Poll: How do you feel about Flash?

I HATE Flash, you can’t deeplink to a site, you can’t open pages in multiple windows or tabs, you can’t control how you look at a website and have to sit through endless loadings of the same stuff on every page. I regularly don’t go beyond the first page of a Flash-intensive site. It’s worse than elevator music on a website.

I think “long term” to ignore Flash is risky. Done right, Flash in a website can make it very appealing. Much more so, in my view, than plain sites. At the very least look at AJAX.

Like all web technologies Flash has it’s place, and like all web technologies when it first hit the scene it was massively over used with resulting over copmlicated search-engine invisible sites that cost a fortune and achieved very little (other than feeding the designer’s already over inflated ego… NOTE: not all designers suffer this ).

Today, thankfully, most design companies (and designers) have got over the novelty and are using flash properly, within html pages where is serves a useful prupose for adding rich media elements or can be used to create an animated promotional item with much more visual impact than a static image.

Flash is here to stay, and rightly so, ignore it at your peril, over use is at your clients’ peril. We should all learn to use it correctly when it genuinely adds something to the users’ experience.

Just my humble opinion

Flash is only good for simple items like a flash header or playing video. If you are a photographer or any kind of creative person that your site is for then flash works great. For normal sites it is the biggest pain ever and why would you want to build 2 version of your own site?

Bob and Keith: I agree – it’s important that designers not throw out a technology. Flash has it’s place. I don’t agree with Nick that it should be used for a header, but video is a great use of Flash.

One reader wrote to me to tell me that she’s redesigning a site where every image on the site is done in Flash, and this is overkill. Unless you can get the image significantly smaller to download in Flash, the risks (that it will annoy people, be inaccessible, or simply not display because the Flash player is turned off or disabled) outweigh the benefits.

I haven’t used it for anything yet, but it looks really cool when done well on a website. I’d like to try it someday.

as a developer: I use flash when I think it is important AND when I think it will not annoy users – it NEVER starts without the user explicitly requesting video or whatever. As a USER: I hate it when sites slow me down with unwanted and unnecessary flash. It is distracting and very annoying and does not serve *my* purpose as a user.

In general, I think *most* developers spend too much time thinking about what is “cool” and they want to do and not enough thinking about things from the users perspective. Most people use most non-entertainment websites to FIND something or get something done. They do not want flash, or anything else, slowing that down.

I avoid Flash. Mainly due to accessibility reasons. People with visibility impairments find Flash very difficult and also those that are using the keyboard rather than the mouse. For the past years I’ve been working on projects where accessibility is high rated which means Flash and JavaScript is on the not-wanted-list

Flash is a very powerful piece of software. Unfortunately, download times and search engine problems means that in the short term its use will have to be limited to providing small animations within a non-Flash site. In a way this is a shame because ActionScript has incredible potential to develop powerful user interfaces.

I don’t like using Flash as a “required” element. I will, however, embed flash videos on a website, as it looks nicer and functions better than embedding an .avi or .mpg file.

I consider myself to be a major critic of websites, and i have determined the ONLY time flash is acceptable is for gaming.
The only people that think flash is great, are the people programming the site.
For some out of this world reason, programmers think that adding flash makes sites more user friendly, when in fact, its the exact opposite.
A user friendly site doesnt require an entire flash animation to load before you can click a link. A user friendly website follows the guidelines used by web browser programmers for the last 25 years (IE: back button, stop button, refresh button).
No one likes flash animations in ads. Every flash ad looks like it was programmed by a child. “look what i can do”!
These ‘user friendly’ people think flash video is the best. If im looking for something, and i have to watch a flash video to get it, ill simply move on and go somewhere else.
if you simply post an avi/mpeg/mpg/mp4 file, the person watching the video, and open up their media player, type in the url, and go back to surfing while the player downloads the movie.. then, if the screen is too dark, you can easily adjust it so you can see whats happening. Flash video SUCKS.

I really wish this question was “do you like flash on websites”. I bet you would get at least 200 people saying no, and 20 people (all programmers) saying yes.

I avoid flash driven websites because they are generally slow and clunky. (Silverlite is even worse.)
Flash is okay for omline games etc, but it and silverlite should be avoided at all costs for serious web design.
Flash, Silverlite, PDF, music should all be barred from general websites!

Flash is always going to be a debatable subject. I think it’s fine to embed videos with it, but for anything else it’s so crass. I hear what people say when it’s done well it looks great, yeah I agree but when is it really done well, maybe 10% of the time by a real pro but the rest – oh dear.

Even some of the pro’s on here who do flash and ask for an evaluation of their sites, have all these flash banners giving me a headache.