Flash: 99% Bad

I do a lot of Flash development. I would love to switch to HTML. I can't wait. I will probably be forced to quite soon in order to support mobile devices.<p>But.<p>I'm going to miss so very many things:<p>1. A decent display architecture. Every display object has its own matrix transform. All of its children exist inside that space. Position your elements exactly how you want them. If you want markup-like UI layout, you can use MXML. Their display system is quite elegant. I will miss it a lot.<p>2. A complete development environment. Write code in Flash Builder 4. Generate art assets in Flash CS5. Save. It works. It's fast. All you need is two programs (maybe three if you want Photoshop). This is huge for me. The thought of re-rendering all of my art assets as thousands of flat bitmaps makes me shudder.<p>3. Performance. Yeah, yeah, everyone hates Flash because it destroys your battery, but it can actually pull off some very impressive feats. When I switch to HTML, I will have to prune back some of the cooler features I have, simply for performance reasons.<p>4. (nearly) Identical performance across browsers and OSes.<p>5. A decent language for large-scale development. Actionscript3 is actually a really lovely language. I wish I could write HTML apps in AS3. It has real namespaces. It has real classes and real inheritance. It has static typing (but it's flexible enough that you don't feel trapped into endless boilerplate ala Java). It has a sane definition for the 'this' keyword. Javascript is a lovely language, but it's a nightmare to write a nontrivial app with it.<p>6. Display bling. Want a drop shadow around any shape? Done. In HTML, all you get are square drop shadows. Blur filter? Done. Dynamic masking? Done. Efficient alpha transparency for any object? Done. Obviously, if you go crazy with these you quickly eat up all your processing resources, but if used wisely they are very fast and look lovely.

I understand why people are still up in arms, because it must be annoying (at the very list) to see eleven years pass without fixing this. However, I find it even more annoying that after eleven years people haven't learned that you can't solve the problem by yelling at people "BAD BOY! FLASH BAD!"<p>I know really well what the allure of Flash is. I tried my hand at developing casual Web games and that's done in Flash. The following are the reasons, in what I believe is the order of importance:<p>1) Adoption: When it comes to users, everyone and their grandmother has Flash. Even if they don't, getting it and installing it is usually <i>really</i> easy. When it comes to development, you find that casual Web game portals (such as Kongregate, Newgrounds and Armor Games) are Flash-oriented and you even have sites like Flash Game License and Flash Game Art.<p>2) Ease of Development: I've seen games that were obviously made by people who have a considerable talent for art and so little talent for coding that they should have a court restraint to keep them away from development tools. Guess what? They work anyway and are popular. Yes, you have to learn ActionScript, but that's pretty much all.<p>3) Good Free Toolchain: You don't really have to shell out 600 dollars for Flash. You can get your stuff done for free, using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK.<p>Anyway, my point is that it's widespread, it's easy and it gets shit done. For those who think nagging is the solution, for those who rubbed their hands when Apple said it wasn't going to support Flash, here's the crucial question: can you show people an alternative that satisfies their requirements as well or better?<p>In this case, Adobe is the metaphorical Microsoft: their stuff is out there and they make it easy for people to use it. As the history has proven, the solution is not to call people sheep because they use Flash; the solution is to provide the metaphorical Mac and metaphorical Firefox and metaphorical Ubuntu -- stuff that's so good, that people will switch in droves without looking back.

Many of the comments here are along the lines of "But we can count on Flash to work long into the future" or "The alternatives don't work well yet." Both of which may be true.<p>But that is very much beside this article's point, which is kind of surprising - it's a very clearly written article.<p>Web designers mostly <i>should not be doing</i> the things that Flash/HTML5+Canvas make possible. Gratuitous animation and sound, non-standard UI, and the breaking of web fundamentals are not strictly Flash problems, but poor design practices that Flash does (and which HTML5+Canvas probably will eventually) seem to encourage.<p>Nielsen's point isn't that <i>Flash</i> is bad, per se. The problem is: unless you're producing a piece of pure entertainment (games, Homestar Runner, etc) then deciding to use (or emulate) Flash is, statistically speaking, almost certainly a design mistake. A big one.

Look, if you hate Flash because it eats at your CPU, or it broke into your house - be angry.<p>The author explains that Flash breaks 3 fundamentals:<p><pre><code> * it encourages design abuse * it breaks with the Web's fundamental interaction principles * it distracts attention from the site's core value. </code></pre> Guess what else breaks these fundamentals? <i>Everything</i>. Not just Silverlight or JavaFX. These technologies have accessibility API. People <i>just don't implement them</i>.<p>Anyone who implements a fancy custom scrollbar, forgets an ALT attribute, or doesn't properly wrap their label tags is breaking these fundamentals all the same.<p>It's not like I don't agree that Flash could be better, but this argument could be applied to just about any technology at any point in time.

