Flash s*cks! Get rid of it!

Well sounds good, but I did a bit better removed all flash and used chrome as my main browser since it has flash build in!

aziatiklover said:

Well sounds good, but I did a bit better removed all flash and used chrome as my main browser since it has flash build in!

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How is that any better at all?

echo.park said:

Useless. You un-installed flash and re-installed it together with Chrome. Flash is flash. No matter where it comes from. LOL

The point is, that your computer should not "run" flash at all.

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Sorry but flash is not install into my OS at all! I said Chrome has a build in flash in it's own browser! When I use other browsers in my mac it always ask me to install flash plug in which I don't have.

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2IS said:

How is that any better at all?

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I get a cooler MBA, my fan is calm and not screaming, I get better battery life!

Flash is dying, the only thing keeping it around is web desginers to lazy to learn how to use HTML5 and business to lazy to update their web pages.

Ive been blocking flash for about 5 years now, i started top block it to stop the annoying adverts, and never missed it, but then i dont spend my days watching dancing cats or whatever on youtube or playing stupid games (the only two reasons other than adverts flash seems to exist nowadays)

If a site uses flash, and its selling something i need, they have lost my business to a site thats not using flash,

aziatiklover said:

Sorry but flash is not install into my OS at all! I said Chrome has a build in flash in it's own browser! When I use other browsers in my mac it always ask me to install flash plug in which I don't have.

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It is, it's just not the standard flash plug-in. It's still Flash and it's still Adobe code, it's just that Google and the Chromium developers have worked with Adobe and others to develop a new plug-in API that is better, faster and more secure than the old one used by Safari, Firefox, IE and others (so Google claim, and experience would seem to bear this out). I'm not entirely sure how it differs (too old to start digging into APIs these days), but I don't believe Flash is linked directly into Chrome, otherwise their autoupdate system would have trouble updating it in the way it does.

So Flash is still there, it's just not installed the same way as with the standard plug-in.

However, all this is largely irrelevant as the net effect is that Chrome has a fast, efficient and more secure Flash plug-in than the standard one that other browsers use. By using Chrome you get the best of both worlds, you get a fast browser that is 100% HTML 5 compatible and you get to keep Flash too.

So everyone is right, you can use HTML 5 in some instances to avoid using Flash and you can use Chrome to get a better Flash experience.

I appreciate some people don't like and don't feel the need for flash, the ads irritate me too and I don't play games and rarely use YouTube (though there is actually some useful stuff on there, I particularly like all the RSA animate lectures), but you still need it for so many sites. For those of us living in the UK and lucky enough to be able to use the the BBC's iPlayer service then you need it for that for a start and Chrome offers an acceptable compromise.

Nightarchaon - completely with you on the matt screen thing, My partner has a Macbook with the shiny screen which is completely useless in bright sunlight because you can't see it - a portable computer that you can't take outdoors, completely mad - mind you, we live in the UK, so bright sunshine is not something we see that often, particularly not this summer.

Well, ClickToFlash seems like the best option. Saves all the battery life that would otherwise be wasted on flash ads, and gives you the option to watch the videos you want without having to change browsers etc.
But it's better to also enable html5 on youtube so you'll need flash even less.

echo.park said:

So what I found out is this:

Use the Adblock-Plugin for Safari to block all ads, including flash based stuff, that gives me two or more hours longer battery life. For real, at first I couldn't believe it!

Definitely use HTML5 on Youtube. Go here and set the cookie: http://www.youtube.com/html5
When you have done this every video, that is avaliable in HTML5 format on Youtubes servers, will play in HTML5. All other videos will still be flash, though. But most will be in HTML5.

That gives me like 5 hours video playback on 720p, instead of like 2,5 hours with flash. Also no heat and no fan noise for your system.

I would recommend to simply un-install flash at all, but every now and then, there's something you will need it for. Unfortunately.

Hope this helps a little.

