The ability of web standards to commoditize and turn popular vendor-specific, "owned" or proprietary features into open and free specifications for countless user agents to implement is a good thing. Ogg Theora and other royalty-free formats, another debate entirely —and then there's IE—and yet despite all of this, the potential alone of HTML 5 is generating a lot of excitement and interest in the Diggblogotwitreddisphere. Where the "battle" is to be had at some point in the future — if and when basic features and other things are roughly equal — will likely be over specific feature details and quality of execution inter-related, yes.
Flash has a huge, established and supported install base and is the de-facto standard, and "it just works" for most audio and video applications — or, as the cynic would say, it's better than anything else out there. In my opinion, Flash has earned and maintained its dominant position by continuously providing solid cross-platform graphic animation, audio and video support in the browser where others have tried and failed.
HTML 5 is perhaps well set to challenge this over time given the standards process and evidence of interest from a number of large companies, but I suspect it will be several years before HTML 5-based audio and video are anywhere near commonplace. Let's say IE 10, for the hell of it. I'd love to be wrong. In any event, HTML 5 and Flash will most certainly co-exist for a very long time simply due to legacy support.
Many computers and most mobile devices cannot play Flash content and many users have no interest in installing the once dominant software. You can go ahead and test your website for Flash usage there. Flash began as a vector based drawing program developed by FutureWave. Thus the vector-based web animation platform was born. It was Macromedia that began distributing Flash as a browser plugin for playing back Flash content online. Macromedia added scripting, alpha transparency, and other features as they transformed the vector-based web animation platform into a full featured web application tool.
Webmasters and users took notice and adoption skyrocketed. No other software was this powerful with such a small download size. In Adobe purchased Macromedia and their entire product line.
Adobe got in at the height of Flash adoption but they have also been at the helm for its sudden demise. Adobe saw it coming. AIR is the gaming successor to Flash. But what is the multimedia successor? Well, HTML5, of course. Flash is dying. Adobe has announced that Flash development will discontinue completely by December 31, Adobe is abandoning Flash to the software graveyard.
In a sense, Flash was euthanized by the tech community that helped create it because it was a permanent security risk. When a web browser loads a Flash file Flash runs its own process with its own memory within the web browser application. Hackers are constantly finding new methods to use Flash to jump to a specific memory address on your machine… and take control of your entire computer not just the web browser.
Even so, the security risk runs deep in just how Flash functions. And because Adobe isn't supporting the software anymore, there won't be security patches for any new Flash vulnerabilities that come to light. In October, Microsoft also released an optional update for Windows 8 and above that removes the operating system's built-in version of Flash. In spite of this multipronged strategy, though, some installations will persist. Even organizations that uninstall desktop Flash will also need to worry about the browser versions if they aren't updating those regularly.
For systems that don't or can't receive updates easily, these two locations of Flash Player can mean double the exposure. There's some good news still. As Flash has approached its end of life and lost users, researchers say that attackers have tapered off their investment in finding and exploiting new vulnerabilities in the software.
One of the most recent Flash bugs that has been widely abused by hackers is a memory flaw disclosed in January that could be exploited to take control of a target device. Segura notes, though, that the Flash Player plugin was specifically appealing for so long because of its proximity and relationship to serving online ads.
With less ubiquity, Flash attacks will be less useful to hackers, but they will remain in offensive toolkits. So the exposure will still be there in systems that don't receive updates or get overhauled often. Legacy software that's no longer supported and receiving patches inevitably becomes a cybersecurity issue, whether it's ancient industrial control software deep in always-on infrastructure or historic networking protocols in internet-of-things devices.
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