And yet:
“Consortium’s next priority is tackling vexing browser defragmentation for the open Web platform.”
Source: InfoWorld
Published: November 9, 2011
Less Flash, more HTML5. That’s the word from Adobe:
Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.
However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.
We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.
— Danny Winokur, Vice President & General Manager, Interactive Development at Adobe
Via ZDNet.
Published: March 9, 2011
Press release of interest to Flash developers:
Adobe has released its Flash to HTML 5 conversion tool, codenamed “Wallaby.”
Wallaby is an application to convert Adobe Flash Professional CS5 files (.FLA) to HTML5 and its primary design goals were to get the best quality and performance on browsers within iOS devices like iPhone and iPad.
Wallaby has a very simple user interface, which accepts as input a FLA file and exports HTML and support files to a user-selected folder. There is also an option to launch the default application assigned for the .html extension, Adobe said.
The focus for this initial version of Wallaby is to do the best job possible of converting typical banner ads to HTML5 and supported Webkit browsers include Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS.
Via Slashdot.
Published: October 11, 2010
New Web Code Draws Concern Over Risks to Privacy
Worries over Internet privacy have spurred lawsuits, conspiracy theories and consumer anxiety as marketers and others invent new ways to track computer users on the Internet. But the alarmists have not seen anything yet.
In the next few years, a powerful new suite of capabilities will become available to Web developers that could give marketers and advertisers access to many more details about computer users’ online activities. Nearly everyone who uses the Internet will face the privacy risks that come with those capabilities, which are an integral part of the Web language that will soon power the Internet: HTML 5.
— Tanzina Vega @ New York Times [via Slashdot]
New Tool Blocks Downloads From Malicious Sites
Science Daily Headlines reports that a new tool has been developed (funded by the National Science Foundation, US Army Research Office and US Office of Naval Research) to prevent ‘drive-by downloads’ whereby simply visiting a website, malware can be silently installed on a computer to steal a user’s identity and other personal information, launch denial-of-service attacks, or participate in botnet activity. The software called Blade — short for Block All Drive-By Download Exploits — is browser-independent and designed to eliminate all drive-by malware installation threats by tracking how users interact with their browsers to distinguish downloads that received user authorization from those that do not. ‘BLADE monitors and analyzes everything that is downloaded to a user’s hard drive to cross-check whether the user authorized the computer to open, run or store the file on the hard drive. If the answer is no to these questions, BLADE stops the program from installing or running and removes it from the hard drive,’ says Wenke Lee, a professor in the School of Computer Science in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. Blade’s testbed automatically harvests malware URLs from multiple whitehat sources on a daily basis and has an interesting display of the infection rate of different browsers, the applications targeted by drive-by exploits, and the anti-virus detect and miss rates of drive-by binaries.
— Hugh Pickens @ Slashdot
