Safari 5 and Flash Player 10 Woes

Lately Safari has been prone to freezing (pinwheel of doom scenario) and other undesirable behavior when browsing Flash-intensive websites. The problem seems to occur when viewing videos on Youtube or other websites. Stopping one video mid-load and then starting to view another video will often cause Flash to go belly-up. Sometimes when this happens the <div> where the Flash video should have been appears empty. The problem is usually corrected by restarting Safari.

FYI, I'm running the 64-bit version of Snow Leopard on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro with 4 GB of RAM and in general I'm very satisfied with its performance.

Could this problem be related to Apple's decision not to allow Adobe to develop an implementation of Flash for Apple's hand-held consumer devices, such as the iPhone? Steve Jobs stated that Flash is a closed platform not suitable for open application development. He also stated that problems related to running Flash is the number one reason macs crash. It's kind of strange that I'm noticing such problems a lot more now that Jobs has made that statement, but then again it could just be my imagination.

In Adobe's defense, CEO Shantanu Narayen states that Flash is not a closed platform and that Flash does not cause macs to crash, rather those problems are related to underlying issues with the Mac OS X.

While many geeks feel that Flash should be phased out entirely in favor of the up-and-coming HTML5 video format, I personally feel that Flash still has a place when it comes to ease-of-development for interactive web content. At least for a while until HTML 5 has time to mature and gain wider acceptance. This video from Google's annual web developer conference demonstrating HTML5 in action is pretty slick:

Hello World!

Now that I've finally completed my masters in computer science from the Rochester Institute of Technology Golisano College of Computer and Information Sciences, I figured it's a good idea to keep a record of all the cool projects I've worked on over the years. This blog will serve as a personal portfolio and more organized alternative to jotting down notes and how-to guides in miscellaneous text files.

Plus, this way I get to share my knowledge with the world - which will make me feel better knowing that others may benefit from the next 5-hour impromptu code-review session necessary to compile that must-have bin util in the latest version of Ubuntu. Yeah, all you geeks know what I'm talking about.

Like most CS geeks these days I know quite a bit about HTML and web programming, so I was faced with the decision to create my own website from scratch or to use a blogging site like this one (Blogger). Being the type of guy who likes to drive standard shift in a world where standards are quickly being phased out for automatics, I usually like to have as much control as possible over my craft (pun explained: craft as in my vehicle and craft as in my professional activities), but in this case I've decided to relinquish the reigns and go for the simple and easy solution. Besides I don't want to be distracted by the task of maintaining a website on top of everything else. Also, Blogger looks pretty (with the right settings).

As geeks we have an insatiable desire to know every intimate detail of a piece of technology, be it a car, iPhone, printer, Linux kernel, or web service. It's not enough to sit behind an interface and know how to use something; we want to know how it works! Sadly none of us has the time or energy to satisfy our every geek craving. We can't write all of our programs in assembly instead of C or spend our time reverse-engineering device drivers when something doesn't work the way we expect it to. We can't go through life with use strict; on all of the time; sometimes we have to take a more casual approach and accept things as they are. No one ever said that being a geek is easy!

Note that I intentionally changed the date of this post so that it's the oldest and appears first in the blog archive. The dates of other posts may have been changed to reflect a representative date when I completed a project or an employment period ended.