The Adobe Flash Player is a multimedia application created by Macromedia (now a division of Adobe Systems). Flash Player features support for both vector and raster graphics, along with a scripting language and bidirectional streaming of video and audio content. The player is a virtual machine that runs Flash files, which are often embedded in websites to present animations, games, GUIs, or other visual interestingness. If you’re reading this website, you probably know all of this. What you might not know is that Flash sucks.
Actually, flash itself doesn't suck. But the way some sites use it does. This article will point out when and how to avoid these sucky situations.
Reasons why you should not over-use Flash
- Slow: Pages takes longer to open (typically 2 to 10 times more)
- Extra bandwidth: While bandwidth isn't as big a deal today as it was a few years go, and Flash is designed to be efficient, it still often uses more bandwidth than a non-Flash site. This is just a waste.
- Inconvenience: A flash player plug-in must be installed (and updated every few months)
- Bad navigation controls: such as the URL and the Back button, don't work. Some flash websites now have been developed in such way that back button and URLs are possible, but this takes a lot of coding, which means $$$.
- Inaccessible: Many users don't have access to Flash: WebTV users, Mobile devices (phones, PDAs,...)
- Unfriendly to search engines: they only see text, and Flash has no text. So, search engines will not return results for a site whose content is embedded in Flash.
- Very very unfriendly to search engines: search engines only navigate through links, and Flash has no links. So, search engines will not return results for a site whose inner pages can only be accessed through Flash.
- Animations
- Embedded videos/audios in a web page.
- Interactive demos
- Slide show
- Auxiliary content
- Advertising Agencies can increase their billings due to the higher cost of developing Flash content (Flash costs a lot).
- Flash is the easiest way to create "moving" stuff on a website.
Actually, Flash is a great tool when used for:
Why design/advertising agencies insist that Flash is the best choice to build a website?
Comments (6)
÷ Hieu says
Yes Hai, please visit more frequently and share your thoughts about our articles
:)
Minh ngoc says
Agreed. We should visit ur website more often, so that we can perceive more
useful info
Khoa Ma says
Yeah yeah, totally agree with you. I get sick every time the clients say "I
want a website with a flash menu" and it's hard to convince them. Most
Vietnamese clients do not care about usability and accessibility. They just want
a "glitter" website. :D
÷ Hieu says
Khoa: flash is such an inaccessible tool that requires tons of additional coding
and ... we are never gonna know if user's PC has flash installed. How
hillarious!!!
Yen (Susan Tran) says
Hello ... I see 01 flash banner per website is great (just flash banner at
homepage). Client can show some beautiful pictures that they love.