Flash Player Must Die, Says Protest Group

A new protest group who admit to shamelessly co-opting populist terminology, Occupy Flash, have launched a website with one goal in mind – to rid the world of Adobe Flash Player.

In fact, says the group, although it admires normal people taking on big corporations in the interest of the population at large, it is not occupying, but rather attemping to evict and banish the software.

The player, a cross-platform, browser-based application used to view animation, video, and interactivity on web pages, is holding back the web, according to the group’s online manifesto.

Flash makes the web less accessible

“Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It’s buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn’t work on most mobile devices. It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Websites that rely on Flash present a completely inconsistent,and often unusable, experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don’t use a desktop browser. It introduces some scary security and privacy issues by way of Flash cookies,” said the group on its website.

In its manifesto, the group encourages users to join the fight and not only uninstall the software, but also help other, less technically minded users, do the same. The site gives detailed instructions and reccomendations on ways to rid your home and office from Adobe Flash Player, including petitioning you IT department and using HTML5 options when available.

It also justifies its desire to actively rid the world of Flash Player, stating “As we’ve seen with other outdated web technologies (most notably the much-lamented Internet Explorer 6), as long as software is installed on machines, there will be a contingent of decision makers who mandate its use, and there will be a requirement of continued support, the plugin will live on, and folks will continue to develop for it. Also, for unknown reasons, Adobe is still sticking with Flash as a desktop browsing technology. The only way to truly force the web to embrace modern open standards is to invalidate old technology.”

Google Analytics. For shame!

The group does admit that the transition will be painful and that some sites, including Google Analytics, will be less usable, but claims that the sacrifice will be worthwhile as “the more of us who run browsers that don’t support Flash, the quicker that pain will subside.”

This is not a campaign against Adobe or the Flash platform, notes the group, “Adobe has stated they believe HTML5 is the future of web browsing. We’re simply trying to help them get there a little faster.”

They do hope, however, that Adobe will eventually support the site, as Microsoft did when it sent flower to the IE6 funeral held last year.

Those visiting the site with Flash installed in their browser will see the whole site of course – but also see a polite message saying “Flash is currently installed on this browser”.