[Goladus]

I don't care whose fault it is. The flash plugin is the only thing that ever causes performance problems for me when browsing, and it happens all the time. If it's purely a flash developer problem I'd say every single flash developer out there is bad and churns out resource hogging code. Either that, or it's the fault of Firefox and Chrome.

Whatever the reason, the flash plugin is a nightmare and I cannot wait to wake up.

[wensing]

The real problem is that Flash is a gateway for a lot of graphic artists wanting to make something more powerful on the web. A lot of copy-pasting and poor practices being executed on a powerful engine with a very steep learning curve.

By comparison, JavaScript is abused less because it's less appealing to beginners (it lacks the wow-factor).

[Goladus]

I hear you but seriously, my instincts after years of troubleshooting this kind of crap is that the problem is the plug-in itself, not the particular developers that use it. I've seen bad javascript, hell I've seen HTML that can cause performance problems. What's happening with flash seems to be related to the underlying technology.

Some users are affected far more than others, and I have noticed very little correlation between particular sites and performance problems. The only constant seems to be: if the site uses flash (and most sites do), there's a high chance browser CPU usage will spike to 90%+ and stay there until it is killed. I think it happens less-often with firefox only because I've got adblock set up and it stops a lot of it from ever being loaded.

I really don't think the symptoms would be like that if this was simply a case of developers misusing the platform. Some sites would rarely have issues, others would fail all the time. It's mostly a gut instinct at this point and I could be wrong, but I don't think so.

[wensing]

There are a healthy number (though minuscule in the grand scheme) of startups that use Flash, and I doubt you'd get the familiar "90%+ CPU crash" by going to those sites.

By contrast, I work at a major media outlet where a lot of folks with no coding experience are creating Flash interactives that are being viewed by (pushed on) a large number of people. It's painful.

Then there's the fact that 99%+ of all obtrusive advertisements are written in Flash.

[dbrush]

There is a great distinction to be observed between the words "me" and "us".

It seems as though your experience leads you to your conclusions, but I'd bet rather confidently that your conclusions are conjectural rather than empirical with respect to the experiences of everyone else.

[Goladus]

You're absolutely correct. I do not mean to say otherwise. My experiences in this regard may not be common, but they are almost certainly not unique.