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Flash makes one of its last stands on Facebook Live

Q. Why does Facebook Live requires Flash in my desktop browser? I don’t need Flash for any other video at the site.

Q. Why does Facebook Live requires Flash in my desktop browser? I don’t need Flash for any other video at the site.

A. You wouldn’t know about this software requirement from Facebook’s presentation of Live -- its Android and iOS mobile apps don’t warn about it before you start streaming live video, nor do its desktop-video help and live-video help pages. 

But if you try to watch a Live stream in a Flash-free copy of Apple’s Safari or Mozilla Firefox, you won’t see that video. Instead you’ll get this vague message: “Flash Unavailable. We are having trouble playing this video.”

That phrasing suggests that if you try again, things will eventually work. They won’t, but you shouldn’t give in and install Adobe’s multimedia browser plug-in if you’ve already removed it as I urged here last July

Flash has racked up a sorry record of insecurity -- it’s suffered from hundreds of vulnerabilities, including four patched just this year, that have been exploited by malware authors to spread data-hijacking ransomware and lesser annoyances. Flash also has a history of impairing performance and battery life, two of the reasons Steve Jobs publicly blackballed it from iOS.

(Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Edge each include a locked-down version of Flash. Chrome doesn’t play Flash content that isn’t “central to the webpage,” such as ads, and Edge soon will too.)

Requiring Flash for Live streams represents a weird step back by Facebook, which once demanded Flash to view videos but ditched that requirement last year. 

In a company blog post after that change, Facebook engineer Daniel Baulig noted how much people liked it: “Videos now start playing faster. People like, comment, and share more on videos after the switch, and users have been reporting fewer bugs.”

And this revived Flash requirement doesn’t square with Facebook’s recent push to promote live video streaming: If the social network is this serious about getting people to share special moments this way, why make Live harder to watch than the rest of its videos?

In one way, this is worse than Facebook’s old Flash fixation. The workaround that I earlier employed to watch Flash-free video in Safari -- activating its Develop menu and using it to have Safari present itself as the iPad version of Apple’s browser -- failed with every Live stream I tested.

The social network wouldn’t say why it imposed this requirement on Live or what obstructed my attempted Safari workaround. But it is working to end that soon by switching Live video to the HTML5 standard, which works in all modern browsers.

In the meantime, you can watch Flash-free Live video in Google’s Chrome browser -- again, Facebook wouldn’t explain what made that browser special -- or in its smartphone and tablet apps. That’s how I plan to watch Thursday’s live stream of my former Washington Post colleague Dana Milbank fulfilling his pledge to eat the “Trump will lose, or I will eat this column” story he wrote last October.

Rob Pegoraro is a tech writer based out of Washington, D.C. To submit a tech question, e-mail Rob at rob@robpegoraro.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/robpegoraro.

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