[HTC Wildfire S] no.human.being:
Flash is dead. Not just on Android, but everywhere. Almost all relevant sites have moved away from it (apart from Youtube, which of course is extremely "relevant" where this is still work in progress, see below). Adobe doesn't provide updates for mobile devices at all and only stability/security updates for PC but not new features. Instead they're investing in developer tools for HTML5.

I don't have the plugin on my computer anymore since around 2010. In the beginning it was quite a restriction, but now there's barely any Flash content on the web anymore. The only problem is that Youtube doesn't offer all videos in HTML5 yet since they currently don't have the capacity for storing them all in VP8, which is Google's own video codec and the de-facto codec for HTML5 streaming (apart from Apple, which obviously went with H.264 with Safari in order to avoid using the technology that their strongest competitor developed). Now when you visit Youtube, the server makes a decision.

- If you are using Safari, it streams the videos as H.264 via HTML5.

- If you are using another browser, it streams the videos as H.264 embedded in a Flash container. (This is what the majority of users will get.)

- If you don't have Flash installed or decided to "opt in" for the "experimental HTML5 beta" (http://www.youtube.com/html5), it streams the videos as VP8 via HTML5. (This is what I do.)

- If the video isn't available in VP8 encoding yet due to storage limitations on Google's servers it is streamed as H.264 embedded in a Flash container. (This is a problem if you're unwilling to use Flash, even though it will vanish over time as Google acquires more and more storage for their servers and can thus store more and more videos with the "storage-demanding" VP8 coding.)

Despite being a Youtube user, I don't have a Flash plugin installed. Most videos will stream as VP8 via HTML5 since I did "opt-in" for the HTML5 beta. For the videos which aren't encoded to VP8 yet, I use "gstreamer", which is an open source framework for streaming media. This framework manages to decode the Flash + H.264 stream without requiring the Adobe Flash plugin. However, afaik, "gstreamer" is only available on Linux, so unfortunately it's not an option for the great majority of computer users which are using Microsoft Windows.

In addition, "gstreamer" isn't that much more secure than Flash is. In fact it has quite a share of vunlerabilities, especially when used in its "default configuration" (and most users aren't even aware of the framework, let alone the configuration file :D ), but at least it has the advantage of being more "exotic" and a less favorable target due to the low install base. :D

I'm not using any Apple products, but I really

love

Apple for their strict policy of not allowing Flash on their devices. It's basically them who are driving the web developers away of their old bad habits and finally putting the deadly blow to this unbelievably dated and badly-engineered proprietary technology that should definitely not be used anymore now that HTML5 is out where you can do video, audio, animated vector graphics, etc. all with HTML and JavaScript alone. There's really not much that Flash can do that HTML5 with its "video", "audio" and "canvas" element, in conjunction with JavaScript and SVG couldn't do. It's just that most developers are lazy and don't learn new technologies when they're not forced to do so. Thank you Apple for being the driving force in this regard.

---------- Post added at 05:48 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:46 PM ----------

Do a NANDroid backup of the entire phone (all partitions), then flash the RUU, then flash CWM again, wipe and restore all partitions. It will waste write-cycles on the NAND since it writes stuff that you'll overwrite again (from the backup) straight on, but it'll do the trick.