On Sat, 1 May 2010, CW wrote:
I've kind of come to the same conclusion. The Adobe Flash plugin for Firefox was the bane of my existance.. with it in, memory leak in Firefox was insane, I'd get up to 500Mb in the task manager (and over) for a firefox instance in a few hours. Pulled it out, and Firefox went back to reasonable.
If you're not running noscript in firefox at least run flashblock. Makes it so flash apps don't start automatically, you have to hit a play button.
You can whitelist sites like youtube if you want.
The silverlight plugin thing doesn't seem to have an issue that I can find that way. And, to be honest, it actually just works the way I expect it to. I don't really ask a lot of a thing like silverlight except: don't screw up. Watched the NCAA's on ESPN (silverlight) and I use Netflix in mediacenter.. both like a charm. And since they are coming out with 720p/5.1 audio Silverlight from Netflix this summer...
I have silverlight installed but have not run into anything I knew was silverlight.
Somewhere along the line, Adobe just completely screwed their product, they either didn't grow it, didn't do something.. because right now, the flash plugin just sucks. Meanwhile, Silverlight freaking can use video cards for hardware acceleration (DXVA) so CPU usage is less, memory usage is less.. Hell, MS even went out and helps with a Linux/Unix version (Moonlight) that they work with.. Adobe? Yeah, not so much. ( http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/prerelease.aspx )
Adobe is HORRID. A customer of mine had purchased 2 copies of a $600 ebook (medical drug interactions yearly book) when they read that adobe had a library software that allowed then to check the ebook in and out of the library. Turns out that this was on a maximum of 6 PC's. They have 25+ PC's in their office and need to be able to look at that ebook randomly on any of those 25 PC's. They were ok with the 2 copy limit because they have ad 2 copies in their physical library forever.
The ebook was the same price as the physical book, but they wanted to be able to save the time going down to the library to get the book so went the ebook method.
Final solution after talking to adobe support (Which the first 5 things they had us try had NOTHING to do with the problem at hand) was to strip the DRM using the instructions from http://i-u2665-cabbages.blogspot.com/2009/02/circumventing-adobe-adept-drm-for-epub.html
You need to have a valid license (It uses your license to decrypt the PDF) but after that you end up with an unprotected PDF.
Sometimes MS is an easy target to bash.. a bit too easy. So, when they actually get something right, it either gets overlooked, or it has to be enough of a dead-on that adoption happens (win7).
Win7 to me is no more than Vista SP3. They got rid of the shit that was annoying as hell and had the advantage of drivers being compatible between vista and windows 7 so didn't have the launch pains that Vista had.
Vista properly configured and patched to SP2 is not a terrible OS (anymore). Kind of like how at SP2 XP came into it's own.
Vista required too much memory, had too few drivers (NVidia screwed the pooch HARD with their vista drivers at launch), and MS bowed to the manufacturers and lowered the requirements unrealistically.
I've ripped Flash off of several PCs and just went Silverlight. So far, I haven't found a site I care about I don't see in either H264 or Silverlight.
This may be a solution I go with, I'm looking for a replacement for Flash and Reader for my medical customers due to the sheer number of exploits we have to keep ahead of.
Christopher Fisk -- BOFH Excuse #298: Not enough interrupts
