Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

My one (rather serious) worry about HTML5 is this…

My one (rather serious) concern about HTML5 is this:

Currently I can switch Flash off. It’s a plugin, it’s a nuisance, it’s proprietary, it’s unbundled, but *because* of that it’s easy for me to shim or nuke the flash-rendering module and *poof* my webpages become a lot more efficient.

When I added “ClickToFlash” to Safari, my daily morning ritual of loading ~70 tabs up with news, cartoons and zeitgeist got a whole lot faster.

But: if the video rendering is part of the HTML specification… then the ability to switch it off comes under the aegis of browser functionality, surely?

I am beginning to think that I don’t *like* that option.

Browser are not-so-hot at giving people selective “switch it off and leave it off” functionality; they tend to start with “surely everyone has a powerful machine that can do this” and then end-up with some moochily kludged solution.

So, colour me worried…

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Comments

6 responses to “My one (rather serious) worry about HTML5 is this…”

  1. Stephen Usher

    Of course, you can add to that the “canvas” element which adds native animation too….

    Reply
  2. Peter Jenkins

    I’m guessing someone will come up with plugins to resolve the too many videos situation much like the current NoScript pluggin for FireFox. I also hope the performance overhead of a video player integrated into the browser will be greatly reduced … there should be less startup overhead than spawning flash.

    Of course unless the video codec used by the “video” tag improves nobody will make the switch (I notice YouTube still serves up flash video on HTML5 enabled browsers like Chrome despite all the noise made about it a few months back)

    Reply
  3. Tom Hawtin

    At home (using Vodafone 3G, actually GPRS most of the time) I have recently set Opera’s ad blocker to block all youtube.com.

    Reply
  4. C3

    Ah- but what happens to he advertisting industry and its’ digital partners of we allow too much flexibility for a user to turn off stuff in our browsers. I’m joking, but would that affect ‘free.’

    Reply
  5. alecm

    @c3:

    >what happens to he advertisting industry and its’ digital partners of we allow too much flexibility for a user to turn off stuff in our browsers. I’m joking, but would that affect ‘free.’

    You’re absolutely right, and this is a perennial question for marketers; my response – which I believe to be the ultimate and correct one, of course – is that this is a problem for marketers/anyone if they believe they have an absolute and inalienable right to impose themselves on me and my attention, via hardware that I own and pay for.

    And I don’t believe that they do.

    Some folk I know get very shirty when I extol the virtues of AdblockPlus (firefox) and ClickToFlash (Safari) and FlashBlock (Chrome) – because i am educating users that they don’t _have_ to have adverts and can be control of their own user experience.

    The reason these folk get shirty is that they are betting startups – and their mortgages – on peoples’ not realising this.

    Go figure. I reckon Darwin will out, and in a free market shorn of DRM and mandatory advertising technologies – not that either work, anyway – a better way will arise.

    Reply
  6. alecm

    @tom: if i lived on GPRS, I would do that too 🙂

    Reply

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