John Gruber on removing Flash from his Mac:
For the vast majority of my surfing, this new setup works great. I prefer it over my previous setup using the ClickToFlash plugin because Flash Player is never left running in the background because of a background Safari web page on which I clicked to load Flash content hours (or even days) ago. It also means that the Flash plugin never gets loaded into other non-browser apps that happen to use WebKit — eliminating the number one source of crashes for many of these apps.
I performed the same setup on my machine when Gruber tweeted/linked to this a while back, it is without a doubt much better. The performance even seems snappier than it did with ClickToFlash and I highly recommend reading this for great tips that Gruber points out.
Also this bit from Gruber:
As of today, there are significant performance and battery life gains to be had by disabling Flash Player on Mac OS X.