Not long ago I removed Adobe Flash Player from my iMac. Despite all the political things between Apple and Adobe I did this mostly for performance reasons. I am often working on photos in Aperture while having a browser window open and I find that Flash just running ads in Safari use a ton of resources. Since disabling it I see a noticeable gain in speed and responsiveness on my machine in general.
Now I’m not entirely without it, I have Google Chrome installed as my secondary browser which has Flash built in, so when I want to watch Hulu it’s still possible. However I’ve started to notice that most websites offer HTML5 video options and I got an excellent extension for Safari to make most sites default to it.
John Gruber wrote an excellent piece on how to do this and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
That said there are two things that annoy me right now.
- Google Analytics relies on Flash for it’s charts… which is unnecessary… it could all be done in HTML5
- Boing Boing….
I’ve mentioned before that Boing Boing uses a ton of Flash, when I called the hypocritical Cory Doctorow a hypocrite (well he is).
Well it turns out, this is what happens when you visit the BoingBoing.net main page in safari without Flash installed:
Forcing my computer to auto-download useless SWF files? Good job gentlemen. You suck again.
Noticeably this does not occur when you read their site through a RSS reader. Maybe they should just stop being hypocrites and stop running Flash ads? Are you listening Cory? Probably not.