It’s no secret that some people view Flash as major annoyance, labelling it a CPU hog, security risk and ultimately, an unnecessary part of the web. This has lead to inventions like Flash Block and a general animosity towards the technology. Fortunately, its not too late for Adobe to change some opinions. Here are 5 things that we think could greatly improve the day to day usage of the Flash Plugin.

1) Flash should be invisible to the viewer

The custom right click menu, the strange cursors, the incompatibility with browser extensions; Flash content often sticks out like a sore thumb. Adobe should make Flash feel like the integral part of the web it has become.

2) Properly support all operating systems

The killer feature of Flash has always been its build once, deploy everywhere philosophy. Unfortunately the reality is far from perfect as any OSX user with a burning CPU knows only too well. 64bit operating systems have been left out in the cold and Linux development is frustratingly slow. There are also noticeable performance differences and behaviours, between differnet browsers on the same platform.

Adobe needs to ensure consistent experiences across all platforms & browsers or they will continue to be criticised by some of the most vocal people on the web.

3) Hardware accelerate everything

The video hardware acceleration 10.1 brings, is a welcome step in the right direction, but still falls far short of what is needed. Hardware Accelerated HTML 5 is coming in Internet Explorer 9, so Adobe can’t afford to ignore this for much longer.

4) Transparently & remotely update the Plug-in

Delivering invisible, rapid updates would make the Flash Player more secure and would provide a huge development head start over traditional web technologies with long update cycles. Google’s chrome team thinks this is a good idea too, with plans to integrate the plug-in into the browser.

5) Make deeplinking, bookmarking & SEO core features

Its an old argument, but sadly still a relvelent one. Flash breaks some of the most useful features of the web and its damn annoying that we are still discussing this in 2010. Adobe need to make these features almost impossible to avoid when developing any multi-state application.