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Flash: 99% Bad

137 points by gorm 15y ago

macavity23 15y ago
Wow, I remember reading this article when it came out - ELEVEN YEARS AGO. Now I feel old.
cturner 15y ago
A major one not mentioned - flash hijacks your keyboard input, preventing you from navigating around and out-of on pages which are flash-infected.
- evride 15y ago
  Only when you click to focus on it.
  - cryptoz 15y ago
    Depending on your OS and browser, sometimes all you have to do is mouseover it to lose all focus, both keyboard and mouse. This used to happen to me a year or two ago, with Firefox and Linux I think.
- cturner 15y ago
  Now I think about it, the other thing that does this is PDF files. Which are also a gift from Adobe. I loathe Adobe.
  - mitchty 15y ago
    Not in Safari or Chrome. More a fault of the Acrobat plugin I'd imagine.
    - jws 15y ago
      Safari with the native PDF renderer still steals the two finger swipe that does the "back" function from browser navigation. The must be a "good reason" as this irritant persists into Lion.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
timc3 15y ago
Why is this being dug up again? Not that I condone flash.
- gorm 15y ago
  Hoping to get feedback on the current validity of the statements in this article.
  - watty 15y ago
    Well it seems like "Flash" could be replaced with "HTML5" and most of this article would still make sense - many points are arguable whether they apply to either though. Most of these are caused by poor developers rather than the platform itself. * Gratuitious animation * Granularity of user control * Non-standard GUI controls * Back button * Moving text is harder to read for users who lack fluency (haha this one made me laugh) * HTML5 content tends to be created once and then left alone * HTML5 content is typically superficial * HTML5 is typically created by outside agents who don't understand the business
  - radley 15y ago
    Well, HN programmers eat him up so he's still the same. For designers, including Flash devs/designers, he's also still the same (a fanatical old coot determined to prove '96 browser text is superior to multimedia).
CodeMage 15y ago
I understand why people are still up in arms, because it must be annoying (at the very list) to see eleven years pass without fixing this. However, I find it even more annoying that after eleven years people haven't learned that you can't solve the problem by yelling at people "BAD BOY! FLASH BAD!" I know really well what the allure of Flash is. I tried my hand at developing casual Web games and that's done in Flash. The following are the reasons, in what I believe is the order of importance: 1) Adoption: When it comes to users, everyone and their grandmother has Flash. Even if they don't, getting it and installing it is usually really easy. When it comes to development, you find that casual Web game portals (such as Kongregate, Newgrounds and Armor Games) are Flash-oriented and you even have sites like Flash Game License and Flash Game Art. 2) Ease of Development: I've seen games that were obviously made by people who have a considerable talent for art and so little talent for coding that they should have a court restraint to keep them away from development tools. Guess what? They work anyway and are popular. Yes, you have to learn ActionScript, but that's pretty much all. 3) Good Free Toolchain: You don't really have to shell out 600 dollars for Flash. You can get your stuff done for free, using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK. Anyway, my point is that it's widespread, it's easy and it gets shit done. For those who think nagging is the solution, for those who rubbed their hands when Apple said it wasn't going to support Flash, here's the crucial question: can you show people an alternative that satisfies their requirements as well or better? In this case, Adobe is the metaphorical Microsoft: their stuff is out there and they make it easy for people to use it. As the history has proven, the solution is not to call people sheep because they use Flash; the solution is to provide the metaphorical Mac and metaphorical Firefox and metaphorical Ubuntu -- stuff that's so good, that people will switch in droves without looking back.
- AndrewDucker 15y ago
  Agreed. When it's as easy to write your game in HTML5+JS as it is in Flash then people will switch, and not one minute before.
  - ehsanu1 15y ago
    I don't know why it would be considered more difficult to use canvas/dom for rendering + JS. I've been working on a simple JS (well, CoffeeScript really) game, and it hasn't been very difficult at all. But then again, I do lot of JS and never touched flash.
pablobm 15y ago
Is it me or did Nielsen add an update on top of the article when he was hired by Macromedia, or something like that? The way I recall it, it said something along the lines of "OK, Flash is not very good, but now we are working to address the issues mentioned on this article". I checked in archive.org, but there are no copies of the page there.
- easyfrag 15y ago
  After this article the Nielsen Norman did work with Macromedia on developing Best Practices. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1178941 http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1178941 Jacob Nielsen later added the summary findings: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021125.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021125.html
jbk 15y ago
I am just asking a small question: are the complaints here not present with html5 canvas element? For me blaming a technology, when the issue is people, is not very effective.
- gorm 15y ago
  It's a good question. E.g. Flash has support for accessibility, but this gets trumped by developers ignoring it.
- watty 15y ago
  Yes, this annoys me as well. Don't like splash screens and advertisements in Flash? Well you're definitely gonna hate them in HTML5 because they consume more CPU and will be more difficult to block.
ristretto 15y ago
Food: 99% bad
TobiHeidi 15y ago
This Article is not like wine, it doesnt get any better eleven years later. Compared with wine this article is plonk.
gaius 15y ago
AS true now AS it was then.
dylanpyle 15y ago
