Honestly, I am not the biggest fan of Flash. 90% of the time I see it just used for annoying ads. It’s always killing my browser, or pegging the CPU, at least until I install Flash blockers. (Of course, it might not help that I often have 50 tabs open.) And I always have issues with it under Linux.

For the past week I’ve been doing a lot of surfing with my iPad and, honestly, lack of Flash is not so bad. It’s not as bad as trying to surf with Netscape / Mozilla under Linux in the, say, late 90’s / early 2000’s. Always loved those sites that were “optimized” for Internet Explorer. (Read: they used non standard HTML that wouldn’t work with anything else, or, horrors, ActiveX or, as I used to call it at the time, CaptiveX.)

My favorite moment back then: hitting a web site that lectured me that I needed to install Internet Explorer to view the site. I was. From an iPaq running - wait for it - Internet Explorer. Epic fail.

Of course back then browsing from a mobile device was a lot less than mainstream.

Which brings me to tonight’s amusing moment. Went to Ikea’s website and they had a big graphic saying I needed Flash to view that particular content and, not to worry, it was easy to install. Since I was on my iPad, by “easy” I guess they mean “impossible”. Oh well. Luckily I’m able to view much of the rest of the site… So far.