23 thoughts on “Shockwave Flash on my Macintosh”

  6. She also mentioned in the prior post she’s working on a book and updates would be sparse. Hopefully that’s the only thing, because I very much want to support her efforts!

  8. Agreed Flash is such a turd on the Mac, especially when you hit a page with 5 or 10 different flash files on it. Adobe never really wanted to support the mac.
    Thus why I use the ClickToFlash in Safari:
    http://hoyois.github.com/safariextensions/clicktoplugin/
    It blocks flash, but also allows you to whitelist certain sites. Plus it awesomely replaces flash videos with nonflash versions.
    Once I started using that I was amazed the stuff that people used flash for which they should use animated PNGs or even GIFs.

  9. It’s amazing how embeddable video turned Flash from universally-hated, resourcing-hogging, security vulnerability into indispensable universally-hated, resource-hogging, security vulnerability.

  11. I second the recommendation of ClickToFlash. I still use a few PowerPC Macs, and even on the G5, Flash-based videos are pretty much unwatchable. The same videos work quite well when ClickToFlash replaces them with the non-Flash versions.

  13. The sad thing is how the very same thing could have been achieved by setting a multimedia container and companion audio and video codecs as “standard” for video distribution over the web, using the good old OBJECT tag. And some people actually see Adobe Flash as an improvement over OBJECT for video. Kind of reminds Homer in The Simpsons: Movie picking glue to climb the dome (there were jet packs and suction cups, too).
    It’s slow, it’s considered one of the most vulnerable pieces of software and it is not widely supported (Windows and a couple Unices over a couple CPU arches?).
    But, as always, it’s vendor lock-in, if you for some reason need to get a faithful representation of the content, you have to use the Adobe version. As Flash is so overused, blocking by default and whitelisting is a good solution; there is also Lightspark which aims at providing a faster implementation of AVM2 (newer flash files — can be used with gnash to support AVM1 too).

  16. I don’t mind Flash video in that I can choose not to watch them. I REALLY hate Flash site navigation! The best restaurant in Southern NM (and it’s excellent by any standard) has Flash-only, they don’t have an HTML fallback, so if you view it on an iOS device it looks like the site is crashed.

  17. A part of me wonders if this is all Adobe’s fault or not. Flash did trump a little thing called Quicktime by Apple as the de facto way to play videos. Part of me wonders if Flash has so many problems on Apple because Apple doesn’t want to see it succeed? Of course Flash has problems all around – Windows and Android’s Flash have problems too, plus it seems there are updates ever other week, so I get the feeling that such is not the case.

  18. Yeah, but like all competition, it made QT much better in the long run and now it is far superior to anything flash.
    I just hate how many sites use it when they have needed information on their sites, like addresses that you want to copy-paste into maps or something else. Too many restaurant sites and other places do that.
    Flash for the sake of flash is just dumb.

  19. Agreed on the “Flash for the sake of flash is just dumb.” I had a customer a few years back who came in and wanted a Flash Website. I asked what they wanted it to do, to which the replied they didn’t know, but they knew it had to have flash.
    HTML 5 is suppose to replace Flash/QT for video playback, however HTML 5 is still being defined, and you can’t expect everybody to have support for it. Plus ever browser can render HTML a bit differently. Flash looks the same across the board.
    Sad fact is that even with all its problems, Flash will still give you the best chance of getting something to the most people at the lowest cost, and when developing a web presence, that is usually what people want.

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