Does Your Mac’s Safari Crash? It’s Probably Flash

I have one major, recurring complaint about Safari on my Mac. It crashes. Safari 4.x is a little better than Safari 4.x beta, which was actually worse than Safari 3.x.

The scenario is common. I visit a web site using Safair. The site has an embedded Adobe Flash video, usually an advertisement, Safari begins to chew up memory, then it slows down, then it becomes unresponsive, then it totally crashes. If your Mac’s Safari crashes regularly, quite often the culprit is Adobe’s Flash. Is there anything that can be done? Yes.

Just Say No To Flash

Flash is Adobe’s cross platform multimedia system. It’s everywhere, Mac or Windows.

Flash has been around for over 15 years, and, arguably is on more computers worldwide than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, in whatever flavor.

What does Flash do? Beside crash your Mac? Flash is basically an interactive, animation system for web pages, whether animated advertisements, videos, or actual applications.

The Windows version of Flash seems to work better than the Mac version of Flash. Thank you, Adobe, for reminding us just how much you care about Mac users. Google safari flash crash and you’ll be treated with thousands of links; complaints from Mac and PC users about Flash instability.

How can you fight back? Well, Mac users could just say no to Flash, but the relative ubiquity of Flash videos makes that difficult. What if there was a way to avoid Flash video until we want it?

ClickToFlash

Fortunately for Mac users, you’re not alone. We feel your pain. So do the folks who develop the Mac utility ClickToFlash, sub-titled, Any crash is probably Flash.

ClickToFlash is a Safari utility which captures and blocks every web page that has a Flash video or advertisement, and replaces it with an attractive gradient embedded with the word Flash. The Flash ad or video isn’t loaded into Safari until you click the word Flash.

Web browsing is faster, Safari won’t crash as often, and you get to choose with Flash videos or advertisements to view, and when. ClickToFlash helps conserve battery power in Mac notebooks, reduces your CPU’s processing, and virtually eliminates Flash-induced headaches.

What about YouTube videos? No problemo. Many YouTube videos are H.264 so there’s no problem anyway.

The Details

Installing ClickToFlash is easy. Double-click. A menu item shows up in Safari near the Preferences menu. ClickToFlash is simple and comes with a minimum of settings.

Uninstalling is just as easy. Click the Uninstall ClickToFlash button in the settings window. My Mac’s Safari has worked flawlessly the past few weeks with ClickToFlash installed. Not one crash.

Even better, I get to choose which Flash videos or advertisements to view. Videos tend to be a different size than ads, so they’re easily identifiable.

There’s a reason Apple does not allow Adobe’s Flash on the iPhone. Flash has become a slow, buggy, crash-prone, bloated platform which doesn’t do much more than can be done already using Javascript, XHTML, and CSS. Until Adobe gets their collective Flash act together, ClickToFlash gives us Mac users a little room to breathe comfortably.