Wow, it's been 3 months since I stopped using flash.

dpkg.log.3.gz:2010-09-14 11:24:35 purge flashplugin-nonfree 1:2.8.1 1:2.8.1

At the time, there were known, open security holes in flash, and Adobe had announced a fix date -- rather far in the future. It made a lot of sense to remove flash at least temporarily.

I never found a compelling reason to reinstall it. I've missed out on a small amount of content, and had to do a little more to get at other content. But it's been worth it to not need to worry about flash slowing pages to a crawl, being insecure, bypassing cookie management, and being generally nasty, proprietary software.

Between youtube's html5 beta and Vimeo's easy link on every page to switch to html5, I have no trouble seeing most videos. One annoyance is when someone embeds a video somewhere using only the flash player, and also doesn't link to its page -- but I am seeing more youtube embeds being done with html5 recently. Youtube is also still inconsistent with some videos not yet being encoded in html5, and so I have to pull out youtube-dl occasionally to download and watch something. On the audio side, links to sound files are everywhere, and use of html5 <audio> is also very common.

The only thing I ever miss is Super Mario Bros. Crossover. I look forward to the day when the only use of flash is to play such historical roms in MAME.