
In Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, the company removed the Flash Player plugin from its privileged position of being a part of the default OS.
If you visit a website like YouTube using Safari on a brand new installation of Lion, it will warn you to “upgrade your Adobe Flash Player to watch this video”.
Leave it uninstalled
The most effective way to ensure that you almost never have to see a Flash-based video or advertisement on the Internet ever again is to simply follow in Apple’s prescribed path and leave the plugin uninstalled. But what of YouTube, which requires Flash in order to dazzle you with its content? You have a couple of options:
Switch to HTML5: Unbeknownst to many, YouTube does offer a way for you to switch to HTML5 versions of the videos throughout the website instead of sticking with Flash. The HTML5 player uses the H.264 versions of videos instead of Flash and is considerably less resource-intensive. It has almost every feature that its Flash counterpart has, such as changing the rate of playback or video quality, but it cannot do fullscreen video. It also doesn’t work on videos that have ads, rendering a big chunk of the website unusable for the Flash-hating user.
If you’d like to keep the HTML5 but get rid of the ads, consider using YouTube5, a free Safari extension that coaxes YouTube to use HTML5 instead of Flash without requiring you to sign up for the site’s own HTML5 trial. The HTML5 player the plugin provides does not have the ability to speed up or slow down playback of videos and its fullscreen feature has never worked properly for me, but it does have the added advantage of being able to play back all the videos on the site—with no ad in sight!
Use Google Chrome: Predictably enough, Google prevents a Flash-to-HTML5 extension from being developed for its own browser (because it removes ads from YouTube, thus depriving the company of a revenue source), but it does have the distinction of bundling the Flash Player plugin with the browser itself, making it independent of the OS’s support of the feature.
Therefore, if you primarily use Safari but occasionally need to load a webpage that uses Flash, you can open it in Google Chrome to get access to the Flash content. If you find yourself doing it too frequently, however, it may be time to either switch to Google Chrome entirely or consider one of the other options outlined below.