Flash - Love It, Hate It
I’m not so fond of those animated thingamajigs blogs and websites often have these days. They range from video apps like YouTube and MetaCafe, and photo slideshows like slide.com and even Flickr. Some sites even have the tenacity to display animated banner ads in Flash!
Why do I hate them? For one, they tend to eat up memory and processing power, especially when I have a lot of tabs open on my browser (whether it’s Safari or Firefox). That’s even when they’re in the background. Secondly, they eat up bandwidth, especially those that decide to automatically turn on and play by themselves, without even asking me to click a thing.
Some of my friends have flash embedded on their social networking profiles (particularly on MySpace and Friendster, which let you do horrendous customizations). Worse, they automatically play some songs or videos that I just find tacky. I tend to avoid visiting these people’s pages altogether.
I’ve lost a draft blog post, or two, or three, because of these Flash animations that just pop up and freeze up my browser when I’m browsing other sites (for reference, quoting or links). Good thing the latest version of WordPress has auto-save, but that doesn’t always do the trick.
It’s also darn slow. Friends send me links for photos on auto-slideshow services like slide.com, but I would rather not wait for the entire animation to load (I have no patience to wait for the status bar to reach that 100% mark). I would rather go to a photo sharing/community site like Flickr.
But wait, Flickr uses flash, too. However, that’s only for those views where you need to drag and drop items for organizing, or when you want to create a flash badge or button, or when an image has annotations. Otherwise, flickr photo pages are just plain ol’ HTML. It’s not as obtrusve as other applications, and Flickr doesn’t make you wait just to see a photo.
Flash is good because it’s more or less the standard already for animated web content. You don’t have to ask users to download different proprietary plugins, and you can be sure that most are able to view your content. But sometimes it’s just too much, especially if the animations load up automatically, and if they take a long time to load. If it’s the bulk of the content (say it’s a video that a user wants to watch), then fine. But if it just impedes in the user experience, then it’s best to do away with animations of all kind.
That’s why I prefer reading blogs using my RSS reader.
I didn’t read this post entirely cuz it was sort of boring, but you have annoying flash banner ads on this very site. sort of goes against the grain of your post.
Ben Harper said this on June 11, 2007 3:45 am