[COLUG] What good uses for Flash are there?

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Jim <jep200404 at columbus.rr.com> writes:

> The biggest use I see for Flash is for annoying animated images,
> like animated GIFs, but one can not disable Flash animation, so
> Flash is even worse than GIFs.

Oh, yes, one can disable Flash animations.  All one has to do is rm
the Flash plugin, which I did years ago.  Voila.

> The best use I've seen for Flash was for satirical cartoons.  
> The content was significant, although one still had little 
> control over watching it.  MPEG would have been better.  

If what you've got is a linear movie, MPEG is better than flash in all
ways except one:  MPEG uses lossy compression, so it's typically
uglier than a four-hundred-pound man in a thong.  Of course, for
content served over the web, the lossy compression might actually be a
good tradeoff.

It is possible to use Flash for not-entirely-linear stuff, similar to
Director, wherein the user's action can determine which canned
animation sequence is shown.  There might even be more advanced
functionality than that, but nobody ever uses it.  For me, the ability
to view all seven websites on the internet that use Flash for
something other than animation is not worth the tradeoff of seeing all
the lame animations[1], so I generally keep the Flash plugin somewhere
other than my plugins folder (on computers that have it installed at
all).

There's a Firefox extension that causes instances of Flash not to be
loaded unless you click on them, in which case they do play (assuming
you have the Flash plugin installed).  That seems like a good solution
to me, and I look forward to it in the future, when in other respects
Firefox catches up with Navigator in terms of general maturity.  (In
particular, the mechanism for installing extensions is still quite
flaky, which is prohibitive for me since many of the extensions
reintroduce functionality that I already rely on in the Seamonkey
suite.)

[1]  No, I don't care if they're something other than advertisements,
     I still don't want to see superfluous lame animations.

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