7 ms·

Why Flash Doesn’t Suck

18 points by nreece 17y ago

glhaynes 17y ago
"some obnoxious people who dare dub themselves members of the “web elite” [citation needed]" Anyway, I clicked the examples the author gave of good all-Flash sites. As expected, they act weird, they pop up "loading" indicators all the time, information density seems tiny, I can't copy/paste text that I should be able to, scrolling doesn't work the way it should (argh that's so frustrating -- that's a fundamental interaction!)... oh and I didn't even try hitting the Back button. Sure, all those presumably "could" be fixed with enough work. And an MFC app could be written that rivals the latest .NET or Cocoa app. But in practice, the vast majority of apps are going to "feel" like the platform they're on. And the Flash platform feels super-sucky for information-heavy websites, if you ask me.
- alayne 17y ago
  I think many of your criticisms apply to current Javascript UIs also. I have seen so many UI quirks, even in the stuff you'd think would work right like YUI/JQuery UI. However, its saving grace is its composable nature. The biggest problem with Flash in my mind, and what will seal its doom, is that monolithic mentality that you should have a whole site that is only a flash program. That's wrong and throws away a large part of makes the web great. If you aren't building stuff out of the dhtml/dom substrate, if you're not basing architectural decisions on REST, you are doing it wrong.
  - est 17y ago
    > The biggest problem with Flash in my mind, and what will seal its doom, is that monolithic mentality that you should have a whole site that is only a flash program That what RIA is all about. If you really hates Flash only, write your text in HTML and transfer it to Flash using javascript. It's best for both search engines and non-Flash browsers.
  - tomlin 17y ago
    One-way, binary thinking FAIL.
wglb 17y ago
Consider, in the context of Two big reasons why Flash won’t disappear any time soon. The first is porn. that there was porn well before the invention of .gif or the img tag, and well before the invention of flash. Also consider that an important property of the web is that its content is searchable. Finally, I think that there is a desire to have a more open video standard.
- timdorr 17y ago
  I'm pretty sure porn can switch to HTML5 <video> tags anyways. Not quite sure why Flash is a requirement there at all.
  - Timmy_C 17y ago
    I think that he was speculating that since popular porn sites are already using flash that there is no need to switch. Or that there is some unmentioned barrier to switching video formats that porn sites don't have the means or ways to overcome. Either way, his point is unclear and I agree; porn can switch to HTML5 <video> tags when/if there is sufficient browser support.
    - jeff18 17y ago
      Or more likely, they will roll out HTML5 video support and use Flash as a seamless fallback, like YouTube, DailyMotion, and Vimeo are publicly beta testing.
  - micampe 17y ago
    youporn already has a mobile version with H264 and <video> tags.
dougmccune 17y ago
As a Flash dev myself it's exactly this idea of the possibility that Flash provides that made the platform appealing to begin with and continues to do so. Sure, you can make some horrible things, but the sheer number of things that you can make is so huge. Is it a good idea to make a 3D visualization of live sound data from the user's microphone and run facial detection on their webcam to overlay the visualization over their mouth while they talk? No, probably not. But I can. And because I can I'm going to experiment a lot more. And out of a million experiments that are only possible with Flash, maybe one is going to produce something truly innovative and unique. That's the power of Flash. New capabilities of HTML are going to open similar experimental doors, and we'll all be better off in many ways because of it. I believe anything that expands what we can do is inherently a good thing, even if it allows things that should never be done.
- Semiapies 17y ago
  Sheer possibility, sure - but look at what people actually do. The biggest uses of Flash appear to be "show video and audio", followed by "games", and then "make an annoying portfolio site full of pictures that that you can't give someone a specific link to".
- tomlin 17y ago