Yes, OK, everyone hates Flash. However, as others have said, Flash won't - and can't - disappear until Canvas development has the same almost-zero barrier to entry as Flash, and until every potential end user has a modern browser. Another significant limiting factor is the simple fact that there are still things that you simply cannot accomplish outside of Flash. Specifically, I'm talking about camera and microphone data access, which can't be done via HTML5 without calling a Flash or Java applet.
- nikcub 15y ago
  the first implementations of input video and audio will be out soon. the delay was about how to handle security and privacy issues, and how it will be implemented (eg. first it was devices tag): http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video-conferencing-and-peer-to-peer-communication.html#video-conferencing-and-peer-to-peer-communication http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
jscheel 15y ago
What I find more interesting is that the people who usually love to hate on flash are the same people who break these rules when building poorly constructed "html5/css3/javascript" (buzzword overload) sites. There aren't a ton of them out there yet, but the number is growing. Nielsen's points are valid, but they aren't all flash-specific; I've seen these same principles violated in supposedly "standards-compliant" sites as well. I think this bigger problem is a lack of true experience/interaction design knowledge. If you are only focusing on the visual aesthetic, and not spending time on thinking through the total experience, chances are you are going to make most of these same mistakes. The technology you choose is less of an issue, the real problem is how you employ that technology. That said, I always try to avoid flash unless it has a very specific benefit over css/js, thankfully I haven't needed to build something in flash in quite a long time.
- hahaiamatwork 15y ago
  I also notice that a large number of these complaints apply to mobile apps. For example, the difference in back button use between iOS apps and websites is marked.
  - jscheel 15y ago
    Yeah, it really comes down to implementation. I especially love the mobile apps that don't let you use your back button past their home page. Once you are there, that's it, you're locked in!
    - alanh 15y ago
      Do you mean mobile web apps? Or are you referring to Android apps and the Android hardware back button? Your comment is really baffling.
tensafefrogs 15y ago
I saw an interesting stat the other day: According to this "built with" site, use of SWFObject (which is pretty much what 99% of flash devs use to detect + embed their swfs) is starting to decline among the "top sites": http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/SWFObject http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/SWFObject I'm the original creator of SWFObject, so I've looked at that chart a bit, and I've never seen the usage go down in the few years since that site's been tracking js usage.
- danger42 15y ago
  Does this include SWFObject2? (I think the current version is 2.2)
  - tensafefrogs 15y ago
    That's a good question. I suspect it does, as v2 has been out a long time. They may just look at file names, like swfobject.js, or look for "swfobject" in the file path.
- radley 15y ago
  I figure the success of browser-Flash will depend on touch parity between desktop & devices. Flash is a complex experience to create and generating two forms (mouse & touch) confounds the universal cutting-edge innovation expected from Flash.
QuestionWriter 15y ago
I'll bet the Flash you made 10 years ago still works, and I'll bet the JS game you made doesn't. I'll wager the Flash you make today will still work in 10 years, and I'll wager the HTML5 won't.
- fredleblanc 15y ago
  Just cruising around the websites of local stores in my town, their websites that were made 5-10 years ago still look the same as ever, and for the most part still function the same as ever. (The exceptions being when they relied on third-party includes that have since gone out of business.) HTML5 is just HTML, and unless that fundamentally changes, it should work "forever." JavaScript too, again, unless you're linking to frameworks hosted by companies that later go out of business. JavaScript usually adds, but rarely takes away. The look of your HTML site 10 years from now may look more outdated than your Flash site does, but as long as we're all still around, I'd wager that they'd both still work, provided Flash player is still a thing.
  - whatever_dude 15y ago
    HTML5 is just HTML, and unless that fundamentally changes, it should work "forever." That is, if you don't use the bunch of temporary CSS properties browser vendors are supporting (-moz-, -khtml-, -ms-, -o-, etc) that people often assume to be "ready" but that will be deprecated in the future.
tomlin 15y ago
Look, if you hate Flash because it eats at your CPU, or it broke into your house - be angry. The author explains that Flash breaks 3 fundamentals: * it encourages design abuse * it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction principles * it distracts attention from the site's core value. Guess what else breaks these fundamentals? Everything. Not just Silverlight or JavaFX. These technologies have accessibility API. People just don't implement them. Anyone who implements a fancy custom scrollbar, forgets an ALT attribute, or doesn't properly wrap their label tags is breaking these fundamentals all the same. It's not like I don't agree that Flash could be better, but this argument could be applied to just about any technology at any point in time.
- talmand 15y ago
  Thank you. I keep pointing out that these complaints can be applied to Canvas just as easily. When it takes over, will these people hate Canvas with the same passion?
  - alanh 15y ago
    If people create whole websites within Canvas? Then probably.
    - talmand 15y ago
      I'm meaning more the annoying banner ads. Most Flash designers do not create entire websites in Flash anymore, that's a special case situation these days.
- OriginalSyn 15y ago
  Have you read anything from Jakob Neilson before, he would agree with you. If it were up to him the Web would like pretty much exactly like his article.
marckremers 15y ago
Why are we even discussing an article from 2000? This is so irrelevant to todays Flash, and todays digital landscape? And what would the web have looked like before jquery, html5 etc came to the fore? We needed Flash. And could YouTube and Google Maps have ever taken off without it? I'm all for the demise of Flash and the rise of open source, but everything has it's place, and it served and still serves brilliantly for sites made by the advertising industry.
