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Comment by thailandstartup | Hacker News Reader

Click to Flash is the ideal middle ground for mobile devices. Only play the Flash when the user explicitly requests. 90% of the time, the user won't notice the Flash missing, the other 10% it is available on request. That solves the battery issues and the annoying advertisement issues.

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Well, it might help the battery issue, but it couldn't solve it unless the video playback was just as efficiently hardware-accelerated as the native implementation. You're also introducing a user experience cost of N additional taps for an afternoon watching N flash videos.

The ideal sweet spot is for proprietary plugins to vacate all browsers post haste.

Take a good look at the number of plugins you are already running. If you are using Chrome type in about:plugins in the URL. I think you might be surprised.

I see many people have this hate towards Flash because it is a plug-in, but what about QuickTime, Silverlight, and Java? Plug-ins exist to extend the functionality of our browsers and let's face it, HTML does not do everything.

In most cases, those plugins are there because some other app put them there, not because they're actually used. The most notable exception is probably Silverlight for Netflix.

I don't think Click to Flash is the optimal solution. On the PC side it still loads Flash objects, they just aren't displayed. It also skews feedback. If developers think that flash is being represented in mobile devices when its not that only causes them to divert resources from creating mobile HTML versions of sites.

In Safari with the ClickToFlash extension, flash objects are not just 'not displayed', they are not loaded at all until the placeholder is clicked. See for yourself: point Safari to http://adobe.com/software/flash/about/ and show the web inspector 'Resources' tab before clicking on a CtF placeholder. Notice that no SWF are loaded, then click on any one of them and see the SWF get fetched, along with the external process being started in your OS process list.

There could be a ClickToFlash version not loading Flash objects at all until requested couldn't there? Of course it would probably be for all <embed> and <object>, but...

That's the core functionality of NoScript: don't allow anything more complicated than HTML+CSS until authorized by the user. It blocks objects but by default leaves behind a rectangle you can click to download and run the object.

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