You click on a link to go to, say, a sports website, and the first thing that happens is a flashing smiley face and a jittery blurb that assures you that yes, by some highly improbable chance, you really are the exact 10,000th visitor to this page, and if you only click right here right now, amazing opportunities await you. Things like this are often accompanied by jazzy music or hyper-enthusiastic dialog. You wouldn't believe the number of times I've heard "Yuck. Dog breath!", the opening lines of a plug-in commercial for canine toothbrushes, before going thru the series of mouse clicks needed to turn the damn thing off.
Well, not only are these Flash-based animated ads annoying, they apparently suck up a non-trivial amount of power, which has become a matter of some concern to laptop users jealous of battery life, enuf so that Google has decided to do something about them in its Chrome browser. Since Google's approach is thot by analysts to be a flanking attack on Adobe's Flash video player, and since Apple is also famously disparaging of Flash, perhaps Safari won't be far behind in sending these automatic distractions the way of the HTML "blink" command.
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