  Precisely. This is the point I try to make. Flash gives life to the experimental web. Anyone care to tell me why web devs should want Flash dead? No, not a dumb blanket statement regarding open source. Think. Flash sets the stage (no pun intended) for innovation on the web. What if a developer wanted to introduced a new approach to video conferencing / VOIP and allowed developers to play with the experience among multiple audiences? Why is Flash the spooky village witch, to which we must burn at the stake? We'll wait on the W3C to "standardize" innovative processes into browsers. Good luck with that.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    Anyone care to tell me why web devs should want Flash dead? Because it's broken and therefore a pain for users. Should something like Flash exist? Yes. But Flash itself is a bad implementation of a good idea.
GiraffeNecktie 17y ago
There is one area where Flash doesn't suck: it provides a great toolset for creating rich interactive audio visual web experiences. If you're making games or animations, it's a great choice. However it's always (with a few rare exceptions) the wrong tool for making web sites.
pierrefar 17y ago
So many things are wrong with this rant. 1. "You don’t have to follow convention anymore." Generally, convention makes it easier for visitors to figure out the website and get how to interact with it. The prototypical example is having links in blue with an underline. Form elements that look like other forms' elements are also important. 2. Innovation: Flash is a tool that has created a lot of innovation, yes, but so has Javascript. I'd argue projects like jQuery are promoting innovation much better: it's Javascript that runs on pretty much any browser without the need of a CPU-sucking plugin. 3. Rain City bikes: the author needs to brush up on SEO. Firstly, the page has quite a bit of content that is NOT flash, as cached by Google ( see http://66.102.9.132/search?q=cache:ggNvi1Rjd3UJ:www.raincitybikes.com/+Dutch+Bikes&cd=15&hl=en&ct=clnk http://66.102.9.132/search?q=cache:ggNvi1Rjd3UJ:www.raincity... ). Secondly, the anchor text of a page will make it rank higher for queries that match the anchor text; this is regardless of the contents of the page. The extreme examples of this are called Google Bombs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb . For Rain City, this query shows you how much the anchor text is helping them: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=allinanchor%3ADutch+Bikes http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=allinanchor%3ADutch+Bikes . In short: nothing in the post is really arguing why Flash doesn't suck.
teej 17y ago
I think the article makes a pretty poor case for Flash with it's examples. Blizzard's marketing sites are the de facto example I give of Flash used right - incredible and unintrusive layering of audio and animation on top of a website. Flash makes the difference between good and great. I'll leave these here: http://starcraft2.com/ http://starcraft2.com/ http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/ http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/ http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/?rhtml=y http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/?rhtml=y
- jeff18 17y ago
  Just for the record, all of that could be done better with HTML5.
  - tomlin 17y ago
    The record of what? Talk is cheap. Let's see some examples.
    - jeff18 17y ago
      I meant that there is nothing in those examples that couldn't be achieved using HTML5. Basically, the effects could be achieved using HTML5 video for the background, canvas for the particle effects, and either your choice of canvas or CSS transformations / animations for the movement of the character pieces. It certainly wouldn't work for the vast majority of visitors, as most people are still using Internet Explorer (hence why I can't produce any examples of AAA HTML5 sites), but there is nothing shown there that is inherently Flash only, technologically speaking.
      - tomlin 17y ago
        I need to see HTML5+JS perform as well as Flash doing multiple things. Sorry, sliding PNGs across the page with jQuery isn't really the same. If we're gonna go into debate about Flash vs. HTML5, I am gonna need to see more than simple equalizers and canvas bar charts. Show me http://mycanvas.landsend.com http://mycanvas.landsend.com or http://www.myspace.com/fanvideo http://www.myspace.com/fanvideo in HTML5. I wanna see this level of complexity without a hindrance on development time, performance or scope. Enough with the double talk.
wvenable 17y ago
My biggest complaint about Flash is that it isn't truly part of the web. If you have a completely flash based site, all browser conventions go out the window: bookmarks, the back button, and deep linking. Sometimes even non-browser conventions are gone like cut'n'paste, printing, or saving to a file. If you're going to do that, you should have a good reason beyond "it's easy" and "you can have music" Flash is most successful when it's used properly: for small regions of video or cool interactivity. It's least successful when it's used to replace a properly coded website. I don't think the 'web elite' want Flash to die necessarily; they just want all the same cool toys but with something that plays nice with existing web conventions. And they also don't want to sharecrop on someone's proprietary platform. I'd argue the author has taken a very shallow look at the issues involved here.
