Thursday, April 07, 2011

Time to get rid of Flash and Java

I have always regarded Flash, Acrobat, QuickTime and Java as "necessary evils" on my laptop, since I do a lot of browsing. But they are a pain to keep up to date, especially since they are full of security flaws.
But recently I realised that I only ever use Flash from within Google Chrome, and I'm not using Sun Java for anything now that LogMeIn doesn't require it any more. So I decided to remove both Flash and Java from my "Installed Programs" list, and rely entirely on the version of Flash that comes with Chrome. So far so good, since Chrome updates it automatically.
I wish I could do the same with Quicktime, but I still use iTunes from time to time. I have, however, disabled the RealPlayer add-ins on Chrome, Firefox and IE. That's more legacy software out of the way.
Another thing I noticed was that Google Chrome loads quickly but takes a long time to show all the thumbnails in its "New Tab" screen. So I changed it to show the "about:version" screen on startup instead. It's even quicker than before. And I have installed the NotScript extension to protect me from unwanted scripts, and AdBlock Plus to hide the ads. This had made my browser even better.
Hopefully Google will abandon their "flat" logo they are currently playing with in Chrome 12, because it looks terrible at small sizes, but we'll see. Both logos are shown here.

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