A few weeks ago I totally got angry. When you are coding for a couple of hours straight and getting nowhere, you tend to be on edge a bit. Flash was hogging my system down when I tried to look up some documentation and I decided then and there to just disable it. If I regretted it, it was not like it took hours to re-enable it. I must say I kinda like it! There are some downsides, but mostly it was pretty painless.

The most obvious downside is video; web videos are mostly Flash, and Youtube does not really like you on first sight. Same for Vimeo and others. But these two sites have HTML5 players which "do the job", so after enabling them you are totally not shut off. Youtube will harass you about your Flash version, but meh, ignore it.

Actually, the harassment is the biggest downside for me. Most sites assume you "forgot to install Flash" instead of the possibility you actually do not want Flash to be installed or used. I have not thought deeply about the implications for privacy and security, but for now it seems like a good idea to make it possible for sites to detect Flash being disabled or more generally: unwanted. It reminds me of the whole capability-movement, but with a reversed aspect of unwantingnessness.

Another semi-frustration hits you when you open up the HTML-source to fetch an video-link to play in another player and you see iPhone and iPad-detecting code loading up HTML5 video-tags. I want that as well, give it to me in my current browser (I am looking at you NOS!). The positive side is that there is a HTML5 video-source, so I just fetch the link and load it somewhere else.

The last downside is one that cannot be dodged easily like the video: Streetview. This is just Flash-content and until WebGL, canvas and the other HTML5-gizmos are present and used, it will remain. Bummer, if I really really need it, the enable-button is a few clicks away.

Life without Flash is not without some bumps, but in the end, in my life without web games and such, it works :-)