- est 17y ago
  > all browser conventions go out the window: bookmarks, the back button, and deep linking. Most of the ajax in the wild is no better than that. Instead of saying Flash breaks everything, why don't we think about the good n' old browsing behavior model. Does it suit our Web 2.0 world well?
  - wvenable 17y ago
    Actually, a lot of Ajax handles the back button very well. The Extjs framework, as one example, lets you back through almost all the navigation including flipping between dynamic tabs. I'm not even sure how they've implemented that. There was a Ajax chat application that was posted here recently. And this was my comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128206 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128206 The back button is an extremely useful feature and should probably be in every application. Whenever a user gets confused or lost they just click that button -- it's a universal undo for navigation.
- mambodog 17y ago
  "...all browser conventions go out the window: bookmarks, the back button, and deep linking." Actually all of those things can be managed (quite well) with SWFAddress. http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/ http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/ That's not to say, however, that I agree with the article. Flash really should be used a hell of a lot less on the web. No 'main site' should be built all-Flash, however it is ideal for things like interactive product micro-sites.
Timmy_C 17y ago
As I was reading this article I kind of felt the urge to go learn flash (again, just for fun).
megaduck 17y ago
deep breath The most fun I've ever had in programming was programming Flash. There, I said it. Flash is an absolute blast. In my first experience with it, I was able to slap together a simple sprite-based game with basic physics, sound, and a video background. The whole project took about 10 hours, and most of that was learning the toolkit and ActionScript. ActionScript is still one of my favorite languages. Yes, it's terrible for standards, has awful usability, etc. We should be pushing web standards hard. However, we shouldn't forget that Flash makes programming fun and accessible. That's pretty neat, and so I hope it never dies entirely.
protomyth 17y ago
As to video: Flash pretty much replaced Real Player and HTML5 will replace Flash.
- tomlin 17y ago
  You're not very well informed, it appears.
icefox 17y ago
"What if I told you that you can do anything you want. You don’t have to follow convention anymore. You don’t have to do things the way they told you to in school. You can do anything." What a lie. I can't do squat because flash either is either a POS on my platform (OS X & 64 bit linux) or nonexistant (blackberry and iphone).
- gb 17y ago
  ..."Turns out that’s not totally true, but within the realm of Actionscript there are, without a doubt, more possibilities, and more opportunities to innovate. This is why I learned Actionscript."
thristian 17y ago
Probably 90% of my time on the web is spent working with information - searching for it, reading it, manipulating it, submitting it. Sometimes I'm using Firefox and reading and typing with my own eyes and fingers, sometimes I'm copy/pasting or even writing scripts to submit forms and screen-scrape. After all, that's the sort of thing the Web was designed for - free exchange of information (modulo HTTP's 402 error code). Flash sucks because it interferes with my usage of the web. Almost every use of Flash puts a barrier between me and the information I want to get or give, a barrier that can be very annoying (though never impossible) to overcome. About the only thing on the Web that isn't "information" is "experience" - I can't think of any example besides games, but there may be some. You know, where the valuable thing is the interaction, the ping and pong. That's not a thing I can paste into a spreadsheet, process with a script or bookmark. For such things, I can accept that the powerful Flash plugin is a better platform than the documents-and-tables world of HTML. Still, most Flash usage that I see on the web is just to add glitz and glamour to an otherwise informative page - swoopy page transitions, animations, sound-effects. To the extent that your website prevents your visitors from obtaining and making use of the information they came to your website to obtain, Flash sucks.

