I have been going a while without the Adobe Flash player installed on my machine. I mainly chose to do this, since I think Flash hurts my machine in many ways. For starters it’s one of those memory hogs that just keeps sucking memory, and leaving me to the will of the Flash programmer who may or may not have figured out to give me the claimed memory back. I also came across a page on the net that gives me 7 Reasons to Stop Using Flash.

And beyond that there are the security issues. It’s something which I thought of already in the light of all the recent attacks on Internet Explorer etc. And my opinion on the matter was further influenced by the fact that someone like Steve Jobs said that Flash is not secure. And just a few days ago I read this article on Neowin citing Charlie Miller, who literally said: ‘The main thing is not to install Flash!’. This all in the light of possible attack surfaces on a PC.

So, this is where my crusade against Flash starts. I think we will see many more people abandoning Flash, since in the near future there will be HTML5 which will also have many aspects that will make Flash less necessary for any web development in the need of media rich content. And also there is Silverlight, Microsoft's take on delivering rich internet content. So abandon Flash now!

Who’s with me on this one?

Since the web won’t change from full of Flash to a lot less Flash overnight, I have forced myself to use a virtual machine any time I need to get to some Flash content. And that’s only when there is definitely the need to see the Flash content. Otherwise I’ll just ignore it completely.

So, once more, who’s with me on this one?
Meile