Simply not supporting flash does put pressure on those sites which could work just as well without it, but not all sites using flash fall into that category currently. The biggest reason flash has proliferated is that there is a void that they were able to fill, so while everyone hates it, everyone puts up with it until something better comes along.
Keep in mind that flash is not used only for pointless youtube videos and bad programming, there are sites like hulu.com which rely on flash because there is no widely available alternative currently for delivering the kind of media experience they want to give. While long term some of the features of HTML5 are designed to fix these problems, it's still way off and content providers won't be shifting overnight either. Users may incorrectly blame the device manufacturer for their memory filling up or slow connections but they would not be incorrect to blame a manufacturer who sells devices they can't access their favorite websites on simply because of political reasons. I like the idea of not downloading and playing flash files unless they are specifically requested, though. I believe Opera supports this, so it seems to be something that can be fixed at the browser (or at least rendering engine) level bypassing the designers and content providers. -- Katrina -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Bernd Stramm Sent: Monday, March 15, 2010 3:11 PM To: Wichmann, Mats D Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MeeGo-dev] Adobe Flash 10.1 on Meego On Mon, 2010-03-15 at 13:59 -0600, Wichmann, Mats D wrote: > [email protected] wrote: > >> Do you > >> actually want this on your device? > > > > Indeed, and some companies do want it. > > Well of course, I was being silly. "Everybody has it" > is a powerful argument that consumer-device mfg's > will have a very hard time saying no to, and perhaps > they should not say no, that's not something I should > render a judgement on. But we've got this proliferation > of websites with these pointless videos that are driving > this, and I think it's really an issue we're going to > have trouble with. Hear, hear. This is a really bad habit by lazy web site designers, causing grief for many users. Some site designers can't create a 3-item list of links without megabytes of flash. This is stupid. Perhaps more relevantly for this list, many end users will blame the device for filling up with this stuff, and the device manufacturer. They will also blame the their bandwidth provider (a.k.a. phone company) for slow connectivity. There is much to be gained by stopping this flashy nonsense. Bernd >I hope that website designers can get > a little more polite, like not playing stuff unless it's > asked for. I have one system set up so that it drops > flash video files into /tmp, and if the browser tab in > which they played stays open, the file stays there... > and sometimes I'll see multiple multi-megabyte files > sitting there - sometimes rather significant sizes like > 10 or more megabytes. If I'm on my mobile device > connecting only through an expensive data plan, that's > not something I want going on without my consent just > because I browsed to a particular site on it. > So for me personally (not the device mfg.), I don't > want it on my device even if I'll take it on my > notebook. > > > _______________________________________________ > MeeGo-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev _______________________________________________ MeeGo-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-dev
