The Politics of Flash

Steven Frank:

I don’t like Flash because it is responsible for the overwhelming majority of my browser crashes. I don’t like it because it consumes memory and (especially) CPU resources on my computer for almost the sole purpose of showing me advertisements, which also translates directly to reduced battery life on my laptop.

Furthermore, I resent the way that Flash rose to new heights of popularity by providing a terrible video playback mechanism that (although it largely solved the problem of video codec ubiquity) can’t reliably perform the most basic of media playback functions, such as accurately seeking within the stream, even after it’s fully downloaded.

I don’t want to boycott Flash, because there are a few sites I like that use it. But, overall, Flash means UI glitches and crashes to me. I turn off Web plug-ins in NetNewsWire and EagleFiler to avoid the crashes.

The App Store, in Safari

Browing the iPhone App Store at app-store.appspot.com is much more pleasant than using iTunes (via Macworld). I can use bookmarks, tabs, find within the page, etc. It seems faster, too.

Adobe UI Gripes

Adobe UI Gripes is a blog with screenshots of Adobe’s weird, non-standard interfaces (via Jonathan Rentzsch). Adobe’s current Mac software is like Microsoft’s during the Word 6 period.