Hello
fans world-wide!
We'd like to announce that in light of the recent multiple Adobe Flash security vulnerabilities, our website is now free from any Adobe Flash features
Since I resumed Webmastering here at Marlin Crawler back in October of 2008, we have been using the
Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) web font implementation. sIFR combines Javascript with Adobe Flash to embed True Type Fonts directly into websites. We have used this to dynamically populate page headers with an otherwise unavailable font for a nice, custom and dynamic theme. Ironically, the last stable sIFR version was released that same month I began building the website.
Because Flash is a closed, proprietary system that is a "popular punching bag for hackers" (see
Flash. Must. Die.), Firefox is now
automatically disabling it if it's plugin is found to be outdated. While this doesn't break our website, it does negatively alter our theme which may lead to usability issues as it disables all our headers powered by sIFR. In addition to security concerns, sIFR text does not show up in webpage searches, is rendered post-page-load (slow), and triggers mechanisms in ad-blocking plugins.
Fast forward to the present and we have seen almost half a dozen Flash security releases this week alone (see
Flash Player security failures turn up the hate). A bit of searching yields many anti-Flash websites such as
Occupy Flash: The movement to rid the world of the Flash Player plugin. Apple iDevice users have long known that Flash is unsupported (Steve Jobs
wrote an article explaining why), Andriod phones have
not supported it since 2012, Facebook's security chief is
calling for its end, and YouTube is phasing it out
for newer HTML5 web-standard technologies.
Which brings us back to our website. We are now using an open-source and web-standard platform for displaying custom web fonts,
@font-face. Additionally, we have switched to a publicly licensed (freeware) font type that better matches our open-ended creativity and public support business model.
@font-face is a style sheet technology that all modern browsers have support for right out of the box.
Benefits over sIFR include...
- Faster page loads
- Lower memory usage
- Inline page rendering
- Text search capability
- Direct styling support
- Ad-block software friendly
- No longer requires Javascript
- Less code to maintain
- Full cross-platform support
- Is Open Source (transparent)
and best of all, - No more Security issues from Adobe!
Thank you as always for continuing to visit and support
http://www.marlincrawler.com, where we've always taken both your Off-Road Product Reliability and Internet Security seriously!
Regards,
BigMike
ps. While we're on the open source and anti-Adobe train, might I suggest the open source, free, lightweight and portable
Sumatra PDF reader. Get rid of the bloatware that is Adobe Reader today!