Most ads are fine but when listening to music or if your ISP has a small “fair usage” quota, its REALLY annoying for adverts to disturb you or risk pushing you over your bandwidth quota.

Even worse if you are using mobile web stuck on GPRS.

Now back to Flash.

I like rich content and well presented websites. But I also want the sites I visit to be lean, efficient and stable. Similarly, I want any ads I see to be unobtrusive. The second an ad becomes intrusive, its root URL gets added to a blocker and I don’t see any advertising from that company.

On the flipside, if big ad money was being spent heavily to draw your attention to annoying HTML5 based banners that autoplay video (in low quality for now what would your friend do then? Block all HTML5 based content I guess.

A very good point. Long live Flash!

Tim

Jokes aside, and I can understand the haters at times. But the technology is not at fault here, it’s the way it is used – and that does not just apply to Flash.

To think that HTML5 is the solution to all the web’s problems is very short sighted. ‘Open’ does not equal good, and proprietary does not equal bad. Plus the Flash Player plugin is about the only thing that isn’t yet completely open: the SWF format is open, the compiler is, the framework is, and there’s a lot of open source tooling available too.
On the flipside, if big ad money was being spent heavily to draw your attention to annoying HTML5 based banners that autoplay video (in low quality for now what would your friend do then? Block all HTML5 based content I guess.

The average internet user, (I say this knowing that most of the people who read this are not in this category) just want a great experience they couldnt care less what the developer has used to create it, in fact if they are wondering it isnt working properly.

Convergence needs something to meld them all together – we arent going to be shackled to our desktops for ever (thank god!) user engagement and functionality is the only thing that matters not what camp you are in.

It is yet one more application to keep up to date, due to frequent security patches.

The upgrade mechanism is obnoxious. Last night, when Firefox prompted me to update flash, Adobe tried to add a trial version of some commercial anti-virus software to the download, as an opt-out, rather than an opt-in. Especially for a security patch, this is of noxious; it is only marginally better than a Trojan horse. The default link for the installer wanted to use Adobe’s useless “download manager” rather than just downloading the installer itself.

Flash makes the browser misbehave. When a Flash application has focus, most of the keyboard shortcuts for the browser no longer work. The problem is compounded by Flash developers who use controls which don’t even resemble OS standard controls, like “scrollbars” which render his four pixels wide and don’t have any paging features.

But I think the number one reason that people hate Flash is the tendency of Flash developers to use it when standard HTML would work just fine. I think relatively few people complain about YouTube using Flash to show videos; Flash is a good fit for this. But when Flash developers start using Flash to render menus on a webpage, add a scrolling text area, and other things which HTML arguably works better for, then Flash is seen as the problem, rather than the developer’s choice.