Le Morte de Flash: Gone in a Flash

I am tired of Adobe Flash. Since I have been trying to transition a substantial portion of my work to a laptop, I have become more painfully aware of how inefficient this bloated plugin is (and I was already quite aware!). Never mind the slow performance, when battery life drops in half because of a window open in the background that has Flash in it, something is really wrong.

So, I am seeing how I like the web with Click for Flash installed in Safari. Eduardo got me thinking about using a flash blocker when he mentioned the Firefox-oriented FlashBlock in his blog post on web ads.

When the big brouhaha over the iPad's lack of flash started, that made me think even more seriously about Flash and ask a question: would I miss Flash if it were gone? Since I bought my first iPhone two and a half years ago, I have done a lot of web surfing on it and I have never really missed Flash when doing so. In preparing OFB Labs reviews I have also spent a lot of time with other smartphones such as the Motorola Droid and have found I can do everything I normally want to do on the web and never really even think about the lack of Flash.

Really, the only thing I use Flash for is viewing the occasional YouTube video. Now that YouTube is implementing HTML5-based video (which is doubly great since H.264 is hardware accelerated on modern Macs), there is virtually no Flash content out there that I use on an even semi-regular basis. So, why bother with it loading all the time?

I can hear folks saying, “Tim, aren't you being inconsistent with your stance on ad blocking?” The answer is “no.” Click to Flash blocks all Flash on the pages I view — it is not set up to distinguish between ads and normal content. To the extent this is true, using Click to Flash is similar to choices such as not to install Flash at all or choosing to use a text-based web browser.

Similarly, I have always argued blocking popups is appropriate because it is not my duty to provide the ability for sites to jump out of their box (doubly so to hide something beneath my browser as they do with pop-unders). I have blocked popups for years. Likewise, while I choose to use a graphical browser, I have no qualms with those who think using a text-only browser to avoid all graphics is a good idea.

Key principle: I do not believe I have to provide software to allow people to sell me stuff; I can choose to disable any part of my browser I feel like. But, when I disable it, it should not be in a way that intelligently disables it only for ads, but for all uses of the content method the ads use. If I don't want animated GIF ads, I should disable all animated GIFs. If I don't want popup ads, I should disable all unrequested popups. If I don't want Flash ads, I should disable Flash wholesale.

If I continued to have the system download non-advertising related Flash, that would be a different story. After all, I would be using up the web site's bandwidth without at least viewing the stuff they use to subsidize that bandwidth. Bandwidth is very expensive. In agreeing to quid pro quo concerning web viewing, it is no different than how if I want a subsidized price on a phone, I do not try to get out of having a two year contract.

I digress. I am Flash free now. I like it so far — my browsing experience is running faster and I am hopefully doing my part to send a clear message to other web developers: drop the proprietary plugins and use HTML5. The momentum is already there with the HTML5-friendly Mobile Safari/WebKit has engine becoming the lingua franca of mobile web browsing.

Who knows? Maybe by Mac OS X 10.7, Flash will not even come pre-installed on desktop systems. If that happens, I can't say I would be the least bit sad.