Click to Flash: The best thing since sliced sushi

9 November 2009 - Filed under Tech Notes

Despite its currently dominant position in the market, Adobe Flash is not the most universally accessible platform when it comes to the delivery of interactive content. Ceteris paribus, I’d say Adobe’s share in the world of rich internet applications will draw a downward curve over the coming months and years. The first reason is competition: Microsoft is exercising its ubiquitous influence to push Silverlight, while everyone else is jumping on the bandwagon of the upcoming HTML 5 standard that comes with built-in video capabilities, which may render Adobe Flash irrelevant. The second reason is that Adobe seems to have forgotten that to the user and to the vendor, the use of Adobe’s products is a choice, not a postulate. If I were a vendor faced with a choice of content delivery technology for 2010, I would have a hard time articulating the merits of Flash over Silverlight or HTML 5.

Flash and PDF for open government?

On a related note, Adobe recently copped the flak for failing to demonstrate full accessiblity while trying to promote just that. Ars Technica reported:

The Obama administration has made transparency and public access to government information a high priority. Adobe is attempting to capitalize on initiatives to make government information more accessible while promoting its technologies, such as Flash and PDF, as cornerstones for implementing open access. However, these technologies are actually an impediment to making information truly accessible.

Adobe has set up its “Adobe Opens Up” website to promote the use of Adobe technologies to achieve the goal of “opening up Washington,” as well as highlighting ways in which federal, state, and local governments have implemented these technologies. While we agree that making information available in common formats, like PDF, is one helpful piece of this puzzle, we can’t help but notice how the entire site—designed in Flash—is practically inaccessible. [And here's what it means.]

All I want is the salmon in that sushi roll

But here’s my real rant: Because Flash is today’s dominant technology, it’s also the most abused one that causes the most annoyance. I am talking about the dozens of Flash animations that appear on a single Web page, directly and indirectly obstructing my viewing experience when all I’m trying to do is read a news article. 99 percent of the time, Flash elements on a Web page is a waste of bandwidth and a waste of processing power; it doesn’t seem ideal for the age of resource-hungry netbooks on flaky mobile broadband connections. Besides, most Flash-powered advertisements are overkill when a plain image or animated GIFs would do. Flash-powered navigation without the ability to fall back on a plain-image substitute is equally stupid. It comes down to this: I don’t want Flash unless I specifically choose to play a video clip that I want to view.

Then I found Click to Flash, a free browser add-on that prevents Flash elements from loading automatically. Now anything that’s made of Flash looks like this until I specifically choose to view or play it:

While this is certainly the most useful piece of software I have come across in a while, there is a catch: It only works on the Mac.

2009-11-09  »  JK