Killing Adobe Flash

15 points by greenwalls 11 years ago | 2 comments

sirn 11 years ago |

I've been living without Adobe Flash installed directly on machine since 2011, and have to say it's the best decision I could have made for Flash. (I do, however, have FreeSMUG build of Chromium[1] installed in case I need Flash in some video streaming site that I occasional use. I dislike Google's Keystone Updater.)

From my experience, uninstalling Flash will let you see _less_ missing plugin icon than having Flash installed with Click-To-Play enabled. This is because once Flash is uninstalled, the browser will simply report to the website that the user do not having Flash and allow the website to fallback to no-Flash mode accordingly.

One biggest problem of having Flash and using Firefox was Vimeo videos because Firefox weren't able to play H.264 on its own, and Vimeo do not provide WebM. This is where it used to be the problem. However, fortunately recent Firefox versions now included OpenH264 codec and could play Vimeo videos without any problems.

Nowadays there are only handful of sites I need to keep Chromium installed, but the number is rapidly decreasing. With YouTube switching to HTML5 by default, I'd recommend anyone to try uninstalling Flash and rely on Chrome/Chromium when Flash is needed. You won't really miss much.

[1]: http://www.freesmug.org/chromium

JonRB 11 years ago | |

While I fully agree that for video type media, I find that Flash is still pretty important for online games. Sure, those games could be remade in HTML5, but until then it's nice to be able to play them with comparatively little issue. I do, however, like your solution for needing flash on the odd occasion.