Is Flash good or bad?

Flash is a tool to add animation, video and other multimedia elements to web pages.
Now i understand that it is a technology for increasing the user experience for a website or atleast thats what it is meant to be. But is it? I have heard other people complaining that flash is an evil disease infecting the web. Now this makes me wonder if there is any truth to what they say. I am not a web developer so my point of view is that of an average user and thats what i share in this article with you.

Flash seems to be everywhere, out of the 100(non-tech ones off course as you will rarely find an implementation of flash in a technical site ) websites i visit, i find that flash has been used(overused) in almost 70% of them. Is that good, well if you ask me NO!. While i understand that the developer was simply trying to make his site look very attractive but only only ends up creating distractions for the user and i as an user fail to to accept that. Say i am looking for a particular bit of information on the web and i search on google and get a list of sites. I click on the first promising site i find, excited and all but alas some Picaso has put a flash intro on it so i must wait for it to load and then click the skip button to access what i came for but that s only if i don't get too irritated and click the X button on the browser).

Another problem is too much glitter. Some websites look like a girl who just got herself a lifetime supply of cosmetic and used it all on the same day. Looking at pages such as this it makes you think how did they manage to find space for the real content amidst all these flash adds. Hunting for the valuable information on a page like this searching for a needle in a haystack. And then there is the ting that irritates me the most, moving animation doing anything and everything it can to stop me from reading the content. A small advice for all those “animator turned web designer” when i want to watch animation movie i will watch an animation movie. I am am an admirer of the art of animation and truly feel that animation has a place of its own(an its not web pages meant to deliver information). Also when flash is used to deliver the content of a website it basically takes able the capability of a user to interact with the content. You have to sit a watch the entire show to get the information you are looking for. BORING!

I recent had an experience where i was supposed to work with another guy on designing a small website for our neighbourhood community. What i did not know was that this guy was Flash enabled. Initially i agreed to put some flash here and there to add colour to the site but that had to drop the project because the guys was hell bent on making everything move like the background, the the heading, the text. I started getting dizzy looking at the pages he created and finally had to drop out of the project as it started giving me a serious headache.


Now to end this article i would like to state that i still feel if used in a proper and well thought out manner flash can contribute to the web. Like i have no issue with a site that is displaying a flash video as its main content because here flash has a purpose. It acting as the medium to to provide the main content and not distracting the user and when you are watching a video, you are not looking to physically interact with the content in any case. So i feel that the use of flash should be be minimalistic and sensible. This way flash can be used a a tool to enhance the user experience of a website and not give the user a migrane.