18 points by nreece 17y ago

"some obnoxious people who dare dub themselves members of the “web elite” [citation needed]" Anyway, I clicked the examples the author gave of good all-Flash sites. As expected, they act weird, they pop up "loading" indicators all the time, information density seems tiny, I can't copy/paste text that I should be able to, scrolling doesn't work the way it should (argh that's so frustrating -- that's a fundamental interaction!)... oh and I didn't even try hitting the Back button. Sure, all those presumably "could" be fixed with enough work. And an MFC app could be written that rivals the latest .NET or Cocoa app. But in practice, the vast majority of apps are going to "feel" like the platform they're on. And the Flash platform feels super-sucky for information-heavy websites, if you ask me.

alayne 17y ago
I think many of your criticisms apply to current Javascript UIs also. I have seen so many UI quirks, even in the stuff you'd think would work right like YUI/JQuery UI. However, its saving grace is its composable nature. The biggest problem with Flash in my mind, and what will seal its doom, is that monolithic mentality that you should have a whole site that is only a flash program. That's wrong and throws away a large part of makes the web great. If you aren't building stuff out of the dhtml/dom substrate, if you're not basing architectural decisions on REST, you are doing it wrong.
- est 17y ago
  > The biggest problem with Flash in my mind, and what will seal its doom, is that monolithic mentality that you should have a whole site that is only a flash program That what RIA is all about. If you really hates Flash only, write your text in HTML and transfer it to Flash using javascript. It's best for both search engines and non-Flash browsers.
- tomlin 17y ago
  One-way, binary thinking FAIL.

wglb 17y ago

Consider, in the context of Two big reasons why Flash won’t disappear any time soon. The first is porn. that there was porn well before the invention of .gif or the img tag, and well before the invention of flash. Also consider that an important property of the web is that its content is searchable. Finally, I think that there is a desire to have a more open video standard.

timdorr 17y ago
I'm pretty sure porn can switch to HTML5 <video> tags anyways. Not quite sure why Flash is a requirement there at all.
- Timmy_C 17y ago
  I think that he was speculating that since popular porn sites are already using flash that there is no need to switch. Or that there is some unmentioned barrier to switching video formats that porn sites don't have the means or ways to overcome. Either way, his point is unclear and I agree; porn can switch to HTML5 <video> tags when/if there is sufficient browser support.
  - jeff18 17y ago
    Or more likely, they will roll out HTML5 video support and use Flash as a seamless fallback, like YouTube, DailyMotion, and Vimeo are publicly beta testing.
- micampe 17y ago
  youporn already has a mobile version with H264 and <video> tags.

dougmccune 17y ago

As a Flash dev myself it's exactly this idea of the possibility that Flash provides that made the platform appealing to begin with and continues to do so. Sure, you can make some horrible things, but the sheer number of things that you can make is so huge. Is it a good idea to make a 3D visualization of live sound data from the user's microphone and run facial detection on their webcam to overlay the visualization over their mouth while they talk? No, probably not. But I can. And because I can I'm going to experiment a lot more. And out of a million experiments that are only possible with Flash, maybe one is going to produce something truly innovative and unique. That's the power of Flash. New capabilities of HTML are going to open similar experimental doors, and we'll all be better off in many ways because of it. I believe anything that expands what we can do is inherently a good thing, even if it allows things that should never be done.

Semiapies 17y ago
Sheer possibility, sure - but look at what people actually do. The biggest uses of Flash appear to be "show video and audio", followed by "games", and then "make an annoying portfolio site full of pictures that that you can't give someone a specific link to".
tomlin 17y ago
Precisely. This is the point I try to make. Flash gives life to the experimental web. Anyone care to tell me why web devs should want Flash dead? No, not a dumb blanket statement regarding open source. Think. Flash sets the stage (no pun intended) for innovation on the web. What if a developer wanted to introduced a new approach to video conferencing / VOIP and allowed developers to play with the experience among multiple audiences? Why is Flash the spooky village witch, to which we must burn at the stake? We'll wait on the W3C to "standardize" innovative processes into browsers. Good luck with that.
- jrockway 17y ago
  Anyone care to tell me why web devs should want Flash dead? Because it's broken and therefore a pain for users. Should something like Flash exist? Yes. But Flash itself is a bad implementation of a good idea.

