Living in a Flashless Society
Posted on 2006-05-01 (Updated on 2019-01-21)
Recently at work, I received a new workstation. This was necessary, because my old workstation was pretty quirky and very slow. But that's neither here nor there.
After getting my workstation set to my liking, I ended up browsing the web a little bit. A few pages in, I noticed that I wasn't getting any ads. 'That's funny,' I thought to myself, 'I haven't installed AdBlock yet.' A few more pages, and it hit me; I hadn't installed Flash yet, either. After that, the waves of epiphany came crashing down.
Flash has never touched my workstation, and I don't think it ever will. Most web sites are perfectly useable without flash, and many that aren't are not worth visiting in the first place. As an added bonus, I haven't been asked to "Hit the Monkey" or "Stretch the President" or "Claim your free iPod" since I went about this behavior. That creepy 'talking head', advertising speech synthesis services, has all but disappeared. The dancing silhouette girl? She's a no-show.
Not having to deal with obtrusive, annoying flash ads is a great benefit to keeping the plugin away from my browser, and I highly recommend it to anyone who is less concerned with being the lucky 317,496th visitor and more concerned with getting stuff done.
Tags: browsers