A major one not mentioned - flash hijacks your keyboard input, preventing you from navigating around and out-of on pages which are flash-infected.

I saw an interesting stat the other day:<p>According to this "built with" site, use of SWFObject (which is pretty much what 99% of flash devs use to detect + embed their swfs) is starting to decline among the "top sites":<p><a href="http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/SWFObject" rel="nofollow">http://trends.builtwith.com/javascript/SWFObject</a><p>I'm the original creator of SWFObject, so I've looked at that chart a bit, and I've never seen the usage go down in the few years since that site's been tracking js usage.

What I find more interesting is that the people who usually love to hate on flash are the same people who break these rules when building poorly constructed "html5/css3/javascript" (buzzword overload) sites. There aren't a ton of them out there yet, but the number is growing. Nielsen's points are valid, but they aren't all flash-specific; I've seen these same principles violated in supposedly "standards-compliant" sites as well.<p>I think this bigger problem is a lack of true experience/interaction design knowledge. If you are only focusing on the visual aesthetic, and not spending time on thinking through the total experience, chances are you are going to make most of these same mistakes. The technology you choose is less of an issue, the real problem is how you employ that technology. That said, I always try to avoid flash unless it has a very specific benefit over css/js, thankfully I haven't needed to build something in flash in quite a long time.

Yes, OK, everyone hates Flash. However, as others have said, Flash won't - and can't - disappear until Canvas development has the same almost-zero barrier to entry as Flash, and until <i>every</i> potential end user has a modern browser.<p>Another significant limiting factor is the simple fact that there are still things that you simply cannot accomplish outside of Flash. Specifically, I'm talking about camera and microphone data access, which can't be done via HTML5 without calling a Flash or Java applet.

Wow, I remember reading this article when it came out - ELEVEN YEARS AGO. Now I feel old.

I'll bet the Flash you made 10 years ago still works, and I'll bet the JS game you made doesn't.<p>I'll wager the Flash you make today will still work in 10 years, and I'll wager the HTML5 won't.

I am just asking a small question: are the complaints here not present with html5 canvas element?<p>For me blaming a technology, when the issue is people, is not very effective.

Why is this being dug up again? Not that I condone flash.

Eh. Flash is great for games or cartoons or grooveshark-style sites. It's awful for restaurant webpages, but who cares? Also, people who haven't worked with flash are probably unaware of how much better actionscript is than javascript.

Why are we even discussing an article from 2000? This is so irrelevant to todays Flash, and todays digital landscape? And what would the web have looked like before jquery, html5 etc came to the fore? We needed Flash. And could YouTube and Google Maps have ever taken off without it? I'm all for the demise of Flash and the rise of open source, but everything has it's place, and it served and still serves brilliantly for sites made by the advertising industry.

Is it me or did Nielsen add an update on top of the article when he was hired by Macromedia, or something like that?<p>The way I recall it, it said something along the lines of "OK, Flash is not very good, but now we are working to address the issues mentioned on this article". I checked in archive.org, but there are no copies of the page there.

I agree with the article (and always have done), but it's always bothered me that useit.com is a website devoted to usability and it looks like this...<p><a href="http://www.useit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.useit.com/</a> <a href="http://www.useit.com/alertbox/" rel="nofollow">http://www.useit.com/alertbox/</a>

Jakob Nielsen understands usability better than most (and I love him for that) but not multimedia: The proof of this not only how well Flash has done during the past ten years but how much HTML 5 looks and acts like Flash to the end user. The flying type has won...

I've been a flash/flex guy for a number of years. For however many rough spots it may have the cross platform nature of flash/air is something that shouldn't be ignored.

Flash is substantially fixed. If you haven't used Flash lately, I encourage you to read the API docs for Flex and have a play around with the Free compiler. It's become very easy to mix standards-compliant markup and Flash in a manner which degrades gracefully/enhances progressively.<p>IMO, the problem is developers. Because of Flash's origins as a tool for designers to make animations, most ActionScript is atrociously bad. The lion's share of Flash is created by people who really don't know how to program. When you have a community where knowing what recursion is marks you out as above-average, it's understandable that the core technology gets a bad rep. The problem is self-reinforcing, as good developers want to use the new shiny HTML5 and don't want to tarnish their CV with Flash development.<p>A huge spectrum of really high-quality web apps are reliant on Flash. Streaming video is the obvious application, but projects like SoundManager2 are still reliant on Flash for audio in HTML5 apps. It's a very nineties word, but Flash is still the bottom line when it comes to multimedia. Products like Google Street View or Turntable.fm just aren't plausible without Flash and won't be for the forseeable future. Given the glacial pace of the W3C on HTML5 and the likely slow uptake of newer browsers, we're stuck with it. I don't see that as a wholly bad thing.

