Nothing beats the ease with which the regular flash player can be blocked, and then occasionally loaded by mouse click as it works with flash block and the like. The danger of it becoming an extension is that it's now more difficult to have that block/override workflow. And there's always the dreadful prospect of people embedding it directly into their site, potentially leading to a new wave of blanket JavaScript blocking as a response.
The current reliance of sites on Javascript is worse than Flash ever was. Flash elements can be blocked, but if you block javascript, this disables the entire site, so you have to live with CPU chugging mess of a website.
That is sort of my point though. On the other hand, I can see myself just stopping to use sites that abuse JavaScript, keeping the "good" ones. Maybe that kind of feedback just have happened on the web a long time ago.
It's encouraging to hear this can work. Of course that guy was extremely fortunate to be making something everyone was interested in, so it's still a risk (but then again: what isn't?).
There was no fortune to it, it was years of OSS work on lots of Ruby projects followed by a realization that existing solutions were terrible and I had the knowledge to make something better. Nothing like years of experience to put you in the right place at the right time.
You say fortunate, I say foresighted. In any event. I imagine that he started building it to meet his own needs and the growth of revenue now is a happy side-effect.
It's probably always a bit of both, but I'd say that level of success doesn't come without the necessary context (several things have to conspire for it to happen). Anyway, it's an inspiring story!
I signed up for it. I thought about joining nReduce when it was still new but at the time I didn't have an idea... and now they're gone. I would be willing to try this out now.
