Over the past month I have set myself a challenge, to live without flash. This idea first started as a bit of a boycott of Adobe's flash platform. This idea then transformed into something of less malicious intent as it gained some valid reasoning.

Ever since I got my iPad, I have been watching youtube on it. And in this age of the internet, you will be hard pressed to find a video that is not on youtube. Flash on my mac just makes it crash, slow down, causes security problems that I would rather avoid as well as pushing my CPU more than it should need to. For these reasons I have decided that I would go for a month without having flash installed on my computer and see how it affects my usage.

Overall it has not really impacted the way I look stuff up or even watch videos. I use HTML5 enabled youtube for a few videos, but most are played back via my iPad. As for other video websites? I don't use them often, if ever. This makes the need to watch something on them extremely unlikely for me, and thus, not of great importance to watch.

I do watch 1-3 youtube videos a day regularly, but watching them has actually gotten better due to the fact that I am watching them on my iPad rather than via the website. Overall watching youtube on the iPad is much more streamlined to the task of doing it.

Now, thanks to WWDC, we have safari 5. And with this new browser, we also have something called "Extensions" with out browser. One that a friend of mine happened to find was something called "Youtube5". Recently youtube created a beta program for people that wanted to use HTML5 to render videos rather than use flash. What this extension does is that it enables video playback in HTML5 on all youtube videos (except when viewing via a channel). This has not taken the burden off of the iPad for youtube, but it has enabled me to watch a video on my computer if need be.

However, even with advantages such as Youtube5, you will still be burdened with the constant annoyances of "MIME type" error dialogs. There pop up when you have content on the page that your browser does not know how to handle. In this case, the browser does not know how to handle flash content because flash is not installed.

Tools of the trade when going without flash:

• Youtube5
• Flash MIME Type Blocker

Unless you use flash constantly, then living without it is not a big change. You will have to do a few thing different but overall nothing major.

Special thanks to WSmith for joining me in this adventure without flash and creating the Flash MIME Type Blocker.