It is not Flash's fault (just like wordpress modules poor coding is not PHP's or Wordpress fault). It is how it used.<p>I am glad in fact flash exists. I actually can install Flash Block kind plugin and 99% of "design mess" disappears.. If there would be no Flash, all these "designers" star put introduction pages with HTML5/Canvas/etc. And this is harder to block. =)

The only things I see Flash being useful for these days are video in older browsers and copying text to the clipboard via a button.<p>Sure, there are Flash games and ads, but I think Unity is a much better game development plugin and many people block Flash ads these days.

There are hundred of thousands of Flash games on the web. None of the issues raised by the article apply to them.<p>Though I hate Flash <i>websites</i> as much as everyone else, the title is misleading and harmful for game developers.

You'll eventually regret flash when all those banners will be replaced by their HTML5 equivalent ;-)

Flash is great if used well.<p>Eg: check out www.pinklab.com -- I defy you to replicate this site in html5.

AS true now AS it was then.

In the 11 years since this article has been published, Flash has changed, HTML has changed, and web developers' philosophies have changed.<p>I don't like the tone of the article, but I have to hand it to Nielsen for creating something that likely had some impact on the web. In the hall of fame of inflammatory, overly-broad titles, I think it'll be next to Djikstra's "Goto Considered Harmful".<p>&#62; First, Flash encourages gratuitous animation: Since we can make things move, why not make things move?<p>Good taste has prevailed. Once ubiquitous "intro animations" have almost disappeared, as have &#60;marquee&#62; and &#60;blink&#62;. Hype <a href="http://tumultco.com/hype/" rel="nofollow">http://tumultco.com/hype/</a> and Sencha Animator <a href="http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/</a> are powerful animation tools that export HTML5/CSS3. We will have to hope HTML5 and Flash designers continue exhibiting restraint with <i>gratuitous</i> animation.<p>&#62; Second, one of the Web's most powerful features is that it lets users control their own destiny.<p>It's hard to address this issue, since I'm not exactly sure what Nielsen is specifically objecting to. I think it might have to do with McLuhan's "Hot" and "cool" media theory where certiain media encourage participation instead of hijacking attention?<p>&#62; Third, many Flash designers introduce their own nonstandard GUI controls. How many scrollbar designs do we need?<p>"Aristo" <a href="http://cappuccino.org/aristo/showcase/" rel="nofollow">http://cappuccino.org/aristo/showcase/</a> "mocha(ui)" <a href="http://mochaui.org/" rel="nofollow">http://mochaui.org/</a> "Dijit" <a href="http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://dojotoolkit.org/reference-guide/dijit/index.html</a><p>... the list goes on. There's nothing wrong with custom UI, so long as it conforms to users' expectations (a tall order). This issue is still in the hands of developers.<p>&#62; <i></i>Breaks Web Fundamentals<i></i><p>&#62; The "Back" button does not work.<p>In the hands of developers. Many ajax-y sites have this problem now (see Twitter). Many libs exist for both JS and Flash devs to fix (or not) this issue.<p>&#62; Link colors don't work.<p>a:link {color:#000000;} a:visited {color:#000000;}<p>&#62; The "Make text bigger/smaller" button does not work.<p>This is a browser issue. All elements should magnify when a user Zooms In/Out (fixed on some modern browsers).<p>&#62; Flash reduces accessibility for users with disabilities.<p>&#60;img src="image.gif" alt="" /&#62; &#60;canvas&#62;...anything...&#60;/canvas&#62;<p>&#62; The "Find in page" feature does not work.<p>Still true.<p>&#62; Internationalization and localization is complicated.<p>Local websites must enlist a Flash professional to translate content.<p>Nearly all serious Flash projects separate content into XML or JSON files (especially if the website content will need to be translated). Some AJAX-driven sites do this as well.<p>&#62; Also, text that moves is harder to read for users who lack fluency in the language.<p>In the hands of developers.<p>&#62; <i></i>Distracts from a Site's Core Values<i></i><p>&#62; Frequently updating content (Flash content tends to be created once and then left alone).<p>Not true now (or then).<p>&#62; Providing informative content that answers users' key questions at all depth levels (Flash content is typically superficial).<p>This is a great example of why I object to the tone of the article.<p>&#62; Identifying better ways to support customers by task analyzing their real problems (Flash is typically created by outside agents who don't understand the business).<p>I'm trying to understand the implications of this statement, but I'm baffled. Maybe it made sense in 2001 when HTML sites were sometimes cobbled together by a favorite nephew close to the company. Either way, web development is sufficiently sophisticated/complex enough now to require developers to know what they're doing. This sometimes means hiring an agency/production house.

This Article is not like wine, it doesnt get any better eleven years later. Compared with wine this article is plonk.

Food: 99% bad