The Unavoidability of Flash
Published: March 15, 2008Tags: itojun youtube flash
Before the main thrust of this entry, I just wanted to point out that I (finally) got around to putting up at least a first version of my article on password storage, which has been linked to by my SQL injection article for a long time but hasn't actually existed until earlier this week. Enjoy, and feedback is welcome!
Anyway, the main point of this article is that lately I have found myself ever more dissatisfied over the lack of availability of Flash on my home desktop machine. For those of you who didn't realise, Flash is only available as a binary plugin for the mainstream operating systems and NetBSD isn't amongst those. Getting Flash to work in NetBSD has always been a bit hit and miss. There are a wide range of possible solutions (and I discuss most of them, I think, in my NetBSD survival guide), mostly based around various kinds of emulation. These solutions work to wildly varying degrees, depending on everything from the versions of Flash, NetBSD and Firefox involved to, apparently, the current phase of the moon. At the moment, Flash is effectively not working for me - video is jerky and intermittent and audio is non-existent. It's not good enough for 9 out of 10 uses of Flash.
Now, this has been the situation for years, ever since I started using NetBSD. But I used to absolutely not care. You only need to go a few years back in time to arrive at an internet in which Flash was completely and utterly useless and technical people could quite happily go without it. The uses of Flash could be summarised almost completely as:
- Hideous banner adverts on websites which included video and/or sound. These things are often mind blowingly obnoxious (doing things like playing sound when rolled over with the mouse) and invariably not interesting enough to be worth the increased loading time and security risk.
- Website navigation systems created by incompetent and inconsiderate web developers who had no concept of convenience or accessibility and were perfectly happy to make people with dial up connections wait for 10 minutes to their site and for people who didn't use a supported OS or browser to simply not be able to see it. Invariably, these navigation systems offered nothing of value which couldn't be achieved using faster, safer, and more accessible HTML, perhaps with Javascript, and the associated websites were entirely missable. There's a great rant about the problems with this sort of site here.
- Interactive games or lengthy animations, the kind of things people email around to everybody they have ever met. Most of the time these things were fairly mindless, unwelcome distraction from actual work. Sometimes they were genuinely amusing (I used to be quite fond of the Strongbad email animations on Homestar Runner). In either case, they were something one could live without pretty easily.
At first I simply ignored YouTube as well. I thought the idea of using Flash to distribute video was stupid. I did not understand what the problem would be with simply providing direct links to mpeg or avi video files which could be downloaded via HTTP or FTP. This would let anybody enjoy these videos regardless of their personal choice of operating system or browser. Furthermore, in the early days YouTube seemed to me to be little more than the new version of the final dot point in my list of Flash uses above - a way to distribute stupid, possibly amusing (but probably not) 5 minute videos that wasted my time. And some of the comments left on YouTube videos rank very highly amongst the stupidest things that humans have ever written (a point made in this xkcd comic). YouTube? No, thanks.
However, today I am forced to admit that YouTube has become useful. Maybe it became useful a long time ago and I missed it while grumbling with my stone tools and bearskin clothes in my Flash-free cave, I'm not sure. To be sure, there is still a tremendous amount of crap on YouTube, complete with shockingly stupid comments. But at the same time, a lot of intelligent, creative people are using YouTube to broadcast stuff which is genuinely interesting, educational or useful. After Itojun passed away I learned that he had posted a series of videos on YouTube explaining the basics of (what else?) IPV6, in both Japanese and English. Just last night, my brother-in-law Gareth pointed me in the direction of some YouTube videos by Johnny Chung Lee, a hacker from CMU, who has done some really clever stuff with the Nintendo Wii's "Wiimote", like building quick and cheap head-tracking hardware, electronic whiteboards and finger trackers. I also recently found via Reddit a video demonstrating "Shredz64", a port of the popular Guitar Hero game to the Commodore 64, which uses the actual PlayStation guitar controller, hooked up to the C64 through a home-made adapter. These are just some things I've found relatively recently and thought were awesome - I have to assume there is a plethora of similar stuff on YouTube.
It's not just YouTube, either. YouTube has popularised the notion of embedded video streaming in web sites. It crops up in a lot of places, and it's often used for good things. Google's technical talks come to mind first, but they're not alone. Not only is there a lot of other stuff out there now, but it's clear that there is only going to be more in the future. For better or worse, this is the medium that the internet community as a whole has chosen. I don't doubt that if, for instance, internet-based citizen journalism takes off (and I sincerely hope that it does), YouTube or YouTube-like technology will be behind it.
Clearly, the situation regarding Flash has changed since I last evaluated it. It now looks like these days I have more to lose than I do to gain by forsaking Flash. This is a sad situation, to be sure. It's always a sad situation when in order to fully participate in the wonder of the internet one has to have one's freedom of choice of OS and browser limited by the will of a company which stubbornly refuses to release source code, or at least file format documentation (Why not, Adobe? The Flash player is (financially) free anyway!). But pragmatism has to trump idealism at some point. Maybe, with Flash, this point has been reached?