- gnosis 15y ago
  Google Maps does not require Flash. I don't have Flash installed at all, and Google Maps works just fine without it. Youtube also doesn't require Flash to download the videos. I use a number of youtube downloader programs to get the videos, and then use a native video player to watch them. Of course that's not how most people watch youtube videos. But there's really no reason why the service couldn't have been built around an some open downloading/streaming technology instead of Flash. "it served and still serves brilliantly for sites made by the advertising industry." Yet another reason to avoid Flash for end users like me, who hate ads and despise the advertising industry.
tomelders 15y ago
I agree with the article (and always have done), but it's always bothered me that useit.com is a website devoted to usability and it looks like this... http://www.useit.com/ http://www.useit.com/ http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ http://www.useit.com/alertbox/
- lurker19 15y ago
  Use It is widely regarded as Spartan and perhaps ugly, but it is eminently usable. I bet most readers get in and out with more recall of key appreciated content in less time than the ever-so-popular "5 wordpress plugins to make your site shiny" style of bloggers. And I bet Jakob N has 1tested this question extensively as well. Oh and on his home page I stumbled on a link to a page with his own (better) explanation: http://www.useit.com/about/nographics.html http://www.useit.com/about/nographics.html
  - tomelders 15y ago
    It's not the lack of graphics that I find unwieldy, it's the fact that the content seems dumped onto the page with only a cursory thought towards hierarchy. I look at it and see an impenetrable wall of content, which I personally find difficult to sift through.
Lagged2Death 15y ago
Many of the comments here are along the lines of "But we can count on Flash to work long into the future" or "The alternatives don't work well yet." Both of which may be true. But that is very much beside this article's point, which is kind of surprising - it's a very clearly written article. Web designers mostly should not be doing the things that Flash/HTML5+Canvas make possible. Gratuitous animation and sound, non-standard UI, and the breaking of web fundamentals are not strictly Flash problems, but poor design practices that Flash does (and which HTML5+Canvas probably will eventually) seem to encourage. Nielsen's point isn't that Flash is bad, per se. The problem is: unless you're producing a piece of pure entertainment (games, Homestar Runner, etc) then deciding to use (or emulate) Flash is, statistically speaking, almost certainly a design mistake. A big one.
ender7 15y ago
I do a lot of Flash development. I would love to switch to HTML. I can't wait. I will probably be forced to quite soon in order to support mobile devices. But. I'm going to miss so very many things: 1. A decent display architecture. Every display object has its own matrix transform. All of its children exist inside that space. Position your elements exactly how you want them. If you want markup-like UI layout, you can use MXML. Their display system is quite elegant. I will miss it a lot. 2. A complete development environment. Write code in Flash Builder 4. Generate art assets in Flash CS5. Save. It works. It's fast. All you need is two programs (maybe three if you want Photoshop). This is huge for me. The thought of re-rendering all of my art assets as thousands of flat bitmaps makes me shudder. 3. Performance. Yeah, yeah, everyone hates Flash because it destroys your battery, but it can actually pull off some very impressive feats. When I switch to HTML, I will have to prune back some of the cooler features I have, simply for performance reasons. 4. (nearly) Identical performance across browsers and OSes. 5. A decent language for large-scale development. Actionscript3 is actually a really lovely language. I wish I could write HTML apps in AS3. It has real namespaces. It has real classes and real inheritance. It has static typing (but it's flexible enough that you don't feel trapped into endless boilerplate ala Java). It has a sane definition for the 'this' keyword. Javascript is a lovely language, but it's a nightmare to write a nontrivial app with it. 6. Display bling. Want a drop shadow around any shape? Done. In HTML, all you get are square drop shadows. Blur filter? Done. Dynamic masking? Done. Efficient alpha transparency for any object? Done. Obviously, if you go crazy with these you quickly eat up all your processing resources, but if used wisely they are very fast and look lovely.
- windsurfer 15y ago
  I also worked for Adobe doing Flex work, and I agree on all of your points. Some of the new techs are still rough (like Spark and Flex themes...) but overall it's very powerful and nothing can compare yet. This article was also from 11 years ago and other technologies haven't caught up.
- mambodog 15y ago
  With respect to your first point: have you had a look at CSS Transforms, specifically the matrix() transform function? You can use Transformie[1] for IE compatibility. Additionally, within a div with position: relative, all child elements can be positioned just like Flash's x,y coordinates. Just apply position: absolute to the child elems and use top: and left: in place of x, y. [1] http://transformie.com/ http://transformie.com/
michaelpinto 15y ago
Jakob Nielsen understands usability better than most (and I love him for that) but not multimedia: The proof of this not only how well Flash has done during the past ten years but how much HTML 5 looks and acts like Flash to the end user. The flying type has won...
geraldalewis 15y ago
