No News: Flash

The point's been made before.

Get It Try It

People having trouble with Safari at the Guardian. Scripts running really slow and Safari popping up one alert after another. Switch to Firefox to compare.

Wow.

Surfing to the Guardian without Flash is a no-brainer. Not so much with Firefox. Firefox visits a link at the Guardian, page takes ages to load (but it does finally load). And then funny things start to happen.



The Apple laptop fan goes on. This despite Firefox idling. Activity Monitor reveals the following.



CPU usage goes down, goes up. As the obscene number of obscene Flash ads decide they have new tricks to show off.

One might be totally against Steve's walled garden. But one thing no one can ever fault him for is grasping just how bad Adobe Flash is. Looking at a typical page at the otherwise prestigious Guardian is like wandering in the stairwell of Hogwarts on a contaminated hallucinogen.

That Flash has to go, that everyone's had it with Adobe, is obvious. But it's also obvious that something has to be done about the way the web experience is being ruined by obscene advertisers with their hysterical animations, Flash-based or no.

None of which is news. But it needs to be said again and again until something happens.