Daniel Robinson of IT Week says Flash is "the absolute bane of the internet"...It appears that people over at IT Week like to make uninformed decisions based on a limited number of examples. Flash is not the "bane of the internet". If anything Flash enables a richer internet experience. I do admit that there are some that misuse Flash and give it a bad name, but it is easy to not go to sites that use Flash like that. It is also easy to block flash ads and regular graphical ads all together with filters like Firefox's AdBlocker. To say things like: "I have come to regard Flash as the absolute bane of the internet. The technology's chief purpose seems to be to annoy the hell out of anyone surfing the web. Is there actually a bona fide purpose for Flash, other than creating endless animated adverts to ambush the unwary? If there is, I think we should be told about it." I think that you Daniel Robinson are completely uninformed on Flash and you are the last person in the world that should be writing about it. What experience do you have except for poking around on the web for a few minutes to get ready to write your article? If you did research you would know that you do have control over what advertisements you see online. You also have control over what websites you go to. If a website annoys you, don't buy their products. Source: http://www.itweek.co.uk/itweek/comment/2184157/flash-needs-content-kill-switch |
That aside, my biggest peeve with comments such as this is that DHTML and animated GIFs are just as much to blame as Flash - except for audio/video abuses.
So, it's the people who make them. Not the technology. It's like the saying, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." But in this case it's, "Flash doesn't irritate people. Web producers irritate people."
I also thought it was funny that there were advertisements all over the IT Week page, most of which were flashing, even though they were only animated gifs.