by Ben Huot
ben@benjamin-newton.com
www.benjamin-newton.com
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Why Avoid Flash even with Internet Explorer?
The main reason why I ever used Flash is Internet Explorer 6-8 incompatibilities with Javascript and lack of support for CSS (which all the other major browsers support) which used to make it a nightmare, to do anything interactive, that needed to work with Internet Explorer 6-8 (even with having the great Javascript libraries like JQuery and Moo Tools). 3rd party Javascript libraries are now very free, easy to use, and do not require any programming skills, so they often are easier and cheaper than Flash, and even the performance in Flash Player is often worse, than Internet Explorer 6-8, for many things.
I no longer see the need, for Flash, for almost any reason: you just give up too much performance, compatibility with new Apple and Google devices, and CSS, HTML, SVG, and Javascript all work together better than before (but it is hard, to fully leverage them, with Flash because Flash kind of lives in its own parallel world). When you start trying, to update the formatting, on every page, of large sites, in one place, you will quickly see how useful CSS is and how many problems it fixes. In the future, we will be able to gradually fade out excessive Javascript, like we are now, with Flash, as CSS becomes more and more powerful and SVG support becomes more common.
