With the latest flash for Linux update, two of the biggest annoyances have disappeared. Yay for usability!

  • Flash no longer steals the keyboard focus - Ctrl+L to go to the location bar now works even when the mouse is over the flash embed
  • HTML overlays over flash finally work. This makes some web sites finally usable even with Flash on (I still recommend using FlashBlock!) - they had a navigation menu that would open up under some Flash animation they had displaying below the menu, effectively making these parts of the menu inaccessible.

It still sucks, and I’m only using it in rare cases by selectively loading Flash. I love FlashBlock, which replaces any flash crap with a ‘Play’ button. Now if we could only do the same for some of the Web 2.0/DHTML annoyances…

[Note: it’s not a particularly new version. r115 according to about:plugins. I was told it’s like 3 months old. I just noticed the difference, maybe cause the Debian flash-installer package was just updated to this release, or because I use Flash so little. It was so unreliable for like ever that I wouldn’t even start using any site that uses Flash for anything serious. Granted: I do use youtube, because there are some great Swing dancing clips there. But that only uses a tiny fragment of Flash but still has been killing my browser every now and then.]

[Update: I was misled by a clever Javascript that actually disabled the flash or shrank it or so when the menu popped up. E.g. the Toyota site http://www.toyota.com/corolla/ is still unusable unless you’re using some flash blocker or do not have flash installed (apart from the flash assuming it were transparent, but it’s rendered on all white). The menu still pops up under the flash, making it impossible to access many pages.]