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.
Thanks for building this 10 years ago. This was my first repo I looked at as a noogler earlier this year because I wanted to understand the effort req’d to replace flash charts. It looked a bit more complex than I was expecting but I still have it as #1 on my backlog for a multi-weekend project.
Are Google employees expected to work on Google services over multi-weekends? Are you compensated or is this for fun? If you're working for free and your work is not open source it seems like you are being taken advantage of by your employer.
I think about it a little differently: I don’t work on that product team, but I’ve benefited from using google finance for almost a decade and have the skillset + interest to help contribute back to that product.
Despite being a little bit more complex than I think it needed to be (I was a junior engineer after all, and this was my first project at my first job) I still think there's more complexity than meets the eye. Like anything that looks simple, there's tons of work behind it.
The idea that Google has been spending engineering hours on other parts of Google Finance is ridiculous to me. I don't think there's been an update to it in over 5 years. They seem to be doing something to it finally, because there's a notice at the top of Portfolios saying that feature is being removed.
My stupid work computer makes me re-install flash pretty much every time I use it. That instantly makes it way too annoying to use google finance's charts. Thankfully yahoo finance has gotten a little better recently and doesn't need flash. They both kind of suck though.
You certainly set a standard with the interactivity and general functioning of the charts you built! Kudos
I'm curious as to why, if it's seemed so difficult to replace them, that Google hasn't gone with a rather wide-spread and capable library like High Charts?[0][1]
edit: Or am I missing the core problem. Not that it's difficult for Google to coordinate on an internal chart library, but rather that it's a problem of integrating a new display format?
And while we're on charting, I recommend having a look at:
https://cryptowat.ch/ (Though it has a bit of a different purpose)
I don't know enough about HighCharts. Funny to see that they also copied / were inspired by the Google Finance Charts sparkbar (that's what we called the thing that shows you the summary at the bottom with the handles that you can drag).
I'd imagine is a combination of "not built here", pride (google engineers always feel that they can build everything better than the outside world), and performance (Google was investing, and I imagine continues to invest, vast amounts of engineering in speed).
Thankyou for your good work on the charts. Google Finance for a long time has been one of my favorite financial tools. (At least it used to be before the stock screener broke.)
Google's issues these days are management and culture, not a lack of talent. Pretty much like every other big company that recently became big.
For a smaller (but worse affected) example, look at Wikipedia. The majority of their spending is on management, and "soft jobs" like "PR" and public events. They spend a tiny fraction on the one thing that matters: Hosting bandwidth and upgrading their platform where all of their content they provide comes for free. Till a few years ago they had (IIRC from last time I looked into their docs) like, only 2 or 3 full-time engineers in the entire company for a bulk of their growth until finally adding a bunch more--while adding plenty of other staff. If the majority of their money is coming from those banners, and not outsider backers, there is no excuse for them to spend so much outside their core technology. Universities spend big money outside the college (Football, and grant money)... but it GAINS far more in exchange, so that makes sense.
I would hypothesis that as a company employees more and more "assistants" and "assistants of assistants" and the proportion of administration to engineering/research staff grows, a company bogs down with people who don't really contribute as much as they debate (or do nothing at all) in the company. I've seen studies that show that same problem as one of the reasons University costs have risen so much. There's probably an existing term for it akin to the Peter Principle but I'm not aware of it.
Basically, Google is an amazing company full of amazing people. But while they're amazing in TECH, that doesn't mean they have equally amazing managers capable of stopping the stagnation and confusion that comes with large companies. Lots of their "open" ideas work well on small and medium scales, but do they scale up?
But of course lots of that is more vague than I'd prefer in a comment. So I'd like to emphasis my one real point, as the proportion of # administration to content producers grows, the efficiency of a company drops as it gets bogged down in communication issues and "the usual" office politics. Which I would also hypothesis the majority of politics come from low-end producers (possibly to feel like they're contributing?). We've all worked at companies (and often still do) where we can cite limitless examples of non-producers easily passing HR, but bogging down the content creators by distracting them.
Lots of the "leaks" about Google have happened and almost every single one has mentioned office politics, retribution, witchhunts, and blacklists. They could be false. But they seem to have those as common threads among them. ("Where there's smoke there's fire"?) It also goes in line with Google producing much less "world revolution" products and acquiring mass amounts of startups with new ideas. Kind of reminds me of the story of AOL.
You're looking for Parkinson's Law. From wikipedia:
Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". It is also sometimes applied to the growth of the bureaucratic apparatus in an organization.
He goes on to write about organization inefficiency, how adding more and more people make committees useless.
I'd like to see them sit on their money and run their network in maintenance mode forever rather than rashly spend it and risk the loss of one of the biggest core resources to modern society to overspending. Wikipedia certainly doesn't need to beg users for money with big intrusive banners, they just need to cut excess costs!
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.
