Props to Flash for a whole lot of things, from making the YouTube revolution possible to offering a genuinely accessible authoring environment. Seriously, good on ’em.

But on Safari, Chrome and Firefox, I’m discovering that most sites with a significant Flash presence are a sign that I’m about to have the opportunity to practice my calm breathing skills while those browsers slow to a crawl. For whatever reason, if the Internet is a bunch of tubes, then Flash is the slowest hamster in the Habitrail.

I’m loath to lard up my system with beta software, but Flash is ubiquitous enough that I’m prepared to make an exception. So we’ll see if the Flash plug-in 10.1 release candidate speeds things up any.

Meanwhile, on a related note: if you’re starting a restaurant web site, please be one of the few, the proud that aren’t built entirely in Flash. Mobile devices can’t use them, most are hostile to search engines (you do want search engine traffic, right?) and I have yet to see a restaurant web site that had a good reason not to stick to good ol’ HTML.