Hello geeks,
I want to share with you my latest thoughts about the subject related to the lack of flash on some devices, early risers in HTML 5 and readability of the modern web pages.
Starting from the lack of Adobe Flash on some devices, especially on the brand new Apple device called iPad I want to say that is a kick in the butt for Adobe first. I do not have major issues with flash on the web, but it keeps my laptop warm every time when I leave the browser tab open with the flash running in the background. That is not so funny and from the green perspective bad, because my CPU eats more power that it should do. Nobody really likes flash, but everyone uses it because it is popular now. Of course, it causes your browser to hang out or crash time to time, but you might think that is acceptable. You are wrong — it is not of course! So, what can we do to get rid off the flash from your browser in the customizable fashion? There is a way — actually two ways: one is more temporary in a long term perspective, second one is more permanent, but have not yet started to be implemented widely.
The first one is a small application available as a plugin for Safari. It is called ClickToFlash and you can find it here. It is customizable and stop flash adverts and other stuff to run on the page until you are going to allow it to run. What it the result — nice and clean pages without the flash! Check it out if you would like to find how the web should looks like.
The next thing which I would like to talk is readability of web pages. Sometimes when you go to the local news aggregator pages or even to common big news sites you are overburdened by the advertisements and hyperlinks to other pages and news. You just want to read the article in a clean and nice way for your eyes, right? Try to set up a small, but very useful Java script droplet for your browser, which makes reading experience much more pleasant. It is called Readability and it is available here. Small, but powerful and that is my second recommendation for you guys.
The last thing is something much bigger. It is availability of HTML 5 instead of Adobe Flash on some major video sharing players web pages. I am talking about YouTube.com and Vimeo.com. Devices like iPhone and recent iPad do not have support for flash, because the battery life and some other political and technical issues which I do not want to discuss here. I just want to say, that those devices (at least iPhone now) have significant market share and maybe it is good that Apple have not allowed them to run Flash pushing the industry and web developers to use something different. Without that, nobody want to change the habit and we will not see any progress and changes to a better way of sharing video on the web. If you want to check the HTML 5 in your browser you have to get the latest Safari, Chrome or IE8 browser and go the this web page, join to the html5 beta and you are good to go. Do not clean you cookies than, because you will have to join once again. This is a small glimpse of hope, but every rose has its thorns! Google and Vimeo decided to use H.264 codecs which are not supported by some browsers like Firefox for instance and H.264 is not completely free. It has some good points, because this codec is more advanced and already recognized on the pro market, but it may slow down the HTML 5 implementation. So far what we can say is time will tell. I hope that HTML 5 will become more and more deployed and developers figure out how to use it widely on every web browser! I will keep my finger crossed saying that HTML 5 is the way of the future!
To sum my divagations up, world wide web is going to change in the recent future and we will see it sooner or later — hope that Apple will be pioneering with these changes and finally Adobe realize that there are not only one on the web and not too lazy to read the customers feedback.
What are your opinions and thought about it? Have you found above mentioned apps useful? Do you want to use HTML 5 instead of flash?
UPDATE
H.264 to Remain Fee-Less for Free Internet Video Through 2016! It means that Firefox and other browsers may use this codec without any fee. Better! Here is the story: http://tinyurl.com/ygeowec
From my Macbook to the Net 
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