I finally bit the bullet and installed Flashblock on my Firefox.

I’ll miss it a bit – you miss a bit of the Zeitgeist when you don’t see the ads and so on, but I won’t miss the speed hit I was taking.

Between the upgrade to Firefox 4 (very nice, except for memory management) and iTunes, some nights it’s a pain to keep things stable. No crashes, but iTunes would stutter all the the time.

Turning off Flash solved 95% of the problems. And – at the same time – when I go to sites I’m familiar with, no issues. HTML 5 and jQuery (especially) are removing the need for Flash in most cases. (One notable exception: Nick Denton’s sites: Gawker, Lifehacker and so on. Killing JavaScript would kill the site; it appears nuking Flash does the same. The sites – beyond the framework – never load any content. Awesome redesign, guys!)

Once again, Steve Jobs was right…or the success of the iPhone/iPad made people scramble to de-Flash sites so iOS devices could view same. Whatever.

Works for me!