Google to ban Adobe Flash-based advertising

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/10/google-ban-adobe-flash-advertising

John.

 

Personally, I would ban animated adverts, whether Flash or HTML5. It was the extra CPU usage that these impose which drove me to adblockers.

John

 

Yeah, my little Atom cpu running at up to 100% just trying to scroll down the page, not to mention the extra battery power wasted or running up of your limited monthly download limit.

John.

 

Ads? What are those? I love ABP on my Firefox.

 

One of the problems with add/popup blockers as they can block stuff you actually want to see, it`s fun trying to buy something online with the required windows do not open, not fun when you are halfway though the process and you realize you forgot to turn off the add/popup blocker.

John.

 

Yeah, I run into that. But my usual sites that I buy from I have it disabled there or make an exception rule for that site. But some sites are getting smarter and you can't download a file or read some content unless you disabled your adblocker. I know ads are a necessary evil, but yeah, keep down the CPU and bandwidth usage. The old school banner ads at top and/or sides weren't too intrusive. But completely stopping your time to watch an ad just to use content is ludicrous. That's the legacy way of doing things on TV. This is internet. Needs to be much better.

 

Remember when people paid for that new "cable TV" so they didn't have to watch ads. lol.

 

Yep. I grew up with that, lol.

 

Virtually every flash youtube video i click on fails and i have to refresh the page before they will play, I changed my default player to html5 and they all work fine now on the youtube website, but video on other websites still have to be refreshed, it`s a pain and the sooner flash dies the better.

John.

 

I don't know if it's Firefox or flash all by itself, but on multiple computers, anytime I enable flash to watch video, browser will start freezing up and taking up to 1 min to respond.
I think Adobe gave up on flash themselves long time ago. As far as ads go, I hate them as much as anybody else, but they do pay for free content we all use, this website included, so it's a necessary evil.

 

The use of Flash in ads and the security issues that brings is a nightmare for the Google advertising system (they have to scan all those ads), plus they don't like having to keep supporting the latest Flash version in their various ad platforms, so it's far easier for them to just say they don't support it. For us as end users this is obviously not a sad thing to see go either. But that all said, HTML5 animations and the javascript it relies on can still tax a low power processor, so ad blockers will still be popular with those that simply don't want to see the ads and don't want their processor / bandwidth used to download ads.

 

My kids still like to play a lot of flash based games. Hoping they'll adapt them to something more robust.

 

This basically. It's not like google is doing it for the sole reason of protecting end users. That said, whatever their reasons, it is still a good thing. You also hit the nail on the head with the ads taking up more bandwidth and CPU than the frickin web page. I am seeing more and more "We see you are running an ad blocker banners on websites". Well guess what, if the ads weren't intrusive, obnoxious and made the pages load slower (even on good hardware) maybe we wouldn't need to use ad blockers.

 

Have a few dozen flash games as well, only saved locally and run them with MPC-HC or something.

Here's one: Dice Wars. Use ' inspect element', find the embedded swf file and save it to disk. Also have more control that way; can speed up the game a little.

ps.
The game considers the player with the largest number of tiles the primary threat and initiates a free-for-all on that player. So trick is to keep second place at all times. Ah, and have your tiles consecutive and break those of the other players midway.