The Manifesto

Flash Player is dead. Its time has passed. It's buggy. It crashes a lot. It requires constant security updates. It doesn't work on most mobile devices. 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.

Flash makes the web less accessible. At this point, it's holding back the web.

Our goal: To get the world to uninstall the Flash Player plugin from their desktop browsers.

Why, you ask? Why does it matter, when Adobe has already neutered the platform by publicly killing Flash on mobile devices? Why does it matter when HTML5 has clearly won the fight for the future of our web browsing? Well, as we've seen with other outdated web technologies (most notably the much-lamented Internet Explorer 6), as long as software is installed on machines, there will be a contingent of decision makers who mandate its use, and there will be a requirement of continued support, the plugin will live on, and folks will continue to develop for it. Also, for unknown reasons, Adobe is still sticking with Flash as a desktop browsing technology.

The only way to truly force the web to embrace modern open standards is to invalidate old technology.

Now let's be clear: Disabling Flash Player in your browser will likely mean that some of the sites you use regularly are less usable (We're looking at you, Google Analytics. For shame!). Should you choose to join the movement, there will be some pain and sacrifice involved in your decision. But the more of us who run browsers that don't support Flash, the quicker that pain will subside.

Note: This is not a campaign against Adobe, or even their Flash platform. We're sure there are plenty of good uses for it, such as building great Air applications, for example. In fact, Adobe has stated they believe HTML5 is the future of web browsing. We're simply trying to help them get there a little faster (Sidenote: Adobe, if you're reading this, how about manning-up and supporting this site, like Microsoft did with the IE6 Funeral)

Note: this site has no corporate backing, and is not a lobbying effort of any sort. Sad that we have to say that, but the accusations have arisen.

A Final Note: This campaign is in no way meant to belittle the efforts of the more important Occupy movements currently going on. We understand we are fairly shamelessly co-opting populist terminology. And for that matter, we're not really occupying anything. More like evicting. Or banishing. Regardless, we love the idea of normal people taking on big corporations in the interest of the population at large.