Hacker News Reader

Flash makes it easier to get some of the information like your system fonts, but JavaScript get the same information it's just more difficult. It has to cycle through a list of fonts and test for them individually rather than Flash which just gives the full list of fonts you have installed.

I don't think this is the case. It seems to be a part of the overall fingerprinting test and having Flash disabled didn't block me from viewing the final results.

There are a lot more sneaky ways such as http://diracdeltas.github.io/sniffly/ that are often combined