Is Flash frowned upon for building web apps?

2 points by innernode ↗ HN
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?

4 comments

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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.

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 :)

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.

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