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by eatonphil·11y ago·view on hn ↗
Does anyone know why this is showing up on Github as well? I just saw this banner when I logged in. Why would Github be using Flash?

(A quick Google search shows they used to use it for the network graph but it is now Canvas.)

4 comments
Github uses flash for the 'copy to clipboard' button to copy an http or ssh url to the clipboard.
Something I noticed after making my Flash click-to-activate a while back. That seems like a HUMONGOUS tunnel to create in order to allow copy to clipboard, and fairly irresponsible on GitHub's part.

What developer doesn't know how to copy to clipboard?

Github claims that the flash version is "currently the only reliable way to put data in the clipboard". This seems to indicate that they looked at the native browser option and found it unacceptable for their use case.

https://github.com/blog/1365-a-more-transparent-clipboard-bu...

That blog is from 2013. Github now does browser sniffing to see if it can use native APIs instead of flash: https://gist.github.com/jonrohan/81085b119d16cdd7868a
They seem to use it for clipboard access, some repository links have a button that puts the URI in you clipboard automatically. I'm not sure if there is anything else they are using it for.
In addition to clipboard access flash is also used to provide alternate upload mechanisms. See Dropbox for a good example (and the failover UI).
Don't they use it on their "copy URL button"?