What is so evil about a Flash based website?

Question

I have the feeling that Flash-based ( or Silverlight-based) websites are generally frowned upon, except when you are creating games or multimedia-content rich applications.

Answer 1

Flash and Silverlight based sites typically go against basic Internet conventions with their closed models.

For example, most Flash & Silverlight based sites:

• Ignore the back/fwd button.
• Don't allow you to send anyone a URL to a specific place on the site, or bookmark a specific spot for later via your browser
• Place the internet in a fixed size box. No dynamic sizing for wider monitors or higher resolutions.

Answer 2

Interestingly everyone here blasts Flash/Silverlight and you would do well to recognise that this is only one side of the coin.

Flash (and Flex) allow web site designers significantly more flexibility and richer content for their site and this works in a variety of situations - e.g. sites relating to movies, or bands, sites for kids, sites for games etc.

Certainly, there are many reasons to not choose Flash/Flex/Silverlight, but one can do sites just as inaccessible in JavaScript these days. I have previously worked with JavaScript products that have no reasonable usability by blind people, or web crawlers.

Flash penetration (from a biased source to be sure) is 99%+ (http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html), which means that those that say "would never visit a Flash site" are in the 1% of the population that do no install Flash, do not watch YouTube or movie trailers online.

So, you need to be mindful of your audience. Certain audiences and situations would definitely be better off with plain HTML pages and a minimum of JavaScript (government websites, programming websites are two areas that spring to mind). Other times it is because the audience are office workers that are not allowed to install Flash in the browsers.

Rich Internet Applications (RIA) is one area where there is a distinct clash/struggle between the Flex/Silverlight and JavaScript/CSS/HTML sides. I've worked with both, and I'm now of the opinion that requiring Flex/Silverlight plug-ins is fairly reasonable, though you can still lose some visitors if the application is public.

In summary - you're best to identify your audience, identify what they're willing/able to use and then based on such limitations decide on your technology.

Answer 3

In this next rant s/Flash/Flash or Silverlight/g

1. The Flash application/plugin is a closed source pot of serious undisclosed security holes that expose private data, allow modification of arbitrary files on your hard disk, etc.
2. Flash files are enormous for basic content. There are more efficient ways of doing things
3. Flash is slow. The plugin on my Windows PC can hog 100% of the CPU time to play some shitty websites.
4. Flash is non-standard. There isn't a supported flash plugin installed everywhere. Linux users can't run it without jumping through package management hoops. Firefox users on Windows don't get it by default (well didn't last I checked).
5. Flash is annoying; your users don't want to be bombarded by animations and jingles and junk just to get some basic information.
6. No back/forward functions unless the Flash designer wanted to implement them in
7. Can't view a single page without waiting for all the content/scripts that make up that "page" to load. That's really quite painful if all your user wants is a slice of text and you force the multimedia down their throat.
8. Most Flash-only sites are really bad; the designers seem more concerned with using all of the features of the flash engine rather than presenting something that's concise and useful to the user.

Answer 4

Let us not forget that Flash allows web sites to display video, animation, user interaction, etc., and it allows this to be a simple process or a geeky techie one, depending on what you want to do. Many bad Flash sites are down to the author.

If YOU don't like Flash then the answer is simple, don't use it. Don't install the Flash plug-in, or install a browser plug-in such as Flashblock on Firefox. This replaces any Flash movie with a play button, preventing and download until it is clicked.

Better than that though, if you don't like the solution that Adobe or Microsoft are giving you, then come up with a better one, or at least let them know what you don't like, they do take feedback seriously. Support some of the people who campaign for accessibility improvements in Flash, for example visit http://niquimerret.com.

Accessibility is an ongoing issue and not one that will go away, Flash accessibility is improving for people with physical disabilities. In in some cases the use of Flash enhances the experience for people with cognitive and learning disabilities, when an concept or idea is better explained when presented as an animation rather than a page of words and static images.

Answer 5

Probably for the same reason C programmers shied away from Win32 API, Win32 programmers from MFC and MFC programmers from Windows Forms. It's tricky to use and understand - I have tried programming in Flex and am getting along pretty well but it is not inherently designed for typical web application design e.g. there is no native (at least until Flex 3) support for databases or cookies or sessions - you need to put all 3 in PHP or another server-side page and call that from ActionScript.

Try making a simple register/login page with PHP and then again with Flex/Flash and you will see that all the server side crunching is done by someone else - again, this is probably by design since we have HTML/JavaScript for the front-end mixed with ColdFusion or PHP etc. for back-end in "traditional" web applications.

Like started by other people, Flash is bad with the keyboard - try pressing Ctrl-T in Firefox when a Flash object embedded in an HTML page has focus (mouse-over) - so that can be frustrating for the user...

Having said all that, I would still rather make a web application front-end in Flash/Flex than HTML/JavaScript/CSS since the latter needs a sharp learning curve that gets quite bewildering after a while since you have to account for the "good" design aspects of CSS and JavaScript and the bad ones too - and also the peccadilloes that JavaScript/CSS inherently have and those which are introduced by the JavaScript library vendor (Yahoo's YUI, Google's Ajax API, script.aculo.us, etc.

If you are already a web programmer who knows CSS/HTML/JavaScript very well and have a good development environment set up on your PC with all required code inspectors and runtime debuggers etc. etc. then it's easy to keep on working in that (not taking into account end-user preferences) but if you are like me and want to make a web application ready and available for use quickly and want to add features to it quickly while making it pretty all the time, then Flash/Flex is a better option, IMHO.

Answer 6

My biggest gripe with Flash is that it takes you "out of the browser" into its own totally separate application. This breaks "browser standards" - i.e. the functions I can do in my browser:

• Right click
• Middle click (for opening links in other tabs)
• Selecting text
• Copy & paste
• Printing
• Keyboard shortcuts (since Flash steals keyboard focus)
• Back/Forward buttons and the whole "page" concept
• Javascript interaction with other elements on the page (I don't think this is possible).
• "Inspect element" in Firebug or Chrome, if I wanted to see the source of a particular part of the Flash file, or find the image being used.