I Hate Flash
Sorry, but I do. And no, I don’t mean Flash Gordon, or Flash Photography. Flash, for those of you who are not familiar with the name, is the technology by Macromedia that allows advanced animation with interactive/link properties to be displayed on web pages. True, Flash done right can be incredibly cool. The problem is, it is incredibly annoying most of the time, and sometimes can crash your browser–and more often than not it is completely unnecessary.
It reminds me of the early days of the World Wide Web, the days of the first Mosaic browser and the first versions of Netscape, when there was far less capability to browsers. There was one hypertext command, BLINK, which made the chosen text blink on and off. Many used it because it was new and fun, and “hey, I can make the text blink!!” However, it became maddeningly annoying very quickly, and it is rarely used any more. Animated GIFs became the new BLINK, and everyone started putting cute little animations everywhere–prompting the makers of browsers to include a browser option to stop them from doing their thing.
But now, the new BLINK is Flash. In 99% of all cases as I see it, Flash is utterly unnecessary, used solely in a vain attempt to make the web site look cool. Some web site are Flash-only, meaning if you don’t have Flash, then don’t bother visiting. Good web designers have Flash- and No-Flash versions of their pages. Better web designers know when not to use Flash at all.
Worst of all, many ads today are Flash-based. Meaning that if I visit a web site, I cannot read it because all those damned ads along the sides are constantly distracting me. And though a few browsers claim they can disable plug-ins (Flash is installed as a ‘plug-in’), Flash still persists. I’ve tried a couple of plug-ins that claim to be able to disable Flash easily, but so far, none actually work for me. So I’ve devised a kludge–I found the Mac OS X plug-in for Flash (“Shockwave Flash NP-PPC” in the Internet Plug-ins folder in the main Library), and removed it to another folder. Whenever I need Flash, I plop it into the needed folder, reload the web page and it works; when I’m finished, I get rid of the plug-in. Inelegant, but at least it works.
Still, Flash is a major annoyance, IMHO. Even with a less kludgy way of disabling it, it should be used sparingly by web page designers.
Flash is like chocolate ice cream: It’s really good every once in a while, but you shouldn’t have it with every meal–and certainly not instead of regular meals! 😉
(Not my analogy, by the way, but one that I find rather apt.)
I know what you mean. I just wish more designers thought our way.
my workaround. i have flash installed with internet explorer and do my day-to-day browsing with mozilla. when i need to see a flash item (which really isn’t that often), i open the page with IE. otherwise i browse in peace, no flashing/dancing monkeys in my way!
I am trying to learn flash for a Uni assignment. It is the only time I will ever use it in my life. It is the most user unfriendly, feature bloated, screen hungry, annoying software I have ever used. I know AutoCAD, Photoshop, Lightwave, Viz, Corel Draw, Director and I don’t have the frustration with these that flash gives me. The simplest tasks are maddening. I will no doubt fail this assignment. Flash is not at all flash and like most people say, it only gobbles bandwidth and flashes annoying stuff at you. Flash can flash off!
How bout “Flash” is more like Chilli Con Cane “you dont need it but when you give in to your urges, you will regret it when trying to get it out of your system
No offense to Mexican Food!!
I hate flash too. GIVE ME THE CONTENT. Give me text. Give me ASCII. Give me something I can scale up, scale down, cut and paste!
We have to go back to the basics- where the web was once a swiftly running river full of wonderful content, it is now a horrible cesspool clogged with the bloated corpses of once-useful websites killed with Flash.
Not very nice!
What do you think of this little programme
I have no idea. I don’t use IE (it’s a really bad browser), and for all I know, the author is a hacker and that thing could ruin your computer. Even if I used IE, I wouldn’t try that kind of software, but instead use one of the more established Flash blockers.
4 years after this article was written, the same is still true today. Flash is growing on an amazing scale, and i still only believe the people who like flash are the people programming the website.
I have disabled flash in mozilla, and if a site is flash based, ill refuse to go to it.
I am not going to sit there for two minutes while the page loads.
i cannot copy and paste text
i cannot search flash
i do not want to wait for an entire page to finish loading before links are clickable.
i do not want to see distracting animations that serve no purpose other then ‘wow, how neat’.
If a site is flashed based, that immdiately tells me the site has no content, and its not worth the time to even visit.
I do not understand why these programmers believe flash is user friendly. Its so far from user friendly its a joke to even consider that.
user friendly means all the options in every web browser are usable.. ie back button, refresh button, stop button.
These flash programmers feel that they are finally not constrained to the limits of a browser, and a full interactive, massive bandwidth hog, cpu intensive site is what people want.
The only time flash is useful is for gaming.