I’ve become so sick of Flash-based websites that I’ve installed a Firefox extension that blocks all Flash by default, giving me the chance to voluntarily decide to play it or not. I’d used this extension, Flashblock a few years ago, but removed it after only a few days. I guess back then my temper for shitty Flash menus, complete with streaming and screaming soundtracks was a bit softer. No more. I can’t deal with Flash-based sites. I won’t deal with them. They’re retarded.

For example, being a paid member of Crunch Gyms, occasionally, I need to look up some information concerning the particular gym I frequent in Brooklyn. In sane circumstances, I’d have no problem, but the idiots that designed Crunch’s site, aside from being semi-defective in non-mainstream browsers, use Flash to find and display specific gym information, turning what should be 5 seconds of searching into an annoying ordeal of dealing with an inefficient, bullshit site, filled with whiz-bang eye candy that I could give two shits about. It’s a waste of my time. I get better results just calling the gym on my phone.

I can admit that only four years ago, this very website was 90% flash-based. I’ve since learned the errors of my ways, along with most everyone else with half a brain. Why people still pay for second-rate Flash sites that actively annoy and retard the dissemination of whatever information they built the site for in the first place is beyond my ability to understand.

There’s a time and place for Flash when used properly. Youtube is a great example of it being integrated into a site in a sane and constructive way. Building a website using Flash menus is wrong. Delivering text content via Flash is wrong. Automatically streaming sound or video with no warning, especially for a non-music or video oriented site is brain-damaged. I hate it and now, I’m blocking it.

While I’ve known that Gmail uses SSL to log in, someone recently pointed out to me that while my password is sent to Google fully encrypted, once logged in, all pages that I view are sent via http, meaning that all the emails I read and send can be scooped right out of the ether at any open hotspot.

One remedy I found is to manually change the address from
http://mail.google.com/mail/ to https://mail.google.com/mail/
and for that session, you should be using https and all the pages you view in Gmail will be encrypted. Very cool, but I have to remember to manually check this every time I log in. I smoked way too much weed as a teenager. Half the time I don’t even know what day of the week it is. No lie. How am I supposed to consistently remember this?

Looking further, I found this great extension for Firefox that takes care of the problem for me. CustomizeGoogle lets you set a whole mess of options for a variety of Google services. I won’t get into most of the details since they don’t apply, but check them out because a lot of them are pretty cool. One option that is relevant is that once installed, you can set an option for Gmail to always use https by default. Just check off that one option and from that point on, you have worry-free, encrypted Gmail sessions as a default. Pretty damn useful. CustomizeGoogle also lets you set an https default option for Google Calendar as well. Even sweeter.

Unfortunately, Safari, Konqueror and other browser users are out of luck (IE users, you deserve what you get.) with this extension, so unless there’s something else out there, they have to manually check the session every time or set a bookmark using https in the URL and be consistent about accessing Gmail through that bookmark.