Funk Babblings

As noted at LWN, Adobe has finally announced the official release of the Flash 9 player for Linux. The last release for Linux was Flash 7; there was no Flash 8 for Linux, so much of the modern Flash-based web content, especially videos, has been unavailable to Linux people for a long time. (There were a couple of betas of the Flash 9 player in fall, but now we have the real thing.)

For a long time I was a Flash hater, and it still doesn't take much for Flash to annoy me. It bogs down the computer, it adds unwanted visual (and sometimes audible) noise to whatever I'm trying to read, and occasionally it crashes my browser. And these things can't be fixed by the programming community because Adobe (previously Macromedia) keeps it binary-only proprietary software, not allowing programmers outside the company to improve the code. This results in another problem, that a Flash player doesn't come with Linux like everything else I use does. So with the various problems, I tend not to have it enabled by default. Often I don't even install the plugin in my main browser (Konqueror), while still installing it in an alternate browser (Firefox). Or I might install it but tell the browser to allow it only for vertain domains. When I use Firefox, the FlashBlock extension is essential, since it allows me to only run the Flash that I want to run.

Despite its problems, here are three reasons that Flash is worthwhile for me:
Pandora - music player organized by musical similarity (or similarity to my taste)
YouTube - videos depicting such essentials as treadmill power-pop
Homestar Runner - well, mainly Strongbad answering his mail