Daring Fireball: Going Flash-Free on Mac OS X, and How to Cheat When You Need It
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
* go to about:config
* search on plugin.default_plugin_disabled.
* set to false
Firefox doesn't support H.264. If you're using Firefox 4 you can opt in to the HTML5 beta and get a fair number of videos served as WebM, though.
No, we won't "cross that bridge". Colour me skeptic, but I've yet to see DF admit to any of the insufficiencies of HTML5 over Flash.
When confronted with contrarian proofs, the average Steve Jobs allegiant will cite other FUD grab-bags (ex: security issues, battery life, etc.). It's tiring to watch intelligent people pushing HTML5 based on fallacy after fallacy. Everyone wants HTML5 to evolve, but not by the hand of bullshit.
Here's a short writeup of how one of them worked:
http://www.google.com/reader/item/tag:google.com,2005:reader...
What people like Gruber are reacting to is the craptastic Flash ads that permeate websites today, and the negative effect that they have on performance and battery life.
> video - kinda. The RTMP equivalent implementation isn't quiet as easy as RTMP.
> animation - this is the kind of bs I'm talking about. Having done complex timeline animation in Flash and JS (with WebWorkers) I can say with all honesty that it is not just fine with HTML5+JS. JS-based timeline animation is clunky at best and incredibly time consuming.
No one can seem to give a tangible, legible reason why Flash has the unreasonably holy authority to drain battery power.
Hamish: No Flash site is inferior to its HTML5 equivalent in terms of battery life.
Angus: Youtube's Flash implementation uses more battery than their HTML5 equivalent on my machine.
Hamish: No well-coded Flash site is inferior to its HTML5 equivalent in terms of battery life.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/No_true_Scots...
Apologies for this, it seems to have evidence in it: http://apiblog.youtube.com/2010/06/flash-and-html5-tag.html
It's hard for me to compare HTML5 to Flash if the Flash version has a truckload of abilities being used that cannot be utilized in HTML5. What's so hard to understand about this?
Does the MacBook fan only come on for Flash? It seems unlikely. Seems like it might engage for CPU-intensive processes that contain audio, video, Internet access (WiFi or 3G isn't cheap on the battery) and a mixture of other features.
I'm not trying to get any one to agree to Flash being better. I just don't see an equal argument. Ever.
I read the article. I saw HTML5 mentioned as a fallback for YouTube videos. Which, um, works. I also saw discussion of ClickToFlash as an option for things you want to use and which don't have a non-Flash alternative. Which, um, is pretty darned sensible.
The concluding line -- "we'll cross that bridge when we come to it" -- is about the only position it's possible to have. Nobody knows what the future's going to look like, and sticking to something that really does have performance issues right now on the grounds that the replacement might become worse in the future is, well, not so sensible.
So maybe you should talk to your optometrist, because you're apparently seeing things that aren't there.
With tongue in cheek, there is no advertisement="true" attribute on the canvas tag. If you were to block CANVAS or VIDEO you'd essentially be halting HTML5 progression. This concern, albeit not backed up with conjecture or reference, is that the use of CANVAS could actually cause some detriment to the HTML5 cause. Why shouldn't we anticipate this probability? Easy: we'll invariably end up with an answer we don't like and understand that an unfavorable result is to come.
The more "Flash is the cause of..." narratives I read, the more obvious it becomes. This fight isn't about standards at all. Flash-driven restaurant sites didn't suddenly become awful. They always were. And Adobe didn't make those sites. Shoddy developers did. iTunes for Windows runs like a fat kid; no one is banging down Microsoft's door about it.
When:
* Adobe Photoshop crashes, blame Adobe.
* iTunes runs like shit, blame Apple.
* a Flash-based site crashes your browser, blame the developer who built it.
Grooveshark is currently in the background, not playing anything. On my work PC, running XP, it doesn't use any cpu at all. On my personal mac, it constantly hovers at 45% core usage, meaning if I open grooveshark at home, my fans kick on in a 60 degree room.
With access to a decent selector engine, it's actually not that hard to selectively disable only the things which are (likely to be) ads. I've been doing that for years with nothing but CSS -- the fact that ads come in standardized formats actually makes it easier to put together selectors for them.
[Flash] appears to under-perform on every platform I have except Windows (Windows in VMware + Flash is better than native Mac Flash, I swear!).
Flash has been an albatross for Mac users for a decade. It has performed terribly, crashed our browsers, and with the rise of YouTube &co. forced us to use it to watch videos via a hilarious, incredible, inefficient hack instead of a real native video player.
We are really (and understandably) happy to get rid of it, especially if that means we get to skip the worst kinds of ads and online videos don't churn the CPU anymore.
For all its usefulness, Flash just isn't worth the hassle for Mac users, and it's largely Adobe's fault that we find this to be the case.
On my G1, browsing was a quick bit of text here and there; with the G2 I don't think twice when a site links to something like Vimeo. It just works. It's the web.
I can't understand intentionally taking that away from yourself.
I don't think twice when a site links to something like
Vimeo. It just works. It's the web.
Point is I don't have to shrug my shoulders and say "guess I can't check out this content because I'm on a mobile device" anymore. I don't have to think in terms of real web vs mobile web, which I was certainly doing before.
Then choose any of the other embedded media scattered
across the web that hasn't already catered to iOS.
However, no Youtube5-like extension for Chrome seems to work for me.
That's the problem YouTube5 solves.
http://www.andrewandoru.com/2010/11/05/labs-flashy/
flashy! is an AppleScript applet that makes the simple simpler by automatically enabling and disabling the Flash plug-in by moving the appropriate components from their normal directory, and placing them in a “.disabled” directory for safekeeping.
the downside to hiding flash is that your brain no longer can feed on the ads that users are being exposed to - you don't know what the trends are, etc.
Your statement might be true for future releases, but unless you are running nightlies, Chrome does currently not have this as a builtin feature.