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“Adobe Flash Player is required for interactive charts”

by level09 on 9/27/17, 9:00 AM with 99 comments

• by Okvivi on 9/27/17, 1:07 PM

  I built those charts on Google Finance. At the time (10 years ago) there was no better alternative for building interactive charting in browsers.

  After I left Google Finance I feel that the team has attempted a few times to remove Flash, but I don't know why they didn't succeed.

  Others on this thread are probably right - finance is not enough of a focus for Google, only so many engineering hours, better spent on other parts of Google Finance (more, better and cleaner data) than on replacing something that works well enough.

• by anilakar on 9/27/17, 11:57 AM

  People are complaining about Flash? I've got quite a few stories from doing integration work with refrigeration systems. Mind you, most of these systems are meant to be used daily by the staff at ordinary grocery stores.

  - One vendor requires a leaky JRE 1.5 to run their configuration tool, originally written for Windows CE around 2007. You need to keep it inside a VM and disable automatic Java updates.

  - A newer system from the same company requires Flash. Most customers opt for the Java based one, because the newer system is unsuitable for anything but the smallest sites (frozen foods melting at high bus and CPU loads).

  - The web GUI on another company's product wants a browser Java plugin that accepts unsigned certs.

  - The web GUI on a third company's product requires the user to accept unsigned certs, even though these systems are never exposed to the internet (RFC 1918 and certificates are inherently incompatible). The GUI is a stateful JSP frameset hell.

  - Yet another company that no longer makes refrigeration systems requires DOS-based software. Luckily its volume ID based copy protection does not work under Windows XP.

  EDIT: Fixed line breaks for readability

• by ulfw on 9/27/17, 12:39 PM

  It's the typical Google development cycle. Build a great product, don't get enough users, engineers lose interest and boom the product is basically sunset. Years later it is either revived or cancelled outright.

• by coldcode on 9/27/17, 12:24 PM

  Funny thing is they used to have interactive charts without Flash. But then I've always felt the janitorial staff worked on google.finance. When companies go out of business or merge they stick around in the site for months sometimes. Or ever try the stock screener? What an unsmiling pile of poor. Yet they have the data and the horsepower to do amazing things with it, but since it apparently makes no revenue, its not worth the effort unless the night cleaning folks feel like writing a little code.

• by underyx on 9/27/17, 10:13 AM

  A week or so ago this message appeared on the Portfolio page, I assume the Flash Player requirement will be gone soon:

  > Google Finance is under renovation. As a part of this process, the Portfolios feature won't be available after mid-November 2017. To keep a copy, download your portfolio.

• by pja on 9/27/17, 9:01 AM

  Google Finance is a dead product walking: Are there any developers actually working on it at all?

• by Aardwolf on 9/27/17, 10:32 AM

  The article title is wrong. The real message is: "Adobe Flash Player is required for interactive charts." The title is: "Adobe Flash Player is required for charts"

  I see a chart without flash, it's just not interactive (but a static rendered image)

• by stephenr on 9/27/17, 12:15 PM

  VMware's private cloud control panel software requires flash (or at least the version I was subjected to did)

  No charts. No fancy graphics. It's all basic crud stuff. And it's all in flash.

• by ungzd on 9/27/17, 11:48 AM

  They forgot to turn off this service.

• by wslh on 9/27/17, 12:33 PM

  I saw the flash player alert yesterday and thought my computer was infected by some malware! I can't believe Google doesn't have a chart control to put there.

• by CharlesDodgson on 9/27/17, 11:04 AM

  it has a very iGoogle feel to it, i expect it will be killed off or refreshed soon.

• by butterfi on 9/27/17, 2:48 PM

  My place of work used a Java applet for time-card management and just upgraded us to... a flash application. I had to set-up a VM just to manage my timecard because I refuse to install Flash. And this is a major payroll service.

• by stevenh on 9/27/17, 10:06 AM

  Chrome on a Mac here. Did anyone else's ENTIRE SCREEN fade to black for a second upon loading this page? How is that possible?

• by spork12 on 9/27/17, 1:09 PM

  Checkout tradingview.com over google finance