GiraffeNecktie 17y ago

There is one area where Flash doesn't suck: it provides a great toolset for creating rich interactive audio visual web experiences. If you're making games or animations, it's a great choice. However it's always (with a few rare exceptions) the wrong tool for making web sites.

pierrefar 17y ago

So many things are wrong with this rant. 1. "You don’t have to follow convention anymore." Generally, convention makes it easier for visitors to figure out the website and get how to interact with it. The prototypical example is having links in blue with an underline. Form elements that look like other forms' elements are also important. 2. Innovation: Flash is a tool that has created a lot of innovation, yes, but so has Javascript. I'd argue projects like jQuery are promoting innovation much better: it's Javascript that runs on pretty much any browser without the need of a CPU-sucking plugin. 3. Rain City bikes: the author needs to brush up on SEO. Firstly, the page has quite a bit of content that is NOT flash, as cached by Google ( see http://66.102.9.132/search?q=cache:ggNvi1Rjd3UJ:www.raincitybikes.com/+Dutch+Bikes&cd=15&hl=en&ct=clnk http://66.102.9.132/search?q=cache:ggNvi1Rjd3UJ:www.raincity... ). Secondly, the anchor text of a page will make it rank higher for queries that match the anchor text; this is regardless of the contents of the page. The extreme examples of this are called Google Bombs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb . For Rain City, this query shows you how much the anchor text is helping them: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=allinanchor%3ADutch+Bikes http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=allinanchor%3ADutch+Bikes . In short: nothing in the post is really arguing why Flash doesn't suck.

teej 17y ago

I think the article makes a pretty poor case for Flash with it's examples. Blizzard's marketing sites are the de facto example I give of Flash used right - incredible and unintrusive layering of audio and animation on top of a website. Flash makes the difference between good and great. I'll leave these here: http://starcraft2.com/ http://starcraft2.com/ http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/ http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/ http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/?rhtml=y http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/?rhtml=y

jeff18 17y ago
Just for the record, all of that could be done better with HTML5.
- tomlin 17y ago
  The record of what? Talk is cheap. Let's see some examples.
  - jeff18 17y ago
    I meant that there is nothing in those examples that couldn't be achieved using HTML5. Basically, the effects could be achieved using HTML5 video for the background, canvas for the particle effects, and either your choice of canvas or CSS transformations / animations for the movement of the character pieces. It certainly wouldn't work for the vast majority of visitors, as most people are still using Internet Explorer (hence why I can't produce any examples of AAA HTML5 sites), but there is nothing shown there that is inherently Flash only, technologically speaking.
    - tomlin 17y ago
      I need to see HTML5+JS perform as well as Flash doing multiple things. Sorry, sliding PNGs across the page with jQuery isn't really the same. If we're gonna go into debate about Flash vs. HTML5, I am gonna need to see more than simple equalizers and canvas bar charts. Show me http://mycanvas.landsend.com http://mycanvas.landsend.com or http://www.myspace.com/fanvideo http://www.myspace.com/fanvideo in HTML5. I wanna see this level of complexity without a hindrance on development time, performance or scope. Enough with the double talk.