Click to expand...

or you could get "click to flash" extension on safari and it automatically blocks all flash but gives you the option of activating flash on a website by clicking a play button over the flash elements. It also automatically loads up the html version of a video if its available.

Also, its just on macs that flash sucks, when I was on windows it worked great.

Nightarchaon said:

Flash is dying, the only thing keeping it around is web desginers to lazy to learn how to use HTML5 and business to lazy to update their web pages.

Ive been blocking flash for about 5 years now, i started top block it to stop the annoying adverts, and never missed it, but then i dont spend my days watching dancing cats or whatever on youtube or playing stupid games (the only two reasons other than adverts flash seems to exist nowadays)

If a site uses flash, and its selling something i need, they have lost my business to a site thats not using flash,

Click to expand...

Your last sentence irked me a bit. So if one store sells an item cheaper than another store but is using flash (and the other is using html5) you'll buy from the second store? That's pretty stupid.

ClickToFlash obviously works, but you aren't helping fix the situation by using it. Your browser still reports to the web server "yup, I have flash, send me stuff". Only at that point does click to flash intervene. So to that particular web site, you are happily using flash and seeing their site. They don't realize you aren't. If we all suddenly uninstalled flash, things would change over night.

That is why using Chrome is a better alternative imho. I use safari 90% of the time, with no flash installed at all. When I must see a website that is using flash, I'll fire up chrome to view it. Chrome has a built in flash player. With youtube html5, switching to Chrome is quite rare. A lot of web pages have stopped using flash for their content.

No flash on my MacBooks

Definitely don't install flash on any MacBooks. It is evil battery sucker.
After upgrading to Lion, I decided not install flash anymore. Now my 2010 i7 Macbook Pro 15" has a solid 7-hour battery time; and my 2011 i5 Air 11" can run for 5 hours with normal use.
If you must watch something in flash, use Chrome.

aziatiklover said:

Sorry but flash is not install into my OS at all! I said Chrome has a build in flash in it's own browser! When I use other browsers in my mac it always ask me to install flash plug in which I don't have.

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I get a cooler MBA, my fan is calm and not screaming, I get better battery life!

Click to expand...

No you don't. I have Chrome too and it doens't run any cooler when playing flash content than Safari does when playing flash content.

Nightarchaon said:

Flash is dying, the only thing keeping it around is web desginers to lazy to learn how to use HTML5 and business to lazy to update their web pages.

Ive been blocking flash for about 5 years now, i started top block it to stop the annoying adverts, and never missed it, but then i dont spend my days watching dancing cats or whatever on youtube or playing stupid games (the only two reasons other than adverts flash seems to exist nowadays)

If a site uses flash, and its selling something i need, they have lost my business to a site thats not using flash,

Click to expand...

Which is like....95% of the internet.

2IS said:

No you don't. I have Chrome too and it doens't run any cooler when playing flash content than Safari does when playing flash content.

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The way keeping your mac cool is using Safari (no flash installed) as primary browser; open Chrome when you must see some flash content; quit Chrome afterwards. In this way you don't have any hidden flash plugin running in the background.

Do sign up for Youtube/HTML5, more and more contents are in HTML5 nowadays, running much cooler than flash.

Nightarchaon said:

Flash is dying, the only thing keeping it around is web desginers to lazy to learn how to use HTML5 and business to lazy to update their web pages.

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...or maybe it's the many things that HTML5 can't do that those businesses are obligated to continue doing.

Maybe the BBC should stop subtitling 100% of its TV output, switching to HTML5 <video> would require that. Let's throw disabled people under a bus just because Video Hardware Acceleration in Mac OS X isn't great.

Maybe YouTube should stop providing such detailed view stats to its content providers and advertisers.

Maybe they should dump support for the browsers that make up ~40% of the market share of web browsers online too. That makes excellent business sense.

Clearly you have worked out the issues that HTML5 has, care to share your solutions?

Daveoc64 said:

...or maybe it's the many things that HTML5 can't do that those businesses are obligated to continue doing.

