Are we ready to drop Flash yet?

Posted by nbalagopal on August 18, 2012 05:03 pm 10

Everyone's complaining about how flash is hogs the cpu and that we should stop using it. This seemed like a very good idea to me because it would get rid of a lot of ads on webpages too!

via www.taleo.com

I do agree that flash on any website is crap but are we ready to move on?

To find out, I just did a simple experiment

The most obvious effect will be that you wont be able to watch most videos on Youtube and i'm not going in to the details for this.

Browser: Firefox 11.

Operating System: Linux (Red Hat)

1. Uninstall flash from the machine

2. Tried to use a few streaming music services using my browser.

Pandora

Did not even bring up the login page for me.

I was under the impression that Pandora dropped the flash player and switched to using HTML5 but I guess not.

Moving on..

Google music

Google music has no excuse here considering the fact that it was a service developed while the HTML5 hype was going on. I still don't understand what is so great about flash which makes a company decide to go down that path.

MOG, Rdio

Same story here too.. Again, just like pandora, I did read a lot of articles about how these websites rolled out 'slick HTML5' versions of their websites. (http://tinyurl.com/dxccshn) . Apologies in advance for reading TechCrunch.. :P

Also... The Verge!

Yess I know I know. Not a streaming music website but hey, you got no excuse for using flash either! Yes, I'm talking to you @theverge ! Interestingly enough, the 90SoV video plays fine on youtube without flash support.

To sum it up..

Actually, this information right here, is not enough to reach any conclusion because I just tried this on one browser and one operating system. These websites might behave differently on a different browser like Chrome and that might be an interesting thing to try out.

I guess I'll end with a question..

If everyone wants to move on from flash, why don't we do it already?