In the 11 years since this article has been published, Flash has changed, HTML has changed, and web developers' philosophies have changed. I don't like the tone of the article, but I have to hand it to Nielsen for creating something that likely had some impact on the web. In the hall of fame of inflammatory, overly-broad titles, I think it'll be next to Djikstra's "Goto Considered Harmful". > First, Flash encourages gratuitous animation: Since we can make things move, why not make things move? Good taste has prevailed. Once ubiquitous "intro animations" have almost disappeared, as have <marquee> and <blink>. Hype http://tumultco.com/hype/ http://tumultco.com/hype/ and Sencha Animator http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/ http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/ are powerful animation tools that export HTML5/CSS3. We will have to hope HTML5 and Flash designers continue exhibiting restraint with gratuitous animation. > Second, one of the Web's most powerful features is that it lets users control their own destiny. It's hard to address this issue, since I'm not exactly sure what Nielsen is specifically objecting to. I think it might have to do with McLuhan's "Hot" and "cool" media theory where certiain media encourage participation instead of hijacking attention? > Third, many Flash designers introduce their own nonstandard GUI controls. How many scrollbar designs do we need? "Aristo" http://cappuccino.org/aristo/showcase/ http://cappuccino.org/aristo/showcase/ "mocha(ui)" http://mochaui.org/ http://mochaui.org/ "Dijit" http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit/index.html http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit/index.html ... the list goes on. There's nothing wrong with custom UI, so long as it conforms to users' expectations (a tall order). This issue is still in the hands of developers. > Breaks Web Fundamentals > The "Back" button does not work. In the hands of developers. Many ajax-y sites have this problem now (see Twitter). Many libs exist for both JS and Flash devs to fix (or not) this issue. > Link colors don't work. a:link {color:#000000;} a:visited {color:#000000;} > The "Make text bigger/smaller" button does not work. This is a browser issue. All elements should magnify when a user Zooms In/Out (fixed on some modern browsers). > Flash reduces accessibility for users with disabilities. <img src="image.gif" alt="" /> <canvas>...anything...</canvas> > The "Find in page" feature does not work. Still true. > Internationalization and localization is complicated. Local websites must enlist a Flash professional to translate content. Nearly all serious Flash projects separate content into XML or JSON files (especially if the website content will need to be translated). Some AJAX-driven sites do this as well. > Also, text that moves is harder to read for users who lack fluency in the language. In the hands of developers. > Distracts from a Site's Core Values > Frequently updating content (Flash content tends to be created once and then left alone). Not true now (or then). > Providing informative content that answers users' key questions at all depth levels (Flash content is typically superficial). This is a great example of why I object to the tone of the article. > Identifying better ways to support customers by task analyzing their real problems (Flash is typically created by outside agents who don't understand the business). I'm trying to understand the implications of this statement, but I'm baffled. Maybe it made sense in 2001 when HTML sites were sometimes cobbled together by a favorite nephew close to the company. Either way, web development is sufficiently sophisticated/complex enough now to require developers to know what they're doing. This sometimes means hiring an agency/production house.
matusz13 15y ago
I've been a flash/flex guy for a number of years. For however many rough spots it may have the cross platform nature of flash/air is something that shouldn't be ignored.
mynameishere 15y ago
Eh. Flash is great for games or cartoons or grooveshark-style sites. It's awful for restaurant webpages, but who cares? Also, people who haven't worked with flash are probably unaware of how much better actionscript is than javascript.
hippich 15y ago
It is not Flash's fault (just like wordpress modules poor coding is not PHP's or Wordpress fault). It is how it used. I am glad in fact flash exists. I actually can install Flash Block kind plugin and 99% of "design mess" disappears.. If there would be no Flash, all these "designers" star put introduction pages with HTML5/Canvas/etc. And this is harder to block. =)
roythunder 15y ago
Flash is great if used well. Eg: check out www.pinklab.com -- I defy you to replicate this site in html5.
- Xurinos 15y ago
  I would have appreciated a NSFW warning.
jarin 15y ago
The only things I see Flash being useful for these days are video in older browsers and copying text to the clipboard via a button. Sure, there are Flash games and ads, but I think Unity is a much better game development plugin and many people block Flash ads these days.
BoppreH 15y ago
There are hundred of thousands of Flash games on the web. None of the issues raised by the article apply to them. Though I hate Flash websites as much as everyone else, the title is misleading and harmful for game developers.
jdietrich 15y ago
Flash is substantially fixed. If you haven't used Flash lately, I encourage you to read the API docs for Flex and have a play around with the Free compiler. It's become very easy to mix standards-compliant markup and Flash in a manner which degrades gracefully/enhances progressively. IMO, the problem is developers. Because of Flash's origins as a tool for designers to make animations, most ActionScript is atrociously bad. The lion's share of Flash is created by people who really don't know how to program. When you have a community where knowing what recursion is marks you out as above-average, it's understandable that the core technology gets a bad rep. The problem is self-reinforcing, as good developers want to use the new shiny HTML5 and don't want to tarnish their CV with Flash development. A huge spectrum of really high-quality web apps are reliant on Flash. Streaming video is the obvious application, but projects like SoundManager2 are still reliant on Flash for audio in HTML5 apps. It's a very nineties word, but Flash is still the bottom line when it comes to multimedia. Products like Google Street View or Turntable.fm just aren't plausible without Flash and won't be for the forseeable future. Given the glacial pace of the W3C on HTML5 and the likely slow uptake of newer browsers, we're stuck with it. I don't see that as a wholly bad thing.
MathieuGosselin 15y ago
You'll eventually regret flash when all those banners will be replaced by their HTML5 equivalent ;-)

