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Technology

Flash Free: The Way to Be

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.

  1. Google Analytics relies on Flash for it’s charts… which is unnecessary… it could all be done in HTML5
  2. 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.