Keep bashing Flash

May 3, 2010 by Bill Palmer

We’ve made other outdated technology disappear simply by not engaging in it. We walked away from Geocities years ago, and sure enough, it went by the wayside. More recently we began walking away from MySpace in favor of more modern options, and sure enough, critical mass is flowing away from the old abandoned amusement park by the day. We’re increasingly casting junky flip-phones aside in favor of smartphones like the iPhone, and no one can stop us. And PC users who’ve grown tired of their platform are free to switch over to the Mac any time they wish. So why is that we, the computing public, despite all knowing that Flash is outdated junk leftover from that Geocities era, can’t do anything to get rid of it?

The answer lies in the fact that we don’t control the web; we only think we do. Decisions about what the world’s internet users get to see when they sit down in front of their computers each morning are made by a startlingly small number of developers and webmasters and publishers – and many of them could care less about the quality of the user experience so long as the hits keep coming. Lest we be hypocritical here, while none of our actual content comes in the form of absurdly outdated Flash content, when a misguided advertiser absolutely insists on running a Flash ad, it’s not exactly easy to say no (although we have finally drawn the line on that matter). Nor is it easy for non-technical publishers to say no to their own entrenched developers when those developers insist on clinging to outdated tools that they happen to feel personally comfortable with instead of giving the audience something more palatable to consume.

And yet we, as the internet using public, generally fail to even try to do anything about it. While we might stop visiting a website that’s too embarrassingly laden with Flash, we’re unlikely to inform the webmaster of why we’ve stopped visiting. When fun free games like Farmville surface and they’re only available in a crap format like Flash, we dive in and play the game anyway, despite the awful looking graphics, despite the glitches, despite the overwhelming amount of processing power that gets gobbled up by it – even though the animation, which looks like a third grader drew it, feels like it shouldn’t be processor intensive at all.

But while Apple has done us the favor of forcing Flash off the iPad and iPhone platforms so that their respective development environments can be forced into the present, that doesn’t change the fact that the ancient technology is still holding back both the Mac and Windows computing platforms. And as long as we continue to allow Flash to be shoved at us on our computers without complaint, that won’t change nearly as quickly as it should. While an outright boycott of websites that use Flash might be too much to ask of the internet using public, a much easier strategy involves simply embarrassing webmasters into being afraid to use the technology for fear of looking like buffoons in front of their bosses. And so even as yet another disconnected geek tech publication has declared today in a headline that we should “Stop bashing Flash,” we’re encouraging you to do just the opposite: Keep bashing Flash. Bash it long, bash it hard, bash it proud. Write into webmasters and tell them to get that crap off their site. Keep talking about how lame Flash is any time it comes up in conversation; you never know what kind of influence you might have on the person who brought up the topic, particularly if that person turns out to be a webmaster or to have influence over one. Maybe even Adobe will see the light and cease betting its future on a hand it can’t win.

The more you bash Flash, the sooner it’ll be replaced by something modern, and the sooner you won’t have to put up with seeing it or using it.