137 points by gorm 15y ago

Wow, I remember reading this article when it came out - ELEVEN YEARS AGO. Now I feel old.

A major one not mentioned - flash hijacks your keyboard input, preventing you from navigating around and out-of on pages which are flash-infected.

evride 15y ago
Only when you click to focus on it.
- cryptoz 15y ago
  Depending on your OS and browser, sometimes all you have to do is mouseover it to lose all focus, both keyboard and mouse. This used to happen to me a year or two ago, with Firefox and Linux I think.
cturner 15y ago
Now I think about it, the other thing that does this is PDF files. Which are also a gift from Adobe. I loathe Adobe.
- mitchty 15y ago
  Not in Safari or Chrome. More a fault of the Acrobat plugin I'd imagine.
  - jws 15y ago
    Safari with the native PDF renderer still steals the two finger swipe that does the "back" function from browser navigation. The must be a "good reason" as this irritant persists into Lion.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

timc3 15y ago

Why is this being dug up again? Not that I condone flash.

gorm 15y ago
Hoping to get feedback on the current validity of the statements in this article.
- watty 15y ago
  Well it seems like "Flash" could be replaced with "HTML5" and most of this article would still make sense - many points are arguable whether they apply to either though. Most of these are caused by poor developers rather than the platform itself. * Gratuitious animation * Granularity of user control * Non-standard GUI controls * Back button * Moving text is harder to read for users who lack fluency (haha this one made me laugh) * HTML5 content tends to be created once and then left alone * HTML5 content is typically superficial * HTML5 is typically created by outside agents who don't understand the business
- radley 15y ago
  Well, HN programmers eat him up so he's still the same. For designers, including Flash devs/designers, he's also still the same (a fanatical old coot determined to prove '96 browser text is superior to multimedia).

CodeMage 15y ago

I understand why people are still up in arms, because it must be annoying (at the very list) to see eleven years pass without fixing this. However, I find it even more annoying that after eleven years people haven't learned that you can't solve the problem by yelling at people "BAD BOY! FLASH BAD!" I know really well what the allure of Flash is. I tried my hand at developing casual Web games and that's done in Flash. The following are the reasons, in what I believe is the order of importance: 1) Adoption: When it comes to users, everyone and their grandmother has Flash. Even if they don't, getting it and installing it is usually really easy. When it comes to development, you find that casual Web game portals (such as Kongregate, Newgrounds and Armor Games) are Flash-oriented and you even have sites like Flash Game License and Flash Game Art. 2) Ease of Development: I've seen games that were obviously made by people who have a considerable talent for art and so little talent for coding that they should have a court restraint to keep them away from development tools. Guess what? They work anyway and are popular. Yes, you have to learn ActionScript, but that's pretty much all. 3) Good Free Toolchain: You don't really have to shell out 600 dollars for Flash. You can get your stuff done for free, using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK. Anyway, my point is that it's widespread, it's easy and it gets shit done. For those who think nagging is the solution, for those who rubbed their hands when Apple said it wasn't going to support Flash, here's the crucial question: can you show people an alternative that satisfies their requirements as well or better? In this case, Adobe is the metaphorical Microsoft: their stuff is out there and they make it easy for people to use it. As the history has proven, the solution is not to call people sheep because they use Flash; the solution is to provide the metaphorical Mac and metaphorical Firefox and metaphorical Ubuntu -- stuff that's so good, that people will switch in droves without looking back.

AndrewDucker 15y ago
Agreed. When it's as easy to write your game in HTML5+JS as it is in Flash then people will switch, and not one minute before.
- ehsanu1 15y ago
  I don't know why it would be considered more difficult to use canvas/dom for rendering + JS. I've been working on a simple JS (well, CoffeeScript really) game, and it hasn't been very difficult at all. But then again, I do lot of JS and never touched flash.

pablobm 15y ago

Is it me or did Nielsen add an update on top of the article when he was hired by Macromedia, or something like that? The way I recall it, it said something along the lines of "OK, Flash is not very good, but now we are working to address the issues mentioned on this article". I checked in archive.org, but there are no copies of the page there.

easyfrag 15y ago
After this article the Nielsen Norman did work with Macromedia on developing Best Practices. http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1178941 http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1178941 Jacob Nielsen later added the summary findings: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021125.html http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021125.html

jbk 15y ago

I am just asking a small question: are the complaints here not present with html5 canvas element? For me blaming a technology, when the issue is people, is not very effective.

gorm 15y ago
It's a good question. E.g. Flash has support for accessibility, but this gets trumped by developers ignoring it.
watty 15y ago
Yes, this annoys me as well. Don't like splash screens and advertisements in Flash? Well you're definitely gonna hate them in HTML5 because they consume more CPU and will be more difficult to block.

ristretto 15y ago

Food: 99% bad

TobiHeidi 15y ago

This Article is not like wine, it doesnt get any better eleven years later. Compared with wine this article is plonk.

gaius 15y ago

AS true now AS it was then.

