Flash is not the web

cover image for Flash is not the web

Let me share a little piece of Internet happiness: When I got my iPhone, I wondered how could its web browser be so dramatically faster than the one on my N810. Could it be just that iPhone has faster processor, and uses WebKit instead of Mozilla? But at the same time, the state-of-the-art Firefox 3 on my MacBook Air was also feeling sluggish.

After giving this a little bit of thought, I decided, Flash must be the guilty party. Flash, as we know, is Adobe's proprietary framework for building multimedia-rich applications, and iPhone simply doesn't support it. Sometimes Flash is actually used for building interesting applications, but most usage online seems to be just fancy animated banners. So, I thought, there must be a smart way to get rid of Flash. And there is: With Firefox you can use the FlashBlock extension to excise all Flash content off the pages:

Arstechnica with Flashblock

With other browsers you could off course uninstall the Flash plug-in, but the problem is that sometimes there is Flash content you actually want to see. And in these cases FlashBlock works perfectly: each Flash area on a site is replaced with a box that you can activate at will. So before Flash is made obsolete by the recent advancements in HTML and Javascript, this option is the best of both worlds.


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