This is what IGN looks like to me

With Firefox’s “Flash Click to Play” plugin installed, this is what I see when I go to pc.ign.com:

That just cracks me up for some reason. Yay Firefox! If it weren’t for you I’m sure I would have just been hit with so many obnoxious page elements that I’d need to towel off. The other edge to this sword, of course, is that I don’t see ANY content, but that’s a pretty clear signal that I should just back away slowly anyway.

I’m not sure, though, if I should be happy about Firefox’s phenomenal growth. It makes web browsing more tolerable now, but if it ever gets too popular then advertisers will either find a way around its features or find new, possibly more invasive ways to advertise. You can see this happening already on television with the reactions to DVRs.

That’s how it looks to me too, at least on my home PC with firefox 0.8 and the flash blocking plugin. Did they ever made a version of that plugin for 1.0?

I’m using Firefox too but I get this when I go to ign.com

HA! Just kidding. I actually like IGN.

:D

Check out the latest wried. The ‘firefox kid’ is creepy lookin’.

Who the hell uses flash to display content? This is 2005 for crying out loud. Fuck IGN and GSI. Fuck them up their stupid asses.

The extention is really weird. I’m supposedly running FF 1.0 at work and on my primary home machine, and it works fine. But on my secondary home machine I also have FF 1.0 installed and the Flash Click to View extention won’t install. I think it may be a difference in builds.

I wouldn’t count banner and pop up flash ads as “content”

Just me though.

One of those three Flash elements is content, though. Or at least headlines and images that link to content. They seem to be trying to solve the “too much content to fit on the page” (c.f., GameSpot and GameSpy) by making it scroll/cycle within a smaller space. I can see the reasoning, but it seems to be trading one problem in for another.

I wouldn’t count banner and pop up flash ads as “content”

Just me though.[/quote]

So you’re saying IGN has no content? HAH! I kid!

[size=1]Would you like fries with that preview, sir?[/size]

As a Flash developer, I am curious…exactly what amount of Flash content is acceptable to you, and in what context? 0% and never?

It depends entirely on the type of content being sought. When I’m going after news, flash, particularly showy, graphically intensive flash, is a huge distraction, and particularly annoying when I’m using an older terminal or my old laptop. If I’m looking at promotional material, such as, say, the PR site for Halo 2, I don’t mind more intensive and graphically impressive flash.

Now you’re getting it.

But seriously, the most Flash I want to see in a website that isn’t devoted to Flash is - at the most - the site’s logo, and it’s logo alone. No text or image based content should ever be delivered through Flash. It’s slow, clunky, and restrictive.

edit - Oh and no fucking Flash-based site navigation implementations either. And I mean that.

It’s not Flash per se that drives me away or makes me disable it. It’s the things that Flash makes so common: needless/distracting animation, cludgy navigation, and general abandonment of simplicity as a design goal. And in the worst cases, sound.

It’s not Flash per se that drives me away or makes me disable it. It’s the things that Flash makes so common: needless/distracting animation, cludgy navigation, and general abandonment of simplicity as a design goal. And in the worst cases, sound.[/quote]

Precisely. And I can’t imagine ever forgiving flash for the monstrosities it’s made commonplace as advertisements. Or for 90% of the creative output of the something awful forums, for that matter.

Flash is the worst thing to ever happen to the Internet.

Flash content is a waste of time

  • It is slow to load. People don’t wait any more
  • Flash sucks
  • It can’t be indexed by search engines which means you are losing thousands and thousands of hits because your page is a mass of code instead of content.

If you have a site which has a product to sell and this site is not fully indexed for Google on the right (carefully researched) keywords then you are quite pissing away thousands of customers a week.

But people still do it! Mostly through lack of knowledge I figure. Just like how people have flash home pages (a complete waste of their most important page) and no text links or site map links on their pages.

It’s madness I tell you!

I just use the AdBlock extenstion to block images by domain. That way I can see my site but not have to deal with the ads.

In my opinion, flash is great for stylistic and artistic pages (if done right) if for example promoing something. But if a site has actual information in the form of articles and other longer pieces of text, flash shouldn’t be used at all.

I’m also using the flash blocker and could never think about browsing the web anymore without it. Using flash for ads was the killer for me. All those super annoying things that float on top of the text I’m trying to read or make loud noises.

Sound ads are one aspect. I also dislike ‘normal’ sites where Flash is being used for navigation. It usually tends to be sloppier because the designers decided to incorporate some effects. I also can’t use standard browser buttons/short cuts (Back etc.) to navigate within a site. Or take advantage of the middle mouse button to open an article in a new tab.