dylanpyle 15y ago

Yes, OK, everyone hates Flash. However, as others have said, Flash won't - and can't - disappear until Canvas development has the same almost-zero barrier to entry as Flash, and until every potential end user has a modern browser. Another significant limiting factor is the simple fact that there are still things that you simply cannot accomplish outside of Flash. Specifically, I'm talking about camera and microphone data access, which can't be done via HTML5 without calling a Flash or Java applet.

nikcub 15y ago
the first implementations of input video and audio will be out soon. the delay was about how to handle security and privacy issues, and how it will be implemented (eg. first it was devices tag): http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video-conferencing-and-peer-to-peer-communication.html#video-conferencing-and-peer-to-peer-communication http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...

jscheel 15y ago

What I find more interesting is that the people who usually love to hate on flash are the same people who break these rules when building poorly constructed "html5/css3/javascript" (buzzword overload) sites. There aren't a ton of them out there yet, but the number is growing. Nielsen's points are valid, but they aren't all flash-specific; I've seen these same principles violated in supposedly "standards-compliant" sites as well. I think this bigger problem is a lack of true experience/interaction design knowledge. If you are only focusing on the visual aesthetic, and not spending time on thinking through the total experience, chances are you are going to make most of these same mistakes. The technology you choose is less of an issue, the real problem is how you employ that technology. That said, I always try to avoid flash unless it has a very specific benefit over css/js, thankfully I haven't needed to build something in flash in quite a long time.

hahaiamatwork 15y ago
I also notice that a large number of these complaints apply to mobile apps. For example, the difference in back button use between iOS apps and websites is marked.
- jscheel 15y ago
  Yeah, it really comes down to implementation. I especially love the mobile apps that don't let you use your back button past their home page. Once you are there, that's it, you're locked in!
  - alanh 15y ago
    Do you mean mobile web apps? Or are you referring to Android apps and the Android hardware back button? Your comment is really baffling.

tensafefrogs 15y ago

I saw an interesting stat the other day: According to this "built with" site, use of SWFObject (which is pretty much what 99% of flash devs use to detect + embed their swfs) is starting to decline among the "top sites": http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/SWFObject http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/SWFObject I'm the original creator of SWFObject, so I've looked at that chart a bit, and I've never seen the usage go down in the few years since that site's been tracking js usage.

danger42 15y ago
Does this include SWFObject2? (I think the current version is 2.2)
- tensafefrogs 15y ago
  That's a good question. I suspect it does, as v2 has been out a long time. They may just look at file names, like swfobject.js, or look for "swfobject" in the file path.
radley 15y ago
I figure the success of browser-Flash will depend on touch parity between desktop & devices. Flash is a complex experience to create and generating two forms (mouse & touch) confounds the universal cutting-edge innovation expected from Flash.

QuestionWriter 15y ago

I'll bet the Flash you made 10 years ago still works, and I'll bet the JS game you made doesn't. I'll wager the Flash you make today will still work in 10 years, and I'll wager the HTML5 won't.

fredleblanc 15y ago
Just cruising around the websites of local stores in my town, their websites that were made 5-10 years ago still look the same as ever, and for the most part still function the same as ever. (The exceptions being when they relied on third-party includes that have since gone out of business.) HTML5 is just HTML, and unless that fundamentally changes, it should work "forever." JavaScript too, again, unless you're linking to frameworks hosted by companies that later go out of business. JavaScript usually adds, but rarely takes away. The look of your HTML site 10 years from now may look more outdated than your Flash site does, but as long as we're all still around, I'd wager that they'd both still work, provided Flash player is still a thing.
- whatever_dude 15y ago
  HTML5 is just HTML, and unless that fundamentally changes, it should work "forever." That is, if you don't use the bunch of temporary CSS properties browser vendors are supporting (-moz-, -khtml-, -ms-, -o-, etc) that people often assume to be "ready" but that will be deprecated in the future.

tomlin 15y ago

Look, if you hate Flash because it eats at your CPU, or it broke into your house - be angry. The author explains that Flash breaks 3 fundamentals: * it encourages design abuse * it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction principles * it distracts attention from the site's core value. Guess what else breaks these fundamentals? Everything. Not just Silverlight or JavaFX. These technologies have accessibility API. People just don't implement them. Anyone who implements a fancy custom scrollbar, forgets an ALT attribute, or doesn't properly wrap their label tags is breaking these fundamentals all the same. It's not like I don't agree that Flash could be better, but this argument could be applied to just about any technology at any point in time.

talmand 15y ago
Thank you. I keep pointing out that these complaints can be applied to Canvas just as easily. When it takes over, will these people hate Canvas with the same passion?
- alanh 15y ago
  If people create whole websites within Canvas? Then probably.
  - talmand 15y ago
    I'm meaning more the annoying banner ads. Most Flash designers do not create entire websites in Flash anymore, that's a special case situation these days.
OriginalSyn 15y ago
Have you read anything from Jakob Neilson before, he would agree with you. If it were up to him the Web would like pretty much exactly like his article.

marckremers 15y ago

Why are we even discussing an article from 2000? This is so irrelevant to todays Flash, and todays digital landscape? And what would the web have looked like before jquery, html5 etc came to the fore? We needed Flash. And could YouTube and Google Maps have ever taken off without it? I'm all for the demise of Flash and the rise of open source, but everything has it's place, and it served and still serves brilliantly for sites made by the advertising industry.

