Is Flash frowned upon for building web apps?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=933023

by innernode • 17 years ago

2 4 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Just wondering since I'm mainly a Flash guy, but I get the impression that flash built web apps are kind of a no-no even with back button support and such. Any thoughts?

tsuraan• 17 years ago

I'd say it's mostly about your audience. Most people have flash installed and don't even know when they hit a flash page. For them, it's probably not a problem. If you want people to be able to view your app with a phone or from a non-MS OS (flash for Linux and OSX is still really bad), then plain HTML/JS might be the way to go.

I personally don't have flash installed anywhere but on a win7 VM that I rdesktop into when I really want to see something that's trapped by flash. That doesn't happen too often, so most flash pages are lost to me. I'm pretty sure I'm in a tiny minority though, and for the most part people really don't seem to mind flash apps.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

If it's built really well and has a reason for not being built in the normal sense then usually I, for one, dont mind.

The biggest problem I have is when an app could have been written in JS/Html and really all the flash does is make me wait while it loads :)

jacquesm• 17 years ago

If you can do it with DHTML do it that way, if not then try to keep it to a minimum.

Don't use flash where a standard solution suffices.

pbhjpbhj• 17 years ago

User issues: back button, history, internal linking, searchability. Owner issues: SEO + the above reducing the UX.

Is Flash frowned upon for building web apps?

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