Frequent readers of this blog will know that I am no fan of Adobe Flash. It’s a CPU hog, a battery hog, and a security threat given how often you have to update it to avoid getting exploited by something. The last time I had a piece of software that was this much of a problem was when I had Java on my system. I dumped that and haven’t looked back since. So I’ve been musing doing the same with Flash. Given that YouTube has recently moved into the HTML5 camp, I decided to take the plunge and dump Adobe Flash. Over the next month, I will document my attempt to get rid of Flash once and for all. Let’s start with actually dumping Flash. Now Adobe does make uninstallers to make dumping Flash easy:
If you’re on a Mac, click here.
If you’re on a PC, click here.
In my case, I followed the instructions for Mac and within two minutes, Flash was gone. Now the question is, is my web surfing experience lacking because I don’t have Flash?
Not so far.
I browsed to my usual websites and found no differences in my web surfing experience. So far, that implies that you don’t need flash to surf the Internet. Now one thing that I did notice is that Safari which according to OS X Yosemite used “significant energy” when I had Flash installed no longer does. Not only that, battery life while running Safari is way over 7 hours which I have never seen on my MacBook Pro before and my CPU usage has dropped so much that it rarely crossed 4%. I guess that proves that everything that Steve Jobs said all those years ago.
This is promising so far.
Check back next week to see how I’m doing and if I am running into any difficulty by not having Adobe Flash on my system.
Bye Bye Flash! – Part 2: What About Porn And Surveys?
Posted in Commentary with tags Adobe, Flash on February 9, 2015 by itnerdI’ve gotten a lot of reaction to my post about punting Adobe Flash from my system over the month of February to see what happens. One of those was from a reader who was concerned about his porn watching habits:
Hello IT Nerd. Seeing as you’re a guy, I figured that you’d be able to tell me if the fact that you’ve you’ve removed Flash from your computer affect your ability to watch porn online.
Thank you.
First off, I don’t watch porn online. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I watched porn online or otherwise. But the question intrigued me as I bet that a lot of people use their computers to watch porn. Thus I replied to his e-mail and got a list of sites to test:
Each of these sites from what I can tell allows you to watch content for free, and watch better content for a fee. Now when I tested my computer against these sites, I was able to watch content without Flash being installed. Only one of them mentioned that I was missing Flash, but it provided a link that allowed me to play the content anyway. And all of the content played in HTML5. Thus apparently, my rather unscientific experiment suggests that you do not need Flash to view porn online. That didn’t exactly come as a shock to me as I wrote a story about four years ago about one of the biggest names in porn was moving away from Flash. Thus it seems that it would be logical that others would follow.
Now onto my second question:
Hello, I belong to two online survey panels that pay me to take surveys. If I delete Flash as you suggest, will I still be able to take surveys as some of the invitations that I get specifically mention the need for Flash?
Any advice is appreciated.
I e-mailed this person back and got the names of three companies that do this sort of thing:
They’re all reputable names in that industry. Thus in the interests of answering this question, I signed up to them and within a few days, I got invitations to surveys that I could take. Of the three sites that I looked at, only one had a requirement for Flash. That one was Asking Canadians. The other two didn’t require Flash and any “rich content” worked fine. So that would imply that if Asking Canadians has a survey that has a video that requires Flash, you can’t take it. Now I should note that the other two survey groups host surveys from third parties. Thus it is possible that you might get a survey that requires Flash that way.
Other than those major questions, it’s been smooth sailing without Flash. I have yet to find a hiccup of any sort that would have required me to re-install Flash. Thus I will continue with this experiment to see what happens. One other thing. If I do need to use Flash, I still have it installed in my virtual machines that run Windows. Thus just like Java, if I do need to use it, I can do so in a low risk environment where any potential damage can be contained inside that environment.
Tune in next week to see an update on how I’m doing without Flash.
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