Occupy Flash - The movement to rid the world of the Flash Player plugin

Occupy Flash - The movement to rid the world of the Flash Player plugin

It’s a nice thought, but I don’t think this approach will work. Most people don’t know or care what any of this means; they want the internet to ‘just work’. They’re not going to intentionally do something to make their computer less functional. They don’t care about web developers or standards or building the future. They just want to watch funny videos. Despite how nicely designed this web site is, it’s missing a ‘why’ that most people will care about.

Better would be to somehow convince more computer manufacturers to stop shipping Flash (like Apple already has done). We don’t really even need users to actively complain; the web site owners should notice the drop in the number of Flash-installed visits in their analytics, and maybe add the two lines of code they need to fall back to HTML5 (since their videos are likely encoded in h.264 already). What the manufacturers lack is motivation to do so. I’m not sure what the answer is.

Increased use of iPhones and iPads has largely failed to achieve this effect, mainly because so many web sites detect the device and shuffle those people off to a separate ‘mobile’ site while leaving everyone else with the Flash version. Which is annoying for other reasons, but that’s another rant.