.................................
To leave Commie, hyper to
http://commie.oy.com/commie_leaving.html
.................................
> >But then again javascript only crashes the browser.
> >Flash manages to freeze the whole apparatus in one shot.
>
>like makromedia says it : "flash : experience-orientated web design"
So, if your experience is negative, you just have to re-orientate? ;)
Strangely enough, I haven't had any serious problems with Flash plugin (so
far).
On Mac-side the Flash frame rate remains rather low, but that has probably
something to do with the graphics chip of the Mac. In the past, the default
Mac graphic chips have had no match to the Wintel-side technology. With
these new iMacs (and other Macs), that ship with with fast Nvidia Geforces,
the frame rate probably isn't an issue anymore (unless OS X is sucking all
the calculating power from it...).
On Windows-side I've heard that big Flash movies tend to crash older
low-RAM machines. That's rather strange, because Flash is supposed to
stream the data to the machine - not to load it all and then show it. Maybe
there are virtual memory problems with Windows version of Flash plugin?
Hard to say - I've never experienced a browser or machine crash on Windows
side (I mean, because of Flash plugin ;).
On Linux-side, I've heard that installing the plugin may be a pain in the
ass. Basically you have to login as root to succeed. Even this way the
installation might go wrong. But AFAIK, Flash plugin is pre-installed on
Netscape with Red Hat 7.2, and should work without problems.
All the webortages we made at Helsingin Sanomat from last year's summer to
December caused some negative feedback with one thing common: The shows
crashed older machines, stopped randomly or crashed the browser. The only
difference between post-summer webortages and pre-summer webortages was the
size. Post-summer webortages were larger than pre-summer webortages. Not a
lot larger, larger anyway. The bottleneck seemed to be the amount of memory
installed in the machine, because the machines crashed regardless of the
connection speed. (*) The Windows flavor didn't seem to matter, either.
There seems to be some "magic line" around 3 MBs. If you the Flash has
overall size bigger than that, you can be sure that older machines and
browsers start crashing. ("Overall" meaning here the amount of Flash data
in the memory at the same time. I mean, if you have ten 2 MB chunks that
replace each other when loaded, that's ok, but if one of those chunks gets
the overall size over 3 MB, someone will end up into problems.)
Annnnyway, regardless of the operating system, the main annoyance in Flash
stuff still is the usability. Very rarely you see justified usage of Flash,
and even if you do, the interface sucks.
---> jab | commie | http://commie.oy.com
"Less is moo"
-- The Holy Mad Cow
(*): If you want to try it out yourself, test these two:
A typical pre-summer example:
http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/klik/webortaasit/default.asp#kautonen2001
A typical post-summer example:
http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/klik/webortaasit/default.asp#paaosassa03
