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Amazon To Stop Accepting Flash Ads
An anonymous reader writes: Starting on September 1, Amazon will no longer support Flash across its advertising platform. The online retailer sites changes to browser support and a desire for customers to have a better experience as their reasons for blocking it. Google has been quite active recently in efforts to kill Flash; the Chrome beta channel has begun automatically pausing Flash, Google has converted ads from Flash to HTML5, and YouTube uses HTML5 by default now as well. Safari and Firefox also place limits on Flash content. Is Flash finally on its way out?
The online retailer sites changes to browser support
CITES
When Flash was used, at least I had the choice to not to install the plugin at all, which meant I wasn't subjected to any Flash content at all.
But now that HTML5 is being used, I have no choice at all. You can't just "disable" HTML5. It's much too inherent. We are subjected to it without mercy, and we have no way out.
As some great poets once noted,
I block ads. never see them, don't care if they are flash or not.
Flash? You mean the Fucking Large-Ass Security Hole? I have had it disabled on my machines for years now, all the way back to the "FlashToggler" software of from the early 2000s. It's about time the rest of the world ditches it too.
The only good thing about Flash is it made blocking animated ads trivial simply by disabling the plugin. I have not had similar success with HTML5, and fear that the rise of HTML5 will signal the return of pages with so much animated ad content that I can't concentrate on the text. :(
Blocking flash is trivial. And of course adblock and the like make short work of ads in HTML5 but its harder to block categorically. I suspect the whole flash removal is dual purpose with increased advertising content to the browser being a major goal.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
The online retailer sites changes
No, they cite changes.
Not that I expect anyone do anything about it; Slashdot stories seem to get posted and abandoned. Correcting spelling mistakes that make you look stupid doesn't attract any more advertisers!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In firefox you can disable the media stuff in about:config - media.mediasource.enabled. That will at least stop the videos....
I'm glad to see Flash go, but it did offer us an element of control over autoplaying videos, by setting your Flash add-on to "Play if clicked." Now we have been stripped of even that meager choice.
For years and years, I've put up with ads. Yes, I heard you guys talk about AdBlock here and elsewhere, but I've always learnt to ignore them, even fairly distracting ones.
Then came the really "in your face" ads with automatic audio, giant sizes, and irremovable ones which obscured content. Irritating, but not a deal breaker. I've got a thick skin, or so I thought. I can deal with all that crap, especially if it helps pay for the site's bandwidth (though I never bother with ads personally, at least not consciously).
End of story right? Oh no,.... they just had to go further didn't they. Then came the ones that suck up all my CPU, losing me money in electricity, heating up the CPU (so I can't have the fan quieter), and generally causing the PC to slow down. I like to open up many tabs in my browser, and this easily eats up the CPU in all four of my CPU cores. Same with the two cores on my laptop.
Since I realized what was happening more clearly, I now hate the ad networks of course, and also hate the CPU management in Chrome and other browsers (Shift+ESC is oaky, but no maximum CPU limit for each process?), and you know what? I even hate Windows for not allowing better/easier CPU management/priority of the processes. Yes, no ability to throttle the percentage of CPU used for a process, let alone be able to define the limits independently for each process. And yes I know there are various apps, but not having this feature by default is insane, and so typical of the mindset at Microsoft.
I installed AdRemover for Chrome (higher rated than Adblock by the looks of it), and have never looked back.
Goodbye ads forever.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Jobs didn't want Flash on iOS because it tore down the wall of their garden. In the iOS ecosystem, the only way to install an app is via the App Store, where Apple gets a 30% cut. If they had allowed flash, anyone could write a flash app, put it on any web site, and you could browse to that site and run that flash app on your iDevice without paying Apple their 30%. Apple also disallows compilers and tightly controls emulators for the same reason.
All that talk about flash draining battery life was just spin to put lipstick on this pig-headed decision. Flash on Android didn't run by default - any flash scripts on a web page were replaced by a stylized F. If you tapped on the F, only then would that flash script run. If you've used Flashblock on Firefox, exact same thing. So no excess battery drain from ads or whatnot unless you specifically allowed the flash app to run.
Flash was originally created as an artist's animation tool. It was never intended to be the web's de facto executable scripting language. That's why it has so many security holes - because it was being used in ways it was never originally intended. Now that HTML5 adds many features which previously could only be accomplished via flash, and more importantly are designed from the get-go for web use, it is natural that flash is being phased out. Jobs had nothing to do with it, and certainly his decision a decade ago when HTML5 wasn't around still makes no sense (until you recognize the financial reason).
I'm still using a Core 2 Duo @ 2.4GHz with 8GiB of RAM. So my computer today is half the speed of your older computer.
Those fucking people in marketing think they can rape my internet connection, my monthly quota and my CPU cycles to display their fucking shit. Well, screw them. I gave them a chance, they pushed it too far with Flash. I removed Flash from my system. They've done the same with HTML5 so now for the first time in my life, I'm running Adblock because these fucking marketing imbeciles don't know when to stop.