So I thought I would post a follow-up to my previous post regarding my un-installation of Flash. It has been an interesting experience I would have to say. Most of the sites I visit in my daily trawl of the internets were unaffected. Sure, there were a few missing pieces but I was still able to use the sites.

The stability and memory usage of Firefox had actually improved! The occasional lockup or total crash had disappeared completely; which lines up with what Steve Jobs has been reported saying that most issues on the Mac are Flash related.

So no Flash was working for me, well until I wanted to use my HP Scanner. Seems that the bundled software required Flash to work. I have no idea why, the application looks like a standard Windows application. So I attempt to install the Active X version of Flash. After convincing the Adobe site that I didn’t want to install their download manager to get their 2mb file, I then had to make sure I un-ticked the Norton security scan!! No Adobe, I already have a capable FREE virus scanner why do I want another one! So after 5 mins of stuffing around I could finally use my scanner.

In my previous post I mentioned that I could utilise the HTML5 version of the YouTube player using Google Chrome. That seemed to work for some videos but YouTube channel such as music videos still used the older flash player. The quality and streaming smoothness was not as nice as the Flash version that is currently in use. Now having the Active X Flash installed, I found myself using Internet Explorer 8 to get my YouTube fix. This made me realise how much of a better browser Internet Explorer has become. It still felt clunky compared to Firefox and Chrome, but using it still made me feel dirty; It was like I could feel my PC being infected.

One thing I would like to mention is the absolute awesomeness of Silverlight smooth streaming! I watched the Windows 7 Phone presentation from MWC10 and the quality and smoothness was great. The ability for the player to adapt to the network conditions and degrade the quality ensured that I always got to see what was going without missing a thing or having to wait for buffering. It would be awesome for a site like YouTube to pick up on this as I think this is the way forward for streaming media.

So, in the end… I have restored Flash into my Firefox BUT I have installed a plug-in called FlashBlock. This gives me the flexibility to allow Flash to work only when I allow it. Adobe Flash does have it’s place on the web. It has helped shape the web as we know it today, it’s just a pity that one of the most used browser plug-ins seems to cause the most problems; wether its poor coding in the flash applications or general issues in the plug-in itself.