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Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

I am so happy that I can barely contain myself. Hopefully this means Flash will now be used for important things, instead of shoving ads in my face that I can't dismiss, and follow my scroll bar.

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You say that now, but just wait until they're written in JS+Canvas and enormously more difficult to block.

Well, it's true that JavaScript- and Canvas- powered ads are harder to distinguish from legitimate web content. But the flip-side is that they're (re-)programmable using standard JavaScript APIs, and thus vulnerable to manipulation by browser extensions in a way that Flash never was, being a proprietary binary format.

I don't have any trouble blacklisting domains for JS with current browser extensions. Why would it suddenly get more difficult?

They'll still be iframes or external scripts. Ads will always be trivial to block.

Yeah, HTML5 YouTube has the significant disadvantage of autoplay.

There's nothing preventing you from blocking HTML5-video just like Flash can be blocked with add-ons today. Personally I use NoScript for that.

Or CSS3?

Seriously? You are that annoyed with Flash and still don't know about FlashBlock?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flashblock

I can't even imagine how many hours I've lost to Flash-induced beachball. Some pages have dozens of little advertisements and assorted trash that take nearly a minute to sort out.

Any effort to make the browser experience smoother is a good thing!

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