Flash is a system created by Macromedia, later acquired by Adobe for adding bling to web sites. The bling includes simple animation used in advertisements, web sites with poor design esthetics, and less. When you see a web site with ads that trigger an action as you roll your mouse over them, you are often seeing Flash. Some web sites even create their primary content using Flash. These sites remind me of those tested with Internet Explorer and then the site authors assume the site will look good with all browsers. Not so.
Flash is also used to add video to web sites, including major video providers, such as YouTube and Hulu. Files with the extension .swf are Flash video. Flash video has taken over the internet, because video rights holders think they can control the security of their property by using this format. Flash video is a file wrapper like QuickTime, and can support H264 format. And yet, the quality of playback just doesn't seem to be as good as QuickTime.
But, Flash video has many more problems than this. Flash video doesn't buffer very well, and doesn't pay attention to preferences you set. Flash video doesn't appear to support simple video controls, such as rewind or fast forward. Try clicking on the time bar to jump ahead or behind your current position, and you will often have problems. You can often lose your buffer, and the video glitches, and the video and audio go out of synch without warning. The more video you watch or the more narrow your bandwidth, and you will experience more of these problems.
What do I have against Flash? The Flash plug-ins for your browser are poorly engineered. These plug-ins use as much memory and processing power as they can take from your system, slowing your browser down and making you wait for simple pages to load. When the web page is closed, the memory used by Flash should be released, but it is released in an inelegant way; play enough videos or Flash content and your memory will get all chopped up, and all of your apps will begin to run slowly. The only solution is to reboot your Mac. My experiments tend to indicate problems with iChat seeing my video camera have to do with the Flash plug-in. Reboot again!
In fact, 99% of Safari crashes are caused by web pages containing Flash or PDFs. Just like Flash, the PDF plug-in for Safari is an Adobe product.
So, should anyone care that Apple's mobile devices do not support Flash? Obviously, I don't think so, and I don't think anyone will mind advertisements will not load on your iPad. Some web sites rely on Flash to display their primary content rather than use properly formatted HTML, but they will suffer, not you. The biggest missing piece for users will be video on Hulu and similar sites. Hulu has already announced experiments in a new format, and YouTube is already moving towards H.264 using QuickTime.
You may be thinking 'if Flash is used in a lot of those advertisements adorning web pages you visit, how nice it would be to not to load the Flash stuff at all.' You can test that idea right now if you use Safari. Wolf Rensch created a free Safari plug-in called ClickToFlash. ClickToFlash prevents Flash modules from loading, replacing them with light gray rectangles containing a small "Flash" button. If you really want to see the Flash, such as video on a Hulu page, just click the Flash button. We discussed this software at the last MacinTech meeting, but in case you haven't tried it yet:
Download ClickToFlash from
You will also demonstrate the look of web pages as seen on an iPhone or iPad. If you ever want to go back to the old way of doing things, just go to the folder found at Home Folder --> Library --> Internet Plugins and pull out the file called ClickToFlash.webplugin.
But, I bet you won't.
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