BlueSunCorp

Adobe Flash is an incredible tool, and over the past ten years the increasing number of innovations achieved with it have been astounding. Adobe claims that more than 99% of internet users have Flash installed, and with the high proportion of websites which make use of it, it's not difficult to see why. Flash, however, in a similar manner to Adobe Acrobat, has a tendency to make me seethe with frustration at times - not because of its own shortcomings, but due to the competency of those who use it to create applications, games and websites. Its problem is not one there is an easy solution to - and that problem is the lack of standards upheld by the aforementioned creators of swf files.

Advertisements

Advertising is a necessary evil, certainly. I have no difficulty understanding the fact that much of the web is kept alive with revenue from product placements and spam - but Flash gives advertisers the ability to take this to new extremes. In the last two years, I have witnessed adverts which obtrusively blare out sound or music without me prompting them to. I have had scrolling flash screens sliding into my browser window, either with no way to close them or a cross which serves mainly as a link to pages of yet more adverts. My pop-up blocker is powerless to stop them. Is this method of advertising more effective? I doubt it. Many sites make do with inoffensive banners, jpegs, animated gifs at the very worst - which at least stay in the same position without being first asked to. Google uses text-only adverts, and yet is one of the most popular sites on the Internet. It's not necessary, I'm sure it drives any valued visitors away, and it's a royal pain in the ass. No matter how many flash adverts I block in Firefox (if you haven't heard of adblock, you're living in an isolated cube; you should probably give it a try) more and more appear daily. Adverts in Flash can be done well. I don't mind if its animated, but if it's noisy, if it changes shape, if it can't even stay still, whoever made it should be dealt with, preferably by being advertised into submission.

Websites

Websites built in Flash only get a small mention here, because in actuality they're far less frequent than they used to be. Why are they irritating? They look nice enough, most of the time. But they don't follow the few simple rules which make browsing the web easy. There's often no coherent hierarchy of pages. The back and forward functions are useless, since the whole page is one file. And in the vast majority of cases, users can kiss goodbye to copying any text. I had a quick look for an example of a Flash based website, and found Muse.mu, the band Muse's official page. The first thing to happen? My browser stopped responding. Nice.

Videos

These are, without a doubt, my single biggest source of annoyance. When the Pandora's Box of Flash-based video streaming was opened, the concept was quickly popularised by sites such as YouTube and Google Video. The idea was fantastic - nobody likes to download entire videos, so watching them from a browser window seems ideal. What's the problem? The execution, the way flash video streaming has evolved - frankly, it sucks. Firstly, there is the quality. Certainly not everyone in the world has the bandwidth needed for high resolution videos; but the vast majority of flash video platforms only ever seem to cater for the underdogs in this regard. Instead of providing choices of resolution, we are left for the most part with either a hastily compressed, tiny FLV with more pixelation than Crysis on a Pentium-II, or nothing at all

It doesn't look good in full screen, it doesn't look good in the thimble sized area of the screen it is designed to fill. It doesn't look good at all. Feature wise, the majority of flash-video frontends are nothing short of appaling. YouTube's seek-bar seems to only allow you to skip intervals of ten pixels in one go, and aside from that the choice of controls is limited to play, pause, and volume. Google video, for some bizarre reason, recently dropped a feature which allowed you to choose the section at which the video began buffering - I was recently watching a documentary, and after ten minutes decided to switch to full screen. The video restarted itself (again I have little idea why) and I was forced to wait to load much of the video I had already seen.

What Flash users need are better standards, and restrictions on adverts. Specifically with regards to the first point, a standardised open-source Flash video player would be ideal. One which allows greater qualities and resolutions of videos, fast-forwarding, ease of use without over simplification. If sites like YouTube do not make an effort to improve, superior alternatives with higher standards, like Stage6, will always be a preferable alternative.