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I'm a little worried about losing what is to me one of the main advantages of Flash: that it can be blocked. So your all singing, all dancing website shuts the hell up and behaves like a sedate page full of text and static images.

I mean, I can block JS, but it's irritating to have to. That's generally used for useful things like navigation. Flash marks something up as useless pizazz.

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Very interesting point here.

Maybe Adobe's next ad campaign will feature this idea: Flash is better because you can turn it off. In fact, if you turn it off, you remove 99% of all truly annoying ads on the web.

Thinking ahead, maybe we need a ClickToJS...

We have one, it's called NoScript.

In Safari:

1. File -> Preferences -> Show Develop menu in menu bar

2. Develop -> Disable JavaScript

This is a worry for me too. I'm a long-term ClickToFlash user. I've enjoyed my time in a flash/ad/animation-free web but am horribly aware that it is temporary.

As HTML5 takes over we will see more unstoppable content - pop-up panels, intrusive advertising etc.

I just wish we could pay for the web without all this crap.

Just use a hosts file that redirects known ad sites to 127.0.0.1 if you're worried about ads. It blocks everything, though occasionally it breaks things or causes weird behavior (like silent, blank ad pages on the NPR player).

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