Flash is a plague

[appel]

So, I installed a new machine and it's ... oh so good.

One decision I've made... I won't install flash. I think flash is a plague on the interwebs. Imagine how much cpu time has been lost because of flash, all those ads and other nonsense things? Probably half the cpu cycles in the world have been lost to flash in the past 5 years or so.


edit: oh... forgot youtube

[sproingie]

Cool story bro.

Youtube is my loophole for streaming music at work.

[Mickelukas]

edit: oh... forgot youtube

http://www.youtube.com/html5

opt in

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[vyh]

http://www.youtube.com/html5

[Fokusas]

Or if you want to watch Youtube but not ads you could install flash blocking addons like Flashblock for Firefox or other similar.

[Damocles]

I always have a flashblocker on. Just have to watch flashstuff you want.
And these annoying overlay window ads are also transparent.

Flash is just a multimedia tech in the end. There is not point in disliking flash itslef.
Its more a point in disliking sites that use flash in an annoying way.

[appel]

I always have a flashblocker on. Just have to watch flashstuff you want.
And these annoying overlay window ads are also transparent.

Flash is just a multimedia tech in the end. There is not point in disliking flash itslef.
Its more a point in disliking sites that use flash in an annoying way.

Yes. Flash is good for specific things, like youtube, but flash is just so widely used for almost anything, ads and buttons and whatever it bogs down your system no matter how good your specs are. Could you imagine if java applets were used in the same manner? :/

[sproingie]

Could you imagine if java applets were used in the same manner? :/

I remember the days when I would see rollover buttons done as applets.  It was as bad as you'd imagine.

This whole topic reminds me of the guy who loudly proclaims at every opportunity that he doesn't own a TV.

[appel]

Could you imagine if java applets were used in the same manner? :/

I remember the days when I would see rollover buttons done as applets.  It was as bad as you'd imagine.

This whole topic reminds me of the guy who loudly proclaims at every opportunity that he doesn't own a TV.

Hehe... back in 1996 or so I think I made a java applet animation for a web page that was something like 4 megabytes. Worked fine locally, but couldn't figure out why it didn't load for someone else that was on a 28.8 modem :/

Anyway, youtube works beautifully without flash. Looks like you really can go on a Flash diet (Ohh.. I trademark that!).

[Roquen]

Humm...I don't own of TV....

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Damocles]

I also dont have a TV  

The net provides me with news and shows...

[pjt33]

Could you imagine if java applets were used in the same manner? :/

I remember the days when I would see rollover buttons done as applets.  It was as bad as you'd imagine.

It was worse than some people would imagine. Don't forget that applets have improved in the past couple of years.

This whole topic reminds me of the guy who loudly proclaims at every opportunity that he doesn't own a TV.

There are still people who own TVs?!

[sproingie]

Noscript does a bang up job at screening out the annoying flash adverts for me.  I find I rarely even need to use adblock after that.  Browsing the web without noscript is like patronizing hookers without using condoms.

[gouessej]

This whole topic reminds me of the guy who loudly proclaims at every opportunity that he doesn't own a TV.

I loudly proclaim that I don't own a TV and I even asked my neighbour to help me to remove a kind of pole on my roof so that another neighbour cannot set his antenna on it anymore  

Flash is becoming worse even for watching videos. I often get a black rectangle on Youtube, it's like Flash doesn't get started. Then, I have to restart Firefox  

[Chromanoid]

disliking flash is like disliking java. dont dislike such powerful technologies, use them, improve them

[kappa]

well its not only flash, browser plugins in general are becoming (feeling) more and more heavyweight, bloated and out of place as the browsers themselves get faster. Javascript (on modern browsers) is well on its way to becoming a flash replacement.

[Chromanoid]

yeah maybe, but flash did its job very well for a long time. i think flash will be the browser game solution until ie has some kind of webgl and you don't have to think about audio codecs when developing games with html5. i cannot imagine unity and epic games add flash deployment to their engines for a few years of flash dieing out.

i hope that the end of flash will be the beginning of a html vm spec that allows us to use any language we want for pure html in-browser applications.

[Eli Delventhal]

I have Flash and ads blocked via Chrome plugins. If I really need it (Pandora is the only thing so far) I just enable it for that site.

[gouessej]

disliking flash is like disliking java. dont dislike such powerful technologies, use them, improve them

Adobe's Flash is not open source, I can only send a bug report, what else?

[BoBear2681]

Humm...I don't own of TV....

"You don't have a TV? Then what does all of your furniture point at?"

Futurama is the best.

[BoBear2681]

Flash is becoming worse even for watching videos. I often get a black rectangle on Youtube, it's like Flash doesn't get started. Then, I have to restart Firefox  

I know you're on Linux, but on Windows the solution for non-starting Flash is often to kill the offending "plugin-container.exe" process.  FF happily gives you a little sad-face lego icon in the Flash applet space that you can click to restart it.  So I'm assuming you can just kill whatever the plugin process is on Linux, no need to kill all of Firefox and your 100+ tabs.

[ra4king]

Humm...I don't own of TV....

"You don't have a TV? Then what does all of your furniture point at?"

Futurama is the best.

Futurama, Friends, Big Bang Theory, and That 70's Show are the only reason I watch TV

[Chromanoid]

disliking flash is like disliking java. dont dislike such powerful technologies, use them, improve them

Adobe's Flash is not open source, I can only send a bug report, what else?

Well at least Flex is Open Source and I think many people here used Java before it was Open Source. You also can improve a platform by developing libraries for it. Afaik since the http://www.openscreenproject.org/ you can develop your own Flash player like your own Java VM if you think it is nescessary. I guess it is just a matter of time when the player goes open source too.

[gimbal]

Speaking of Flash, ever hear of the DJ project?

http://djproject.sourceforge.net/main/index.html

Actually lets you play flash stuff in a Swing app. Until someone attended me to this I was under the impression that it was impossible. How wrong I was.

[Roquen]

"You don't have a TV? Then what does all of your furniture point at?"

The bad news is that some of it points at a computer.  The good news is that most of it points toward the bar.

[ReBirth]

Noscript does a bang up job at screening out the annoying flash adverts for me.  I find I rarely even need to use adblock after that.  Browsing the web without noscript is like patronizing hookers without using condoms.

Same here, the only reason I need flash are video streaming sites and only youtube with html5 feature. In NoScript I block everything except applet. On bad side, I need to refresh a page in first time of load after put it to whitelist.

[kappa]

Adobe offers auto-update for Flash (i.e. silent updates like Chrome). IMO this is a good move for Flash and a well overdue feature. Something that Java should also implement.

UPDATE: better details on how it works found here.

[sproingie]

About time.  Every time I'm forced to click on their damn license agreement in their updater, I want to throw things.

[appel]

I get like 10 "Do you want to install and reboot now?" reminders per day. It's ANNOYING as hell.  If I said yes every time I'd spend half my computer time just rebooting.

Windows updates...
Adobe Acrobat Reader updates...
Java updates...
Flash updates...
Firefox updates...
IntelliJ updates...
etc.

[ReBirth]

I never update (automaticlly)