Flash sucks.
Well, that’s not entirely true: it’s the uses of Flash that suck. Flash websites suck. Flash ads suck. Flash used for the sake of using Flash sucks.
Even website designers recognize this: when’s the last time you saw one of those bloated Flash introductions
without a skip button prominently displayed right next to it? (Extra points off for irony: the put-the-skip-button-inside-the-Flash-intro pattern.)
(A lot of the above goes for Java applets used in similar situations, but at least it’s useful on the server side too.)
When doesn’t Flash suck? It’s probably indicative of how bad things are that only one site comes to mind: Homestar Runner, home of Strong Bad’s e-mail.
This rant brought to you by a guy who’s seen one too many pointless Flash sites today. And the letter Z… that’s zed, not zee, and is a topic for another day.
Serendipity: Tim Bray’s post on a similar topic, published at 10:42pm local time but which I didn’t see in my aggregator until just now. Although he does use the phrase Flash sucks
, the gist of the article is this: given the choice of a Flash UI or an HTML one, users …ended up going for the HTML version every time.