wvenable 17y ago

My biggest complaint about Flash is that it isn't truly part of the web. If you have a completely flash based site, all browser conventions go out the window: bookmarks, the back button, and deep linking. Sometimes even non-browser conventions are gone like cut'n'paste, printing, or saving to a file. If you're going to do that, you should have a good reason beyond "it's easy" and "you can have music" Flash is most successful when it's used properly: for small regions of video or cool interactivity. It's least successful when it's used to replace a properly coded website. I don't think the 'web elite' want Flash to die necessarily; they just want all the same cool toys but with something that plays nice with existing web conventions. And they also don't want to sharecrop on someone's proprietary platform. I'd argue the author has taken a very shallow look at the issues involved here.

est 17y ago
> all browser conventions go out the window: bookmarks, the back button, and deep linking. Most of the ajax in the wild is no better than that. Instead of saying Flash breaks everything, why don't we think about the good n' old browsing behavior model. Does it suit our Web 2.0 world well?
- wvenable 17y ago
  Actually, a lot of Ajax handles the back button very well. The Extjs framework, as one example, lets you back through almost all the navigation including flipping between dynamic tabs. I'm not even sure how they've implemented that. There was a Ajax chat application that was posted here recently. And this was my comment: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128206 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1128206 The back button is an extremely useful feature and should probably be in every application. Whenever a user gets confused or lost they just click that button -- it's a universal undo for navigation.
mambodog 17y ago
"...all browser conventions go out the window: bookmarks, the back button, and deep linking." Actually all of those things can be managed (quite well) with SWFAddress. http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/ http://www.asual.com/swfaddress/ That's not to say, however, that I agree with the article. Flash really should be used a hell of a lot less on the web. No 'main site' should be built all-Flash, however it is ideal for things like interactive product micro-sites.

Timmy_C 17y ago

As I was reading this article I kind of felt the urge to go learn flash (again, just for fun).

megaduck 17y ago

deep breath The most fun I've ever had in programming was programming Flash. There, I said it. Flash is an absolute blast. In my first experience with it, I was able to slap together a simple sprite-based game with basic physics, sound, and a video background. The whole project took about 10 hours, and most of that was learning the toolkit and ActionScript. ActionScript is still one of my favorite languages. Yes, it's terrible for standards, has awful usability, etc. We should be pushing web standards hard. However, we shouldn't forget that Flash makes programming fun and accessible. That's pretty neat, and so I hope it never dies entirely.

protomyth 17y ago

As to video: Flash pretty much replaced Real Player and HTML5 will replace Flash.

tomlin 17y ago
You're not very well informed, it appears.

icefox 17y ago

"What if I told you that you can do anything you want. You don’t have to follow convention anymore. You don’t have to do things the way they told you to in school. You can do anything." What a lie. I can't do squat because flash either is either a POS on my platform (OS X & 64 bit linux) or nonexistant (blackberry and iphone).

gb 17y ago
..."Turns out that’s not totally true, but within the realm of Actionscript there are, without a doubt, more possibilities, and more opportunities to innovate. This is why I learned Actionscript."

thristian 17y ago

Probably 90% of my time on the web is spent working with information - searching for it, reading it, manipulating it, submitting it. Sometimes I'm using Firefox and reading and typing with my own eyes and fingers, sometimes I'm copy/pasting or even writing scripts to submit forms and screen-scrape. After all, that's the sort of thing the Web was designed for - free exchange of information (modulo HTTP's 402 error code). Flash sucks because it interferes with my usage of the web. Almost every use of Flash puts a barrier between me and the information I want to get or give, a barrier that can be very annoying (though never impossible) to overcome. About the only thing on the Web that isn't "information" is "experience" - I can't think of any example besides games, but there may be some. You know, where the valuable thing is the interaction, the ping and pong. That's not a thing I can paste into a spreadsheet, process with a script or bookmark. For such things, I can accept that the powerful Flash plugin is a better platform than the documents-and-tables world of HTML. Still, most Flash usage that I see on the web is just to add glitz and glamour to an otherwise informative page - swoopy page transitions, animations, sound-effects. To the extent that your website prevents your visitors from obtaining and making use of the information they came to your website to obtain, Flash sucks.