Forcing innovation by ditching Flash plugin

Aptitude 0.6.8.2: log report
Tue, Nov  5 2013 22:47:46 +0200

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[REMOVE] flashplugin-nonfree:amd64

Wow, it’s more than a month already! More than a month since I first saw Occupy Flash website and decided that I’m up to the challenge. More than a month since the last time I saw a Flash banner or had to click on a FlashBlock icon to let it play some video for me. And I should say that the experience was much, much more pleasant than I initially anticipated. Actually, it was so easy that the whole point of this blog post is to say that it is so!

I expected quite a lot of problems, but it seems that at least in the corners of the Internet that I frequent, Flash is used only for advertisement banners. I’ve been blocking those with AdBlock and FlashBlock for ages, so no big change here.

I thought that YouTube will get pretty much unusable and I’ll finally get some work done, but it wasn’t the case. That’s in part due to my usage pattern: I tend to watch freshly uploaded videos on-line, and download some older ones to watch later (those usually are talks from the conferences). For new videos, YouTube provides HTML5 player opt-in, which is sufficient.

Talking about online video, I can’t resist mentioning Vimeo. These guys are just awesome, and I’m glad they’re gaining popularity now. They’ve been providing HTML5 support for almost 4 years already, and they also give you a number of download options where uploaders allowed that. You can even download the original source! If you’re a conference organizer and you can’t afford storing your videos on the server of your own, please upload them to Vimeo and allow downloads — that’s hundred times better than putting them on YouTube, I assure you.

Apart from YouTube, I don’t visit any Flash-heavy sites, so not much else broke. Over that last month, I did run into some minor inconveniences (with my bank’s site, for example), but I was mentally ready for little frustrations and didn’t mind it much. I didn’t bump into anything that is a show-stopper, so I won’t be installing Adobe Flash plugin back again any time soon.

Please support the cause by deleting the plugin today. The more of us do so, the faster we get rid of that obsolete technology. Isn’t it worth a bit of inconvenience?