‘Occupy Flash’ aims to kill off Adobe’s flash plugin

An “Occupy Flash” website is urging PC users to rip Adobe’s omnipresent media player off their computers and embrace HTML5.

Focused primarily on desktop Flash, the group is asking the world to boldly uninstall the multimedia player from desktops and laptops. It argues that as long as Flash — a proprietary “fossil,” in its words — is ubiquitous on computers it will continue to see development, despite the availability of open standards like HTML5.

Flash Player is a security nightmare, doesn’t work on most devices and makes the web less accessible, the group said. It continued:

“It’s a fossil, left over from the era of closed standards and unilateral corporate control of web technology. Websites that rely on Flash present a completely inconsistent (and often unusable) experience for fast-growing percentage of the users who don’t use a desktop browser. It introduces some scary security and privacy issues by way of Flash cookies.”

It holds up the years-long dominance of Internet Explorer 6 as an object lesson, and acknowledges that while users may have to go without certain websites or Flash games in the short term, “the more of us who run browsers that don’t support Flash, the quicker that pain will subside.”

It’s estimated that Flash Player is currently installed on 95 percent of desktop browsers, but with Adobe now aiming its development tools towards HTML5 and Air apps, it may not be too long before Flash becomes the one percent instead.

The group admit to shamelessly co-opting a populist terminology, as it has not – nor can it – occupy anything.