What Annoys You About Flash?
I spend a large majority of my work day working with or designing for Flash-based interfaces. Flash is essentially how I make a living on a daily basis. That said, there are many personal/philosophical issues I have with Flash on the web that I struggle with everyday I work with it. Flash has almost always been a divisive technology for the web community. Most people fall in either the love or hate camps with few not holding a strong opinion about it. I am planning to go into my thoughts about Flash – my likes, my dislikes and everything in between later this week. But first, I wanted to hear what your frustrations are with the experience of Flash on the web. Your thoughts can hit any subject – vague to specific. I just want to hear from the people whose opinions are the most important, the users.
Recently I posed the question to myself of how many sites I visit on a daily basis that use Flash. When I really thought about it, the answer really shocked me. I would love to hear if my personal experience mimics yours.
Your comments are going to greatly impact how I direct my article, so please lend me your thoughts.
Update: – You can now read what annoys me about Flash.
The Discussion
37 Comments
- By somerandomdude
- By flippy
- By Michael
- By Zinni
- By Michael @ New York Criminal Attorney
- By Anton
- By varun rathore
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nothing annoys me about flash. AS3 looks very promising along with flex. alot of the major problems have been fixed and AS3 is faster. Also AS is a real language now. I like the fact that i can build a site and have it display exactly the same on all browsers. what annoys me is flash designers who dont optimize there images and sound. the key to a good flash site it keeping it lite. Flash Vs Ajax? i can under stand ajax for big sites but i’m a flash dev i can spit out a gallery faster in flash then ajax so i will….deal with it.
I think my gripe list is a bit different than most folks. They are more language and runtime features.
1.) No API for direct access to HTTP headers. I know this isn’t included because of some old browsers. In that case the API should return null or maybe even throw an error, whatever. It will work fine in modern browsers.
2.) Collections and generics. Somebody else mentioned collections, i.e. hashtables, sets, lists, etc. These need to be standardized and genericized. I am tired of doing myArray[i] as User.
3.) Multi-threading. Also mentioned by others… I would not recommend a shared memory model like Java, C#, but a message based system like you can get with JavaScript + Google Gears.
4.) Virtual Machine APIs. We should be able to force garbage collection, find out memory usage, etc.
And finally, my biggest complaint by far :
5.) The Flex framework needs to be included with the Flash player. The cross-domain caching of the framework as an RSL is a band-aid. Make the Flash player a 2.5 MB download instead of 1.9 MB. Silverlight has a big advantage as an RIA platform because of this.
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I will agree with the statement that it seems like flash is used to only design pointless things. There are times where you see something that has used the potential of the technology in an effective way, however most of this time flash is used just for gimmicks.
Gimmicks really annoy me, as a designer I seek out projects that have substance and actually mean something to someone. I despise things that exist purely to exist, flash makes it easier for these projects to appear worthwhile. This is not entirely the fault of flash, yet maybe the expectations that unexperienced clients put on it.
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First off, Flash is horrible for SEO purposes. Second, the internet is not technologically ready for flash yet. If your connection is not the fastest, trying to load a page that contains flash is a nightmare. I know I keep a list of websites that do not use flash and I go to those instead of the alternative (sportingnews.com vs espn.com). Once the internet catches up with flash it will be great, but for now, it is horrible to deal with.
What annoys me – that is when I’m going through open tabs in Firefox, flash will catch keyboard focus (Ctrl+Tab) and will not release it until manual mouse intervention from my side.
I have been great fan of somerandomdude
Keep up the good work.
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