the onda

One of the great things to come out of Apple's snub of Flash during the iPad launch has been the discussion around whether Flash is really needed for a first-class web browsing experience. In reading the various opinions, I came across a brilliant Safari plug-in, ClickToFlash, which shims the Flash player so that you have to explicitly approve any Flash widgets that are loaded on pages. The plug-in provides a whitelist so that certain domains will always load Flash (say Pandora and Hulu) widgets. Apparently there are also versions of this same general idea for Firefox and Chrome.

I've been using ClickToFlash for 4 days and there is no going back for me. Apple's claim that the Mac crashes most because of Flash seems well supported by the fact that I can now have 20-25 tabs open regularly without Safari hogging all of my machine's resources. It's awesome.

What is most nefarious about Flash is not all of the explicit video embeds that people use, but the fact that it has snuck into display advertising. If you install any of these plug-ins, you'll quickly realize how many of the standard IAB ad sizes are now actually being powered by Flash widgets— which do nothing but pulse in annoying ways— and perhaps more significantly— suck down system resources.

Just say no to Flash.