Anonymous asked:kinda related to your tweet complaining about the verge's evil JS, If you go to the tumblr login page and your browser reports you have flash installed (say if you have it on click to play or just using someone else's computer and they installed that crap) the login page loads some flash applet in the background. Do you maybe know wtf does it need flash for?
lol wow i have no idea
but i do have a handful of guesses
1. the login page just loads all the same stuff as the dashboard, which includes a flash fallback thing for playing audio/video
2. they deliberately load a video player just in case the random background they pick happens to be a video (if that’s possible?)
3. they’re using it to track you — you can store data from flash, just like a cookie, but it’s far less likely that you’ll notice or delete it
kinda betting on #1 tbh. on a big complex site it’s a huge pain to cut down the js/css to exactly what a particular page needs. plus if they load all that stuff on the (otherwise relatively small) login page while you’re busy typing your password, the dashboard will load faster.