My Love/Hate Relationship With Flash

Posted on January 20th, 2010

As a developer who has invested countless hours learning the finer intricacies of ActionScript 3.0 and built somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand swfs over my career, I have somewhat of a vested interest in Adobe's Flash plugin. At the same time, as a die-hard proponent of web standards and as a supporter of open software and web platforms, I can't embrace Flash as the end solution to any given number of browser woes.

Once Upon A Time...

Flash made a lot more sense back in the days of the browser wars. It was reliable and only required one production cycle. You didn't have to recode it eight different ways for every flavor of DOM under the sun. Not only that, but it allowed developers to make sites that generally looked and behaved better than their limited tabled or early-CSS counterparts. But the tabled layout era is long gone. The rise of a (mostly) standardized DOM and the now widespread support for CSS has meant that Flash has lost a lot of its steam and reason for being[1]. That's not even considering javascript transformation and transition libraries like prototype, scriptaculous, and jquery which now offer the power of animation without any add-ons.

The Problems With Flash

For some things, Flash is still the preminent solution - like natively embedding video or building strongly interactive media like games[2]. However, if you can do something with script, why on Earth would you use Flash?


Flash is basically invisible. It has no SEO (Google is the only search engine I know of that attempts the voodoo of indexing flash). And how do you make Flash accessible for the disabled? You don't. My biggest beef though has to be its size abuse which leads to unnecessary loading times and performance hits from memory hogging. No one wants to see your website intro (especially in full window). Srsly.


Let's not forget you also need a plugin to view it which eliminates its accessability for embedded systems and a lot of mobile devices. Apple flat out refuses to give Adobe support for Flash on the iPhone and I see their point.


The internet has thrived because it is a free and open exchange of communication. To shoehorn in proprietary solutions seems counterproductive and ultimately harmful. A lot of parallels can be drawn here to Net Nuetrality but that is a much bigger debate for another day.

The Bottom Line

Suffice to say, I will still continue to use Flash for my future projects, but only when it makes sense and significantly adds to the user experience. Make no mistake, Flash will eventually eat dirt. Just look at the insane CSS tricks coming down the pipleline as seen in the Safari nightly builds.


Don't shed a tear for Adobe though. Something tells me they'll be just fine...

-Your Personal Action(Script) Jackson, Simon Willems

1"Raison D'etre" for the cultured reader

2Side Note: Remember that silly term "rich media" that "webmasters" use to throw around? Those were the days...


Back to Top

Participate!

Want to leave a comment? Well, too bad! Actually if you head on over to Twitter and include penguinsroost (no hash necessary) in your message, you can participate in the discussion over at the penguin's roost.