries in order to achieve something that is already achievable with proven technologies. I think this article and the comments share the most accurate explanation about why Adobe has chosen not to continue support of the Flash player for mobile browsers.
  
  http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/11/11/clarifications-on-flash-player-for-mobile-browsers-the-flash-platform-and-the-future-of-flash/
  
  As for companies that are using Flash or Adobe Air / Flex to build mobile apps/games that are packaged and deployed to devices as native apps… the consumers of those apps probably don’t even know it’s Flash under the hood. What different does it make? All the user cares about is an engaging, fun, informative user experience, and that is what technologies like Flash and Adobe Air deliver. It’s going to be many years before the HTML5 spec catches up to the vast capabilities of any Adobe runtime.
http://www.designedbyjack.com Jack

Doesn’t YouTube load the HTML5 player by default if Flash isn’t installed?
- http://daneden.me Dan Eden
  
  Yes, it does — but that’s a pretty big “if”. And they don’t advertise the HTML5 player to Flash users as far as I know.
jon

Html5 isnt finished, and going by the CSS incompatiblity that is still there, years later, Html5 replacing anything is a complete joke.