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...like running FarmVille / CityVille and Miniclip.com games!

Photics said:

...like running FarmVille / CityVille and Miniclip.com games!

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Out of all of the possibilities, creating those games would be quite easy using HTML5's Canvas tag, although it would be unlikely to work as well as the current Flash implementations of those games.

I completely agree with the OP that Flash (especially on the MBA 2011) is evil. It may be the combination with Lion...not sure. Previously I had an i7 Quad-Core MBP 15" 2011 and I never realized how bad Flash killed its battery, probably because the MBP has a much larger battery.

Well since I've had my MBA for the past 2 weeks I've been disappointed with its battery performance (seems to drain much too quickly). I've been tracking down processes that sap the battery and eliminated those that I don't need anymore (I had an old DisplayLink kext that was constantly running, as an example). Today I installed flash blocker because it's the "other" process that is killing my battery (I run Chrome and see the Flash plugin often). That seems to have really stretched the battery...and I can always selectively enable Flash if I *really* want to take the battery hit on a site by site basis.

Highly recommended.

Viva HTML5 . I guess Steve was right!

Yes, it kills battery life.

Yes, it slows down page loading and causes sluggish scrolling.

But, even with HTML5 on the horizon, there still isn't a genuinely viable alternative for creating rich dynamic content that's consistent across browsers. HTML5 at the moment is hampered by poor cross-browser support, and all sorts of wrangling pertaining to standards to be used for video delivery and whatnot.

People yapping on about it like it's some sort of web miracle are - at the moment - deluded, or, have been done over by the marketing machine.

caodapengtj said:

The way keeping your mac cool is using Safari (no flash installed) as primary browser; open Chrome when you must see some flash content; quit Chrome afterwards. In this way you don't have any hidden flash plugin running in the background.

Do sign up for Youtube/HTML5, more and more contents are in HTML5 nowadays, running much cooler than flash.

Click to expand...

I just installed flash for Safari and use Click 2 Flash plug in. I get all the benefits of not having flash installed with the convenience of using a single browser when I do want flash content.

scarred said:

ClickToFlash obviously works, but you aren't helping fix the situation by using it. Your browser still reports to the web server "yup, I have flash, send me stuff". Only at that point does click to flash intervene. So to that particular web site, you are happily using flash and seeing their site. They don't realize you aren't. If we all suddenly uninstalled flash, things would change over night.

That is why using Chrome is a better alternative imho. I use safari 90% of the time, with no flash installed at all. When I must see a website that is using flash, I'll fire up chrome to view it. Chrome has a built in flash player. With youtube html5, switching to Chrome is quite rare. A lot of web pages have stopped using flash for their content.

Click to expand...

A lot of people keep saying that, but to my experience it's so NOT true.
I haven't found a single video streaming site that works on my iPhone. Even the youtube app doesn't have all the videos, but it does have a lot (obviously). That means that people still use flash a lot (at least for videos).
Maybe they stopped using it for other things, like interactions with the site etc. But for streaming, it still is used a lot.

echo.park said:

vimeo.com does have a superb HTML5 player. Awesome. When you doesn't have flash installed, it automatically switches to HTML5

Just saying...

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Yeah, but big deal?

Whether its HTML5 or Flash, you're still playing video and it's still chomping your battery.

See here.

Apple have an agenda for not promoting the use of Flash, and to some extent I can't blame them as it runs like a dog on certain hardware and to some degree, it takes your user-experience out their hands. But it's also plain that they are quite obstructive towards Adobe and aren't interested in working with them, in one light, Apple claim that they only have the user's interests at heart, with their battery-life lines, etc. In another, it's a clearly cynical attempt to prevent free competition with Flash games against the monopoly of the App Store.

I don't personally miss Flash on the iPhone or iPad, but it still grates, because I can see what they're doing and its damaging for wider development communities who have invested heavily and find themselves locked out of groundbreaking new hardware, through no fault of their own.