Why the hell do grocery store refrigerators require a web GUI? The most complicated computer in the whole system should maybe be an 8-bit microcontroller.
For massive industrial-scale refrigeration and storage, it might also make sense to add, say, a serial port.
Well, for a fleet of refrigerators, it might be nice to have a place to see data from the entire fleet. Power requirements, temperature, failures or failure indicators, etc.
A large supermarket would most likely want something like that. With serial ports, they'd have to design a system themselves, including the boxes to attach to the individual serial ports.
Of course, for a technically skilled individual, a serial port is much preferable.
Temperature logging is mandated by HACCP-related regulations. Without a centralized system one would have store clerks running around with thermometers and a clipboard. The maintenance company can do remote supervision, troubleshooting and optimization. Also, having an overview of all stores helps one pick out the ones that are wasting electricity.
Disclaimer: Our company's main product is used to collect data from refrigeration systems into one vendor-independent, Flash-free web UI. We do pretty much everything ranging from web development to reverse engineering and hardware design.
You're thinking of refrigeration cabinets with small separate compressors, just like an average person has at home? Post-eighties refrigeration systems even at small sites are inherently more complex and yes, they have features that make them comparable to industrial systems.
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.
Yup, I'm seeing this with Google sites (sort of) right now. Even though they're rolling out a new version, it's pretty much impossible to get a digest of all pages on the old sites with revisions. There is an API to access this data, but it's behind an amalgam of out-of-date documentation and forgotten APIs.
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.
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.
If the trends of "renovation" I've seen on other sites are any indication, the Flash requirement will disappear but so will a bunch of other useful features. :-(
IMHO if they can't change things without removing functionality, they should just leave well enough alone. They don't have to "support" the old version or do anything special with it; just leave it alone in its current, working, state.
Of course they can. Flash isn't a cloud service. All "deprecated" and "EoL" means is that Adobe isn't going to change the product or provide support. Google could do the same. It will keep working the way it has always worked. There's millions if not more sites out there still with Flash content. I have a collection of SWFs (mostly games) and they still work too.
The "this technology is old/deprecated/EoL/unfashionable/etc., let's just delete it all and provide no equivalent replacement, nevermind the fact that it's been working well" attitude is what really pisses off users, including me. Also somewhat like me, they don't really care what technology is as long as it works --- all they see is something which used to work is now broken and they can't do anything about it.
Naturally. Portfolios are the reason I use the product. They give you a quick view of each symbol on the right at finance.google.com, a link to chart each symbol, and the ability to chart the portfolio as a whole. It was all convenient and solid for years. Bye bye.
I was a tad sad seeing that the other day. I have used it for 10 years.. I guess I will just have to use my investment site. Logging in is such a pain just to get a general update.
Real-time data via BATS, amazing charts/tooling - all done without Flash. Why one of the brokers hasn't bought them yet is beyond me - so much better than 99% of all trading software put out there by the brokers.
I've always heard great things about Yahoo Finance and I keep the Android app as of recently. They notify me with videos / articles about what's going on in finance which I find handy, it's not too much of it thankfully.
There are plenty of gaps in what Google do that Yahoo! do or did better (stocks, sports, news, weather, chat, groups etc). It's a shame they focused on competing against exactly where Google were the strongest.
I am not sure which company the they is in your second sentence. I think you mean Yahoo and they do have some good services. I haven just always used google products (remember iGoogle?) I have set up yahoo finance and it is lovely but it is just a (small) pain to jump to another site/app ect.
And what strikes me as a finance professional is that I can get live stock prices from the free yahoo finance website, whereas my expensive bloomberg terminal only has 15min delayed stock prices...
Free trial version available on our website (website content is in need of updating -- not all features are mentioned on there yet. We're working on a new site)
Quandl is pretty good (https://www.quandl.com/).
It is a unique API (and has a web interface as well) to a collection of financial and economics data sets.
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)
It should be "Adobe Flash Player is required for charts on finance.google.com on Firefox otherwise static rendered chart image is not renderable either".
I tried Firefox on Windows and Chrome on Windows, only FF can't show the static rendered image without first activate Flash.
If Google cared about Google Finance, they would have done that five years ago (or more). It’s clearly in maintenance mode, with the bare minimum spent on it to keep the lights on but no active development.
Which is potentially why I've heard for years that Yahoo Finance is really good, in fact probably better considering the amount of attention Yahoo Finance gets. Yahoo is still my go to choice. I only use Google when I am looking up stuff from Google's domain and it shows up as an instant answer.
That's why I quit VMware. That was the only project to work on, and there was no way I was going to spend my career in a dead-end technology like that.
It was kind of obvious that HTML was going to take over... Like really obvious.
VMware 6.5 finally has an HTML5 interface! Woohoo!
Too bad it's still a "work in progress" and not actually that useful for the more fine-grained/advanced things (like deploying a new VM or template directly from an OVA file).
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.
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.
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.