Adobe Flash Support Ending in 2020

[Geo 🇺🇦 🌻]

arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/with-html5-webgl-javascript-ascendant-adobe-to-cease-flash-dev-at-end-of-2020/

Well, it finally happened folks. Adobe is finally tired of fixing the endless stream of security issues resulting from their own creation.

I wonder what Neopets is going to do. It's absolutely negligent to tell users to maintain a vulnerable plugin that's no longer going to be updated. The next WannaCry or other cryptomalware could take advantage of a Flash bug. So Neopets is going to have to find something to do within the next three years to transition away from Flash. (I guess they don't have to but it's strongly advised.)

I have no interest in keeping Flash on my computer when it's no longer being updated. I don't want it to be a sitting duck on the web.

[June Scarlet]

Hm... I wonder if people will, like, develop ways to port flash things into html5, or develop something to allow access to old flash things, or something, I don't know what, but something to make this easier to deal with.

But right now, it's a little scary/sad.

[Geo 🇺🇦 🌻]

The last sentence in the article does gloss over the idea that maybe Adobe will write some sort of porting tool to make the transition easier. Hopefully whatever they come up with doesn't cause my computer's CPU fan to go full speed. Flash tends to do that.

[Breakingchains]

Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple will also be immediately pulling support after updates stop. So at the end of 2020, an up-to-date browser will no longer run flash at all.

I mean, flash is awful on multiple levels, so for most of the internet this is good news. But Neo is now on a three-year time crunch before customization and games stop working (assuming the aforementioned porting tools don't happen.)

I am less worried about the games. Worst case scenario is that in order to move them over they need to rebuild them from scratch, and, well... Development tools have come a long way, and if you pare down the catalogue to the top 50 and start with those, you mostly have arcade-y type things that somebody could reproduce very quickly in something like game maker studio. So you could probably remake a respectable chunk of the games room in a doable amount of time--at least enough to keep up a neopoint flow and not trash the economy while you work through the backlog.

But customization... Um, I'm not all that technically-minded but that looks like a pretty big honkin' load of work.

[Geo 🇺🇦 🌻]

Well, let's see how TNT does working through their backlog. They just fixed the Neofriends sidebar.

I guess I would like to see how soon they start on it. Hopefully not two weeks before support is ended.

[June Scarlet]

Jul 25, 2017 20:31:57 GMT -5 Breakingchains said:

But customization... Um, I'm not all that technically-minded but that looks like a pretty big honkin' load of work.

Both Jellyneo and Dress to Impress have recreated customization, and both allow you to navigate and select items without flash, only the pet display part uses flash. And Dress to Impress also has an Image version that doesn't use flash at all, though there's no animation in that version either.

I have no idea how hard it was for these sites to recreate it, but they were able to, at least. And maybe even be possible to port over a non-animated version as everything stands, as Dress to Impress did. The animation though... that's probably going to be harder to deal with.

[Geo 🇺🇦 🌻]

For those interested: github.com/pakastin/open-source-flash

Is it a good idea to open-source presumably a large project that may still be riddled with security bugs? Given that it was written a while back, it will probably be a heap of legacy code that may not be the best code by today's standards. This would keep Flash alive as long as there are contributors.