I love Flashblock!
With apologies to my friend Lucian at Macromedia, I just installed the Flashblock extension for Firefox and I am loving it! When a page has Flash content you see a button, which you can click to activate Flash. And a lot of times I do want to see Flash content. I just want to see it when I want it. I've always been annoyed that the Flash viewer doesn't have any user-modifiable settings (or that IE didn't let you control it) but I didn't want to uninstall Flash, because I really do want to see Flash content a lot of the time. Now I'm a happy camper.
posted by Bill @ 6:42 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Well, I certainly am glad you apologized to me. It’s egregious slander!
Seriously, I’m always happy when Bill’s happy. But be a bit careful with this. There is a lot of Flash content out there that is very important. Getting used to blocking Flash content will filter some ads, but it will also filter out navigation widgets you may not realize are there and that open up worlds of new content. Or little utilities on web sites such as E-Trade’s stock price utility. By its placement and size, I might expect that it’s an ad, but it really provides me a fast, in-line way to look up stock information without leaving my page or waiting for a refresh.
More and more, Flash content of the past is joined by Flash interfaces. As that happens, blocking Flash will hide the fundamental ways web sites work. Sure, you can always turn it on, but missing it will make you miss the fundamental ways that web site is better than the rest.
And keep your eye on Flex. It’s a whole new ball game of essential Flash interfaces building much more productive web applications. Don’t miss the opportunities to use those.
Wow, I’ve never said anything so official to Bill in my life…
Lucian
Lucian, you found me fast!
I may very well find that missing good uses of Flash will outweigh relief from poor executions. My beef is not with the tool (though more user control would be good) but with how sites use it.
I'll post an update on this experiment in a couple of weeks.
BTW, I'm looking to incorporate some Flash elements in my web site at work. We're trying to work in some video and audio as unobtrusively as possible, and Flash has some nice auto-detect features.
Of course, I'll want people to have the option to click to make it start, or not. (For a good example of this see www.goarmy.com.) If all sites offered click-to-start I wouldn't feel the need for Flashblock.
Flash video definitely gives you a huge expanse of video use you never could have done before. Like videos that are completely incorporated in the rest of your content instead of in a separate box. And you can put cue points that trigger other things on your web page to happen. So, you could have the video stop until a user has filled in the form, then start again to explain the rest of the form. There’s lots of great examples out there. And adding a play button is pretty simple. Let me know if you want any help: I’ll unleash the entire team on your web site. :)
Lucian
Macromedia
Hey Lucian--I found a site I use where Flashblock gets in the way. It's espn.com. I haven't decided what to do about it yet.
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