Layer Tennis week 1, Layer 6 by Jeffry Kalmikoff

I’ve been running the neat OSX add-in ClickToFlash for a week or so now. It’s a standard plugin for Safari that steals the mime types and file extensions from Adobe’s Flash, making pages load dramatically faster and making the web as responsive as it should be. It’s not much surprise, given how careless Adobe are about user experience in their other software (see Adobe UI Gripes for a giggle).

It’s an interesting experiment to potter around the net and see which sites work gracefully and which crash and burn. Of course, the plug-in makes flash-dependent sites worse - clicking to expose every ‘page’ of content. Your milage will vary, but I don’t really mind it. If anything, it just means I’ve waste less time attempting to interact with their site before giving up.

The plug-in has a long way to improve, of course, and there’s one thing I’d like to see from it. Rather than just replace the Flash content with a placeholder (you click it to load the Flash object), load the actual alternate content. The actual mark-up that should be exposed in the page in place of Flash. Of course, most of it will be blank. Or it will say ‘You must download Macromedia Flash Player 5 to continue’. But for those few who build websites properly, displaying the intended fallback content could save a click or two, and would make sure that sIFR headings don’t get blanked out. Via: layertennis.com.