Ram usage of Firefox with and without Adobe FLASH (flash:1,2gb ram):

[jltyper]

If that were the case, then multiply the flash ram usage by 1.2 to account for 64-bit pointers

I might just have to research for pointer compression. But of course that would be ineffective, if the implementation of such, used as much memory as it was supposed to save.

20 percent isn't that sort of bad is it? Its just a 2. Come on.

[crazycheese]

Relax, guys. Flash is run within separate process, called "plugin-container". Yes, it does tend to grow to 1/3 of firefox cache and does have memleaks.
Flash is curtainly crap, but try to say that to designers who pay Adobe 1.5$k yearly.

[DaemonFC]

Flash is everywhere. Flash can do so many things and is so huge, it's nearly the size of a web browser by itself.

Part of that is because it actually does things that modern W3C standards are only now catching up with after escaping being smothered in the crib by Microsoft, Adobe, the MPEG-LA patent troll, and Apple. The rest of it is because it has to lug around a lot of complicated code that is designed to provide anti-user malicious features that some sites want to use, such as digital restrictions management.

Flash is on the FSF's High Priority list because it represents a very large threat, even to people who have otherwise escaped all other proprietary/malicious/anti-user software. There are many sites that don't work at all or at least for their primary purpose without Flash installed. Flash is the number 1 most attacked single piece of software not counting Microsoft Windows in total, and it's made even more dangerous because it is cross platform and most of the security problems it is packed full of cross over to all platforms Flash runs on.

Personally I just find a way to block Flash applets and replace them with a button that I must click to load the applet with. Flashblock for Mozilla browsers does this.

A lot of sites are using invisible Flash applets now instead of "web bugs" (1x1 images that set cookies), because cookies only let a site store a few KB of data, must have an expiration date, and browsers have easy ways to get rid of them or control what sites can even set one. By using Flash, they can set 100 KB of data for each SUBDOMAIN (so they can keep going once the first allotment fills up), that data never expires, and browsers typically provide no good way to manage Flash "Local Shared Objects", though BetterPrivacy for Mozilla browsers is pretty good about dealing with that problem.

Really, we should all be wanting Flash to die sooner rather than later. It does a lot of things, and very few of them are things the user is likely to want. This problem is typical of proprietary software, though Flash is more aggressive about its anti-features than most.

[Qaridarium]

Flash is everywhere. Flash can do so many things and is so huge, it's nearly the size of a web browser by itself.

Part of that is because it actually does things that modern W3C standards are only now catching up with after escaping being smothered in the crib by Microsoft, Adobe, the MPEG-LA patent troll, and Apple. The rest of it is because it has to lug around a lot of complicated code that is designed to provide anti-user malicious features that some sites want to use, such as digital restrictions management.

Flash is on the FSF's High Priority list because it represents a very large threat, even to people who have otherwise escaped all other proprietary/malicious/anti-user software. There are many sites that don't work at all or at least for their primary purpose without Flash installed. Flash is the number 1 most attacked single piece of software not counting Microsoft Windows in total, and it's made even more dangerous because it is cross platform and most of the security problems it is packed full of cross over to all platforms Flash runs on.

Personally I just find a way to block Flash applets and replace them with a button that I must click to load the applet with. Flashblock for Mozilla browsers does this.

A lot of sites are using invisible Flash applets now instead of "web bugs" (1x1 images that set cookies), because cookies only let a site store a few KB of data, must have an expiration date, and browsers have easy ways to get rid of them or control what sites can even set one. By using Flash, they can set 100 KB of data for each SUBDOMAIN (so they can keep going once the first allotment fills up), that data never expires, and browsers typically provide no good way to manage Flash "Local Shared Objects", though BetterPrivacy for Mozilla browsers is pretty good about dealing with that problem.

Really, we should all be wanting Flash to die sooner rather than later. It does a lot of things, and very few of them are things the user is likely to want. This problem is typical of proprietary software, though Flash is more aggressive about its anti-features than most.

Thank you for your writing because of this i uninstalled my flash plugin and write this tropic.

Flash is a Ugly FAT monster ! everyone should remove this piece of crap from there computers.

[curaga]

Better than remove it, never install it in the first place.

[crazycheese]

A lot of sites are using invisible Flash applets now instead of "web bugs" (1x1 images that set cookies), because cookies only let a site store a few KB of data, must have an expiration date, and browsers have easy ways to get rid of them or control what sites can even set one. By using Flash, they can set 100 KB of data for each SUBDOMAIN (so they can keep going once the first allotment fills up), that data never expires, and browsers typically provide no good way to manage Flash "Local Shared Objects", though BetterPrivacy for Mozilla browsers is pretty good about dealing with that problem.

LSO are known problem, but not all sites use it. Yes BetterPrivacy is unevitable with Flash.

But dont kill 1x1 tracking pixels. A LOT of websites use this technology, from provider (for example ivwbox in Germany) to confirm that you are unique visitor. Nothing more, nothing less. Without this, the website owner will gain no profit from ads. To many webmins rely on it to get one way confirmation. This has nothing to do with privacy, just IP and so long you are on site.