July 17, 2006

Usage of Flash in Websites

I can understand the usage of Flash on various websites - they can add some nice features. At the same time, Flash should not be used just for the sake of using Flash, and at the very least there should be an HTML version of a website, especially for those people not on a broadband connection.

But an HTML version of a website should also be available for those of us who are not on the most recent version of Flash. There has been a disturbing trend of websites requiring Flash player 8. Some of these sites required it for the ENTIRE site while others required it only for a particular page or feature.

I wonder how many sites are losing visits because of this requirement. Sure, one could just download the most recent version of Flash player. Some people are lazy, though. In other cases, the latest version of Flash player is version 7. This is the case for Linux. While there is talk of version 9 for Linux, it won't be out until early 2007 at the very least.

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