gnosis 15y ago
Google Maps does not require Flash. I don't have Flash installed at all, and Google Maps works just fine without it. Youtube also doesn't require Flash to download the videos. I use a number of youtube downloader programs to get the videos, and then use a native video player to watch them. Of course that's not how most people watch youtube videos. But there's really no reason why the service couldn't have been built around an some open downloading/streaming technology instead of Flash. "it served and still serves brilliantly for sites made by the advertising industry." Yet another reason to avoid Flash for end users like me, who hate ads and despise the advertising industry.

tomelders 15y ago

I agree with the article (and always have done), but it's always bothered me that useit.com is a website devoted to usability and it looks like this... http://www.useit.com/ http://www.useit.com/ http://www.useit.com/alertbox/ http://www.useit.com/alertbox/

lurker19 15y ago
Use It is widely regarded as Spartan and perhaps ugly, but it is eminently usable. I bet most readers get in and out with more recall of key appreciated content in less time than the ever-so-popular "5 wordpress plugins to make your site shiny" style of bloggers. And I bet Jakob N has 1tested this question extensively as well. Oh and on his home page I stumbled on a link to a page with his own (better) explanation: http://www.useit.com/about/nographics.html http://www.useit.com/about/nographics.html
- tomelders 15y ago
  It's not the lack of graphics that I find unwieldy, it's the fact that the content seems dumped onto the page with only a cursory thought towards hierarchy. I look at it and see an impenetrable wall of content, which I personally find difficult to sift through.

Lagged2Death 15y ago

Many of the comments here are along the lines of "But we can count on Flash to work long into the future" or "The alternatives don't work well yet." Both of which may be true. But that is very much beside this article's point, which is kind of surprising - it's a very clearly written article. Web designers mostly should not be doing the things that Flash/HTML5+Canvas make possible. Gratuitous animation and sound, non-standard UI, and the breaking of web fundamentals are not strictly Flash problems, but poor design practices that Flash does (and which HTML5+Canvas probably will eventually) seem to encourage. Nielsen's point isn't that Flash is bad, per se. The problem is: unless you're producing a piece of pure entertainment (games, Homestar Runner, etc) then deciding to use (or emulate) Flash is, statistically speaking, almost certainly a design mistake. A big one.

ender7 15y ago

I do a lot of Flash development. I would love to switch to HTML. I can't wait. I will probably be forced to quite soon in order to support mobile devices. But. I'm going to miss so very many things: 1. A decent display architecture. Every display object has its own matrix transform. All of its children exist inside that space. Position your elements exactly how you want them. If you want markup-like UI layout, you can use MXML. Their display system is quite elegant. I will miss it a lot. 2. A complete development environment. Write code in Flash Builder 4. Generate art assets in Flash CS5. Save. It works. It's fast. All you need is two programs (maybe three if you want Photoshop). This is huge for me. The thought of re-rendering all of my art assets as thousands of flat bitmaps makes me shudder. 3. Performance. Yeah, yeah, everyone hates Flash because it destroys your battery, but it can actually pull off some very impressive feats. When I switch to HTML, I will have to prune back some of the cooler features I have, simply for performance reasons. 4. (nearly) Identical performance across browsers and OSes. 5. A decent language for large-scale development. Actionscript3 is actually a really lovely language. I wish I could write HTML apps in AS3. It has real namespaces. It has real classes and real inheritance. It has static typing (but it's flexible enough that you don't feel trapped into endless boilerplate ala Java). It has a sane definition for the 'this' keyword. Javascript is a lovely language, but it's a nightmare to write a nontrivial app with it. 6. Display bling. Want a drop shadow around any shape? Done. In HTML, all you get are square drop shadows. Blur filter? Done. Dynamic masking? Done. Efficient alpha transparency for any object? Done. Obviously, if you go crazy with these you quickly eat up all your processing resources, but if used wisely they are very fast and look lovely.

windsurfer 15y ago
I also worked for Adobe doing Flex work, and I agree on all of your points. Some of the new techs are still rough (like Spark and Flex themes...) but overall it's very powerful and nothing can compare yet. This article was also from 11 years ago and other technologies haven't caught up.
mambodog 15y ago
With respect to your first point: have you had a look at CSS Transforms, specifically the matrix() transform function? You can use Transformie[1] for IE compatibility. Additionally, within a div with position: relative, all child elements can be positioned just like Flash's x,y coordinates. Just apply position: absolute to the child elems and use top: and left: in place of x, y. [1] http://transformie.com/ http://transformie.com/

michaelpinto 15y ago

Jakob Nielsen understands usability better than most (and I love him for that) but not multimedia: The proof of this not only how well Flash has done during the past ten years but how much HTML 5 looks and acts like Flash to the end user. The flying type has won...

