More moaning and griping about the lack of Flash. How it means the web will be broken for most consumers. How it disables the useful content of the web.
The only thing we realistically can’t do is use Flash. And what does Flash give us:
- A way to watch video on the web which was a hack back in the day and remains a performance and battery sucking hack
- A way to play games on the web – games which may be aimed at education, training as well as throwing shoes at Dubya’s head.
I will not lament the loss of Flash video. It’s sufficiently abhorrent that I installed Click2Flash and haven’t looked back. As a result, my Mac runs faster, cooler and I’ve fewer Flash-based ads to watch. Yes, it was great when we needed it – when there wasn’t a standard, they stepped in and filled a gap and thanks are due to them for that.
I do think we’re missing a trick with the Flash games – especially those designed for education. The problem being that most of the Flash games out there won’t work on a touch interface properly. They’re based on hitting keys or waving the mouse around, hovering over items and as you can guess now – there is no ‘hover’ in a touch interface. So even with Flash, most of the games won’t work anyway.
The performance issues with Flash are my biggest gripe. I tried to access Flash-based sites using “Flash Mobile” on the Nokia N800 and was constantly disappointed with the performance. Slow, laggy and And this was on their mobile platform?
Adobe has had a decade to get this sorted out but performance always suffers. While doing nothing but watching Flash video, the MacBook Air here routinely hits a load average of 6.0 which is ridiculous. It can play HD video onto a big screen with much less effort. Flash is just sucking CPU cycles, lagging even when only watching video and generally ruining the experience of the web for the rest of us.
But for those ‘designers’ who have designed entire web sites that only work in Flash and don’t provide any sort of fallback? You suck as a designer. You suck.