Rob Ford’s Tweet this morning caught my attention. “We need 1 day when the Flash player is disabled just to appreciate how it lights up the web“, he said. I completely agree… We’ve become so accustomed to Flash just being there that we no longer realize how much it is used and how it “lights up the web”.

So it got me thinking: “What if Flash Player was disabled for a day?”.
First of all, advertising on the web would be a lot less interesting and thus a lot less appealing to advertisers. How many sites do you visit on a day to day basis that rely on advertisers to pay their bills? Sure… Some people would have a field day if sites would show less advertising but the reality of this world is that bills have to be paid.

Would you miss using Google Street View? Would you miss listening to your favorite artists on Pandora, Finetune or Last.FM? What about video? Would you miss not being able to just click the play button to watch a video on YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr or Facebook? Would you miss playing casual games on the web? Would you miss not being able to IM your friends on the Yahoo Webmessenger? Would you miss checking out the website for the latest movies and games? Would you miss watching a free episode of your favorite TV show on Hulu? Would you miss using free web apps like Picnik, Aviary, Photoshop.com and Sumopaint to edit your photos?

Yes… I know… I’ll say it again: Adobe pays my paycheck. But I’ve been a supporter of Flash for more than a decade now (long before I joined Adobe). Flash made the web a lot less dull. We’ve long passed the early skip intro days of Flash and it is now a mature platform that allows developers to build engaging sites and applications. Sites and apps you probably use every day…

Flash on!