geraldalewis 15y ago

In the 11 years since this article has been published, Flash has changed, HTML has changed, and web developers' philosophies have changed. I don't like the tone of the article, but I have to hand it to Nielsen for creating something that likely had some impact on the web. In the hall of fame of inflammatory, overly-broad titles, I think it'll be next to Djikstra's "Goto Considered Harmful". > First, Flash encourages gratuitous animation: Since we can make things move, why not make things move? Good taste has prevailed. Once ubiquitous "intro animations" have almost disappeared, as have <marquee> and <blink>. Hype http://tumultco.com/hype/ http://tumultco.com/hype/ and Sencha Animator http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/ http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/ are powerful animation tools that export HTML5/CSS3. We will have to hope HTML5 and Flash designers continue exhibiting restraint with gratuitous animation. > Second, one of the Web's most powerful features is that it lets users control their own destiny. It's hard to address this issue, since I'm not exactly sure what Nielsen is specifically objecting to. I think it might have to do with McLuhan's "Hot" and "cool" media theory where certiain media encourage participation instead of hijacking attention? > Third, many Flash designers introduce their own nonstandard GUI controls. How many scrollbar designs do we need? "Aristo" http://cappuccino.org/aristo/showcase/ http://cappuccino.org/aristo/showcase/ "mocha(ui)" http://mochaui.org/ http://mochaui.org/ "Dijit" http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit/index.html http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit/index.html ... the list goes on. There's nothing wrong with custom UI, so long as it conforms to users' expectations (a tall order). This issue is still in the hands of developers. > Breaks Web Fundamentals > The "Back" button does not work. In the hands of developers. Many ajax-y sites have this problem now (see Twitter). Many libs exist for both JS and Flash devs to fix (or not) this issue. > Link colors don't work. a:link {color:#000000;} a:visited {color:#000000;} > The "Make text bigger/smaller" button does not work. This is a browser issue. All elements should magnify when a user Zooms In/Out (fixed on some modern browsers). > Flash reduces accessibility for users with disabilities. <img src="image.gif" alt="" /> <canvas>...anything...</canvas> > The "Find in page" feature does not work. Still true. > Internationalization and localization is complicated. Local websites must enlist a Flash professional to translate content. Nearly all serious Flash projects separate content into XML or JSON files (especially if the website content will need to be translated). Some AJAX-driven sites do this as well. > Also, text that moves is harder to read for users who lack fluency in the language. In the hands of developers. > Distracts from a Site's Core Values > Frequently updating content (Flash content tends to be created once and then left alone). Not true now (or then). > Providing informative content that answers users' key questions at all depth levels (Flash content is typically superficial). This is a great example of why I object to the tone of the article. > Identifying better ways to support customers by task analyzing their real problems (Flash is typically created by outside agents who don't understand the business). I'm trying to understand the implications of this statement, but I'm baffled. Maybe it made sense in 2001 when HTML sites were sometimes cobbled together by a favorite nephew close to the company. Either way, web development is sufficiently sophisticated/complex enough now to require developers to know what they're doing. This sometimes means hiring an agency/production house.

matusz13 15y ago

I've been a flash/flex guy for a number of years. For however many rough spots it may have the cross platform nature of flash/air is something that shouldn't be ignored.

mynameishere 15y ago

Eh. Flash is great for games or cartoons or grooveshark-style sites. It's awful for restaurant webpages, but who cares? Also, people who haven't worked with flash are probably unaware of how much better actionscript is than javascript.

hippich 15y ago

It is not Flash's fault (just like wordpress modules poor coding is not PHP's or Wordpress fault). It is how it used. I am glad in fact flash exists. I actually can install Flash Block kind plugin and 99% of "design mess" disappears.. If there would be no Flash, all these "designers" star put introduction pages with HTML5/Canvas/etc. And this is harder to block. =)

roythunder 15y ago

Flash is great if used well. Eg: check out www.pinklab.com -- I defy you to replicate this site in html5.

Xurinos 15y ago
I would have appreciated a NSFW warning.

jarin 15y ago

The only things I see Flash being useful for these days are video in older browsers and copying text to the clipboard via a button. Sure, there are Flash games and ads, but I think Unity is a much better game development plugin and many people block Flash ads these days.

BoppreH 15y ago

There are hundred of thousands of Flash games on the web. None of the issues raised by the article apply to them. Though I hate Flash websites as much as everyone else, the title is misleading and harmful for game developers.

jdietrich 15y ago

Flash is substantially fixed. If you haven't used Flash lately, I encourage you to read the API docs for Flex and have a play around with the Free compiler. It's become very easy to mix standards-compliant markup and Flash in a manner which degrades gracefully/enhances progressively. IMO, the problem is developers. Because of Flash's origins as a tool for designers to make animations, most ActionScript is atrociously bad. The lion's share of Flash is created by people who really don't know how to program. When you have a community where knowing what recursion is marks you out as above-average, it's understandable that the core technology gets a bad rep. The problem is self-reinforcing, as good developers want to use the new shiny HTML5 and don't want to tarnish their CV with Flash development. A huge spectrum of really high-quality web apps are reliant on Flash. Streaming video is the obvious application, but projects like SoundManager2 are still reliant on Flash for audio in HTML5 apps. It's a very nineties word, but Flash is still the bottom line when it comes to multimedia. Products like Google Street View or Turntable.fm just aren't plausible without Flash and won't be for the forseeable future. Given the glacial pace of the W3C on HTML5 and the likely slow uptake of newer browsers, we're stuck with it. I don't see that as a wholly bad thing.

MathieuGosselin 15y ago

You'll eventually regret flash when all those banners will be replaced by their HTML5 equivalent ;-)