Steve Jobs says Flash Player is buggy and drains battery power. Is there an alternative that will play the many things that only Flash seems to play like YouTube videos?
iMac(Intel), MacBook Pro, MacMini, Ipad, Ipod,
Mac OS X (10.6.3)
Youtube has already converted their videos to HTML5, which Apple is promoting as much better for the iPad, the iPod Touch, and the iPhone.
The problem of course with any standard, until it is widely adopted, you'll get promoters and detractors from those standards. The best you can do is contact webmasters who are insisting on Flash to have a look at the conversion to HTML5. And you can also recommend webmasters have a remediation course in "graceful degradation" and HTML standards at
http://www.anybrowser.org/
There is no reason in this day and age for a stamp "this site is only recommended for Internet Explorer" to be shown on any website.
My three Macs stay updated to the latest of everything. I have already upgraded to Safari 5.0. Yesterday I uninstalled Flash Player because of the problems. YouTube videos will not play on my computers now and, most everywhere I go on the web, I get messages that I need the Flash plug-in to play the content. Am I missing something?
Most intriguing, because Youtube is compatible with the iPad, which does not have Flash. It is possible that the Youtube that is nonflash requires a separate App. If you give me a moment I'll see if you can load it another way.
Thanks for the info. The FLVPlayer just might be the answer. Please answer one more question. Since deleting the Flash Player, about everywhere I go on the net a window opens that says "Safari cannot find the Internet plug-in for this content" and it goes on to explain what it means. Do I just have to put up with this until I either install The FLVPlayer or the new Flash version coming out tomorrow or is there a way to stop it?
Just put up with it. Mind you Flash is far from going away anytime soon. I for one try to avoid Flash websites. There is a software called ClicktoFlash which may make it easier to deal with if you have the plugin installed. Instead of having to dismiss messages every time, it puts up a region in the page showing you where Flash would have displayed if it was enabled. And with a simple control-click you can allow Flash to show on specific websites, while letting all the rest not show them without any alerts.
in terms of YouTube, it is possible to completely uninstall Flash Player and still view videos right on the site.
Before you uninstall Flash Player, install the plug-in that a brody references above called ClickToFlash - use version 1.5.5 as it's the stable version.
Visit a page in Safari that you know has Flash and under the file menu will be an item called Click To Flash. Choose it and here all you need to do is check the box that says "Show H264 videos on YouTube."
Now quit all your open browsers.
Then un-install Flash Player using the Adobe uninstaller (also, if you have Adobe AIR, check under /Library/Application Support for an Adobe or an AIR directory, and there will be a Flash Player in there as well as AIR needs Flash to run and even though it's not in the internet plug ins folder, I don't trust Adobe enough and wiped it all out. Of course, this also means AIR apps won't run but there are many replacements for those type of apps anyway, they are just web apps on the desktop, a lot like OS X widgets)
Now, revisit YouTube and you'll be shown the H264 videos - you'll need to watch them in Safari or another webkit browser like Stainless that doesn't just support HTML5 video but HTML5 H264-encoded video (for instance, Firefox, although it's not a webkit browser, supports the HTML5 video tag but only plays back ogg format files encoded in Theora - because it's open source. I'm not sure if Opera has made up it's mind yet but I heard it was going to support both).
And it is so much better than dealing Flash and the fans kicking in and all that jazz.
HTML5 aside, I wish more sites served up H263 or H264-encoded videos with the option of using Quicktime plug in to watch alongside Flash because more and more sites are veering away from the codec Adobe wants people to use and producing stuff in the Quicktime plug in compatible codecs and basically now all they are doing is wrapping Quicktime files into SWF's for transport. That same file, if not wrapped in the SWF, can just as well be viewed via Quicktime in any browser at all that supports Quicktime.
