I’m an avid reader of ZDNet for my technology news, and today came across Adobe screw-up leaves Flash flaw unpatched for 16 months.

I’ve never been a fan of Flash, I see it as some kind of blight on the internet. When I was a Windows network administrator, I often had to tell users to shut down tabs running flash because they were using 50% of the CPU. I side with Jakob Nielsen too, with his opinions on usability and ergonomic website design. Though flash applications can be easy to use, most developers seem to take the flexibility and power afforded by it as an excuse to go over the top on garish, cryptic designs. Steve Jobs (though I’m not a fan of Apple, more on that another time) has even earned some begrudging respect for his recent stance.

The internet is moving forward with HTML5 and exceptional Javascript libraries like jQuery. I believe the need for flash is rapidly diminishing, and that makes me very happy. It’s just a shame the community and contributing organisations couldn’t agree on one video codec (Vorbis would have been good, if not for the greed of large corporations, in my opinion).

This security issue should undermine a lot of respect and support people have in flash, but unfortunately I don’t see the “flash fanclub” doing anything but pushing forward ever more aggressively.

Just do me a favour: Next time you think “Oooh, I could use flash for that”, pause a moment and wonder “Can I use Javascript instead?”.