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Sites unavailable without flash

P

pcslookout

Lifer
I am making a list of sites that can not be used without having adobe flash player installed. Right now I only know of one.

HBO.com
 
</flashhaterbandwagon>

It's the new Windows Vista!

Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to hate on PDFs today?
 
rivan said:
</flashhaterbandwagon>

It's the new Windows Vista!

Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to hate on PDFs today?
Click to expand...

Actually no sense I can use sites without flash like youtube. I just use kmplayer instead to play all my youtube videos. It is the best media player in the world after all.
 
rivan said:
</flashhaterbandwagon>

It's the new Windows Vista!

Are you sure you wouldn't prefer to hate on PDFs today?
Click to expand...

The difference is that Flash really, really sucks and needs to die. PDFs are fine as long as they don't contain any of the extra shit like Javascript.
 
Nothinman said:
The difference is that Flash really, really sucks and needs to die. PDFs are fine as long as they don't contain any of the extra shit like Javascript.
Click to expand...

Flash is no different; when used well, it doesn't suck. When used irresponsibly or incompetently, it's terrible. What's so offensive about Nike.com's use of flash? It's a tool presenting the image they want to present. Could they accomplish the same thing with HTML4? Not without a bunch of other scripting. Do it all with AJAX? Would that make you happy? It'd probably piss someone else off.

Or is the gist of your anger that you don't want all this media on a page - you want to go back to the internet's bronze age of browsing and everything to look like it's rendered in Lynx?

Lynx-wikipedia.png


The vitriol for these applications is silly in my opinion; it's like blaming a broom for flipping dust up into the air because the person sweeping is just flailing around. If you're not sweeping like a retard, the floors get clean. Don't blame the tool, blame the wielder.

When it's being served to you in only one flavor, it's easy enough to block or turn off. Problem solved for most people. Instead some people start threads in some weak display of boycott that will never ever even reach the ears of the marketing people at Nike, much less ever sway them to make any changes.
 
I had Flash lock up my browser a couple times when I was experimenting with not using adblock+. I don't know whose fault it is that it runs like crap, but something needs to change. When a banner ad uses more resources than Win7 running in a VM, somebody did something wrong. There's enough blame to go around, and I'd like to see something different as an alternative.
 
lxskllr said:
I had Flash lock up my browser a couple times when I was experimenting with not using adblock+. I don't know whose fault it is that it runs like crap, but something needs to change. When a banner ad uses more resources than Win7 running in a VM, somebody did something wrong. There's enough blame to go around, and I'd like to see something different as an alternative.
Click to expand...

This!

And PDF needs to die too!!!!
 
Flash is no different
Click to expand...

It's very different. It's an extremely shitty tool regardless of how the developer uses it.

Or is the gist of your anger that you don't want all this media on a page - you want to go back to the internet's bronze age of browsing and everything to look like it's rendered in Lynx?
Click to expand...

Lynx and w3m work in a pinch, but I prefer just to use a flashblock plugin. Kills all of those bullshit flash ads and still lets me watch youtube videos, porn and order pizza via Dominos.

If you're not sweeping like a retard, the floors get clean. Don't blame the tool, blame the wielder.
Click to expand...

Except that I'm not in control of the "broom" (flash), I click something and poof here comes a boatload of shit. Yes, I'll do everything in my power to avoid that.

When it's being served to you in only one flavor, it's easy enough to block or turn off. Problem solved for most people. Instead some people start threads in some weak display of boycott that will never ever even reach the ears of the marketing people at Nike, much less ever sway them to make any changes.
Click to expand...

Maybe, maybe not. If you never complain things will never get fixed.
 
I don't even have flash installed and don't plan on installing it either. Everything seems to be running better too.

If I ever need it I will find a way around it somehow.
 
To the people who say flash is not that bad why do you think most browsers now are running flash in a separate process ? The same is done with java. At least in Internet Explorer I have seen it like that. I don't use that browser though. Hopefully all browsers will sooner or later will do this. For Flash and java.
 
Iphone/ipad FTW!

when was the last time a website required JAVA RE 18? not in months on my system. hopefully html5 can nuke flash. flash ads. bah.
 
Care to elaborate? I'm not saying you're right or wrong; I'm just genuinely curious as to what is inherently wrong with Flash.
Click to expand...

The idea itself is fine, it's the actual plugin that's shit. Performance is terrible, security track record is terrible and it's the source of virtually all of the browser crashes I've seen.

Iphone/ipad FTW!
Click to expand...

Not the devices themselves, but I would like if they were able to leverage the death of Flash.
 
Nothinman said:
Except that I'm not in control of the "broom" (flash), I click something and poof here comes a boatload of shit. Yes, I'll do everything in my power to avoid that.
Click to expand...

You know, if your problem is ads, I use adblock and only very rarely is does a flash ad get through. I add a few rules to the subscription manually and I'm totally set without using flashblock.

Flash ads are annoying as hell, but that's the point I was trying to make - don't blame the TOOL for the absolute dreck people are making with it. It's like condemning the computer because People magazine is produced digitally. And since I work for a company that (among other things) makes some of that dreck, don't blame us, either. Blame John Q Public for clicking on something more often when it's blinking. That makes our clients ask us for it, and we make it because they're signing our checks. We do our best to keep it tasteful, but in this market environment when the client says "blink" we say "how high?"

I still fail to see the problem with sites like the Nike one someone called out; Nike's whole image is slick, high motion, etc. That just doesn't translate on Lynx.

On security, that's purely an issue with being the de facto standard in a given arena. Explorer was hacked to bits when it was the only browser with market share. Then Firefox came along and was "secure". Firefox gets marketshare and suddenly it's not secure anymore. Expect the same thing with Chrome or Opera (or Lynx) if they ever gain significant marketshare.

I don't entirely disagree with your railing - I just think the anger's misplaced.
 
rivan said:
Flash is no different; when used well, it doesn't suck. When used irresponsibly or incompetently, it's terrible. What's so offensive about Nike.com's use of flash?
Click to expand...

Ever use it for prolonged periods of time? Ever try in linux? Doesnt always work or respond.

Im not a hater of flash but wish it could be improved, which is being done but only in windows. Not completely flashes fault either, apple surely wont help them.
 
Flash ads are annoying as hell, but that's the point I was trying to make - don't blame the TOOL for the absolute dreck people are making with it
Click to expand...

Flash is annoying as hell. The performance is only pretty bad on Windows but on OS X and Linux it's absolutely abysmal. Pretty much any flash app causes my work machine's CPU to spike and the fans to kick on.

I still fail to see the problem with sites like the Nike one someone called out; Nike's whole image is slick, high motion, etc. That just doesn't translate on Lynx.
Click to expand...

Lynx is at the far extreme end of the spectrum, you can still have a good, slick site without flash. Given a choice between a flash site and non-flash site, I'll choose the non-flash version 100&#37; of the time.

I still fail to see the problem with sites like the Nike one someone called out; Nike's whole image is slick, high motion, etc. That just doesn't translate on Lynx.
Click to expand...

But what about that site couldn't be done with Javascript? I only poked around for a minute but I didn't see anything.

On security, that's purely an issue with being the de facto standard in a given arena.
Click to expand...

That's a tired cry made by poor programmers. Sure, being popular gets you more attention but that doesn't automatically mean there will be exploits released every month or so like there are for Flash and Acrobat.

Explorer was hacked to bits when it was the only browser with market share. Then Firefox came along and was "secure". Firefox gets marketshare and suddenly it's not secure anymore. Expect the same thing with Chrome or Opera (or Lynx) if they ever gain significant marketshare.
Click to expand...

According to Secunia FF 3.5.x has had 7 advisories, 3.6 has 1, 3.0 has 23 and 2.0 has 29. I fail to see the large spike in vulnerabilities that you imply appeared once it became popular.
 
rivan said:
I still fail to see the problem with sites like the Nike one someone called out; Nike's whole image is slick, high motion, etc. That just doesn't translate on Lynx.
Click to expand...

Did you actually try using their site? I did, in response to this thread, and I am not impressed. If anything, I was amazed at how painfully slow it was - and how much slower the use of Flash made it seem. Every page load was an exercise in watching a loading animation (oddly, it seemed to be a different one on each page) on a black screen. Perhaps this is my bias as an Opera user, but staring at a blank screen like that is not something I'm used to. It's not hard to figure out why it was happening, though: checking a few random pages indicated they were sending down about 300 KB of Flash per page, and all I got was a black screen until I had downloaded every byte of it. The hilarious bit? They were using Flash primarily to display what amounted to static images.

The same thing done with images, a little Javascript, and a handful of small Flash apps for the fancier bits would have provided a superior experience in every way.

I don't consider Flash inherently evil (in particular, it is a simple development platform for simple games), but it does have some severe deficiencies, and is frequently abused. The Nike site is a fairly egregious example of that.

I am reminded of this recent A List Apart article on roughly this topic.
 
The problem with flash is two pronged. One, developers abuse it (not saying all). Just, developers use flash when you really don't need to add that kind of stuff to a webpage. Two, Flash is inherently resource intensive so therefore it bogs down your computer when you try to access a webpage.

As long as it is used well (Hulu for example) Flash is fine.
 
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