A Life Without Flash 4 Weeks Later

I decided four weeks ago to uninstall both Adobe Flash and pdf readers from a work computer. The motivation for this move stemmed from the increase in Flash and pdf specific exploits and attacks that put a computer system at risk. There was a downside to it as it became quite complicated to view Flash videos for instance. This is now the fourth week of the change. There have not been many situations where I missed the Flash player, mainly when some of my friends send me a link to a video that I could not watch, when a website embedded a flash video that would not play and when I tried to watch online video at sites like Hulu or Gametrailers. One of the most irritating experiences was the constant notification in the RSS feed reader RSS Owl that the Flash Player was not installed. It was possible to turn that message off but this also meant that the reader would not display images anymore. I still decided to turn it off as the messages were to frequent to be ignored. I did cheat just a little bit as I run a developer version of the Google Chrome web browser which, as some of you may know, comes with native Flash support .