When a user attempts to load a Flash game or content in a browser such as Chrome, the content now fails to load and instead displays a small banner that leads to the Flash end-of-life page on Adobe’s website. While this day has long been coming, with many browsers disabling Flash by default years ago, it is officially the end of…
Tag: plugin
Adobe Releases the Last Flash Update Ever
Adobe has released the final scheduled update to its Flash Player plugin, weeks before Flash’s official retirement. The Verge reports: As noted on Adobe’s site, yesterday marked the last update for Flash outside mainland China, which has a separate version of the software. Adobe will stop supporting Flash on December 31st, 2020, and it will block Flash content from running on…
Flash Animations Live Forever At the Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations, games and toys in our software collection. Jason Scott writes in a blog post: Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed. While Ruffle’s compatibility…
German Regulators Look To Block Teens From Porn Sites
German authorities are trying to force internet service providers to block major porn sites that don’t implement age verification systems. Gizmodo reports: Currently, German law requires porn sites to restrict access to individuals 18 or older. What’s changed is that German authorities, like the British before them, have now dubbed it a good use of their time to actually pursue porn…
Is Microsoft Retaliating For Chrome’s Warnings About Extension Security in Edge?
Several pundits criticized Google for warning Edge users to switch to Chrome if they wanted to use Chrome extensions “securely”. “In Chrome, a plugin can be remotely disabled by the Chrome team if it’s considered unsafe for whatever reason,” notes PC World. “Google lacks the ability to remotely disable the same plugin within Edge, prompting Google to recommend switching to Chrome,…
Firefox, WordPress Move to Support Lazy Loading of Images and iFrames
“Lazy Loading” would augment HTML’s <img> tag (and <iframe> tag) with two new attributes — “eager” (to load immediately) and “lazy” (to load only when it becomes relevant in the viewport). Felix Arntz, a developer programs engineer at Google (and a WordPress core committer) notes the updates in the HTML specification for the lazy loading attributes, adding that it’s “already supported…
Do You Remember MIDI Music Files?
A new article at Motherboard remembers when the MIDI file format became the main way music was shared on the internet “for an incredibly short but memorable period of time…” [I]n the hunt for additional features, the two primary developers of web browsers during the era — Microsoft and Netscape — added functionality that made audio files accessible when loading websites,…
Chrome Tries APIs That Allow Changing A User’s Files, Receiving SMS Verification Texts
“Web pages have never been able to directly access your computer’s (or phone’s) file system, unless there was a plugin like Java or ActiveX involved somewhere,” reports Android Police. The new Native File System API in Chrome 78 changes that… Here’s how the API works: A web page can bring up a file picker dialog, just like you would see when…
Wired Remembers the Glory Days of Flash
Wired recently remembered Flash as “the annoying plugin” that transformed the web “into a cacophony of noise, colour, and controversy, presaging the modern web.” They write that its early popularity in the mid-1990s came in part because “Microsoft needed software capable of showing video on their website, MSN.com, then the default homepage of every Internet Explorer user.” But Flash allowed anyone…
Ask Slashdot: Why Doesn’t the Internet In 2019 Use More Interactive 3D?
dryriver writes: For the benefit of those who are not much into 3D technologies, as far back as the year 2000 and even earlier, there was excitement about “Web3D” — interactive 3D content embedded in HTML webpages, using technologies like VRML and ShockWave 3D. 2D vector-based Flash and Flash animation was a big deal back then. Very popular with internet users….