I’m one of those people who hates Flash with a passion. Not only did it make your Mac browser crash a lot in Leopard, it also used disproportionate amounts of CPU time and made your laptop heat up like a stovetop. It’s virtually impossible to not use Flash online, though – it’s mostly Youtube that forces me to use it on a daily basis.
What if I told you that Youtube’s Flash requirement could be history? Somehow I missed the news that ClickToFlash, a brilliant open-source plugin I’ve been using for a while, now has a setting that will load all Youtube videos (including HD content!) in Quicktime instead of Flash.
It even allows reliably skipping portions of the video without having it completely loaded. This is a feature that didn’t work for me in Flash most of the time. I’m donating to the project, as it’ll probably keep my computer running cool and stable for the years to come. I suggest you do too!
Oh my god. That’s the best news I’ve ever heard. Downloading!
Great news, Sebastiaan. Is there an equivalent add-on for Firefox?
Now we need something like this for Firefox as well
Very nice! I wish one day flash will be history! At least for video!
Does this work on Snow Leopard for you… I cant seem to get it to work :-(
Works for me, Sam. Try the beta version :)
Oh God, this is awesome. Thank you so much for find this, Seb!
+1 for a Firefox fix. I like Safari, but it’s lack of extensions is stopping me from switching.
On the upside, it’s speed and this is tempting me to switch…so….hm.
I adore ClickToFlash, but ended up re-enabling Flash for YouTube because the QuickTime plugin’s lack of full-screen playback kills me :(
Well, there’s always FlashBlock and I’m sure that Google will push the video tag to YouTube once it gets more supported.
@commenters: FlashBlock ( http://flashblock.mozdev.org ) and FlashKiller exist on Firefox for several years ;)
This really screwed up Safari on SL for me. Can’t find any way to uninstall it either. How can I remove it?
I’ve been using ClickToFlash until I installed Snow Leopard and it’s been fantastic. Unfortunately, it sets every video it intercepts as autoplay so they all play at the same time. I’ve detailed this in my blog http://bit.ly/3AbqzA. I’ll re-install this when they fix the bug.
@Bill: all you have to do is delete the plugin from your ~/Library/Internet Plugins folder.
I’ve been using this since it was first anonymously announced and posted, before Wolf Rentzsch picked up the project and fleshed it out into the full-fledged plugin we know it as today. I’ve hated Flash since people started using it in the late 90s, and stubbornly refused to learn it ever since. I maintain (these days, anyway) that there isn’t anything worthwhile you can do in Flash that you can’t do with some form of Javascript. Certainly Apple concurs — they’ve pushed Javascript harder than any other framework lately.
Perhaps the most telling pitfall to Flash came in John Siracusa’s recent Snow Leopard review:
According to the automated crash reporting built into Mac OS X, Apple has said that the number one cause of crashes is Web browser plug-ins. That’s not the number one cause of crashes in Safari, mind you, it’s the number one cause when considering all crashes of all applications in Mac OS X. (And though it was not mentioned by name, I think we all know the primary culprit.)
Thanks for making me aware!
Already installed it, and am very happy with it.
Yes clicktoflash is truly useful
and flash should disappear for all I care.
Thanks for sharing, Sebastian! Downloaded, installed – Love it! My MacBook now is now quiet and cool again when using Safari. Donated some $ also!
i agree, flash is sucking lately, these past weeks, firefox has been crashing a lot because of flash scripts.
Wow!
Great little plug-ing. And it blocks tons of add in sites I visit everyday!
Thanks Sebastian!
Excellent update to Click2Flash! I’m loving the H264 in Youtube :-)
yey!
Is there any way to,when you click on the youtube video that is “Blocked”, open the video on quicktime player without going to the left corner? thanks. amazing tip !!!
Flash hater. one more here.
This demonstrates why the iPhone doesn’t have Flash. The iPhone’s QuickTime can utilize its hardware decoder to save power and battery life. Somebody ought to do a study on what website authors are costing the world in energy by targeting FlashPlayer instead of just putting the video in the page.
YouTube is merging their desktop and mobile sites, making the desktop more like mobile, so they will drop Flash at some point altogether.
This is a godsend. Thank you!
Ahhh, very nice